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The Suburbs Were Discovered by Accident One Day in the Early 1940s!
The general will is always right and always tends toward the public utility. However, it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude. We always want what is good for us, but we do not always see what it is. The populace is never corrupted, but it is often tricked, and only then does it appear to want what is bad. There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the general interests, whereas the former considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills. However, remove from these same wills the pluses and minuses that can each other out; each interest has different principles, and the accord of two private interests is formed in opposition to that of a third, and the accord of all the interests are found in opposition to that of each. If there were no different interests, the common interest, which would never encounter any obstacle, would be scarcely felt. Everything would proceed on its own and politics would cease being an art. What remains as the sum of the difference is the general will. If, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. However, when intrigues and partial associations come into being at the expense of the large association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the state. It can be said, then, that there are no longer as many voters as there are humans, but merely as many as there are associations. The differences become less numerous and yield a result that is less general. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Finally, when one of these associations is so large that it dominates all the others, the result is no longer a general will, and the opinion that dominates is merely a private opinion. For the general will to be well articulated, it is therefore important that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen make up one’s own mind. It is true that some divisions are harmful to the republic while others are helpful to it. Those that are accompanied by sects and partisan factions are harmful. Since, therefore, a ruler of a republic cannot prevent enmities from arising within it, one at least to prevent them from becoming sects. Such was the unique and sublime institution of the great Lycurgus. If there are partial societies, their number must be multiplied and inequality among them prevented, as was done by Solon, Numa, and Servius. These precautions are the only effective way of brining it about that the general will is always enlightened and that the populace is not tricked. Having seen how swiftly we are moving away from industrial style synchronization and standardization, it should surprise no one that we are also rewriting other sections of social code. While all societies need some measure of both centralization and decentralization, Second Wave civilization was heavily biased toward the former and against the latter. The Great Standardizers who helped build industrialism marched hand in hand with the Great Centralizers, from Hamilton and Lenin down to Roosevelt. Today a sharp swing in the opposite direction is evident. New political parties, new management techniques, and new philosophies are springing up that explicitly attack the centralist premises of the Second Wave. Decentralization has become a hot political issue from California to Kiev. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In Sweden a coalition of largely decentralist small parties drove the centralist Social Democrats from power after 44 years in office. Struggles over decentralization and regionalism have shaken France in recent years, while across the Channel and to the north the Scottish Nationalists now include a wing committed to “radical economic decentralization.” Similar political movements can be identified elsewhere in Western Europe, while in New Zealand a still-small Values Party has sprouted, demanding “an expansion of the functions and autonomy of local and regional government with a consequent reduction in the functions and size of central government.” In the United States of America, too, decentralism has picked up support and supplies at least some of the fuel for the tax revolt that is, for good or for ill, surging across the country. On the municipal level, too, decentralism gains force, with local politicos demanding “neighbourhood power.” Activists, neighbourhood-based groups are proliferating, from ROBBED (Residents Organized for Better and Beautiful Environmental Development) in San Antonio, or CBBB (Citizens to Bring Broadway Back) in Cleveland and the People’s Firehouse in Brooklyn. Many see the central government in Washington as the source of local ills rather than the potential cure. According to Monsignor Geno Baroni, himself a former neighbourhood and civil rights activists and once the Assistant Secretary for Neighbourhoods in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, such small, decentralized groups reflect the breakdown of machine politics and the inability of big government to cope with the wide diversity of local conditions and people. Say The New York Times, neighbourhood activists are winning “victories in Washington and across the country.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The decentralist philosophy is being spread, moreover, in schools of architecture and planning, from Berkeley to Yale in the United States of America to the Architectural Association in London, where students are, among other things, exploring new technologies for environmental controls, solar heating, or urban agriculture with the aim of making communities partially self-sufficient in the future. The impact of these young planners and architects will be increasingly felt in the years to come as they move into responsible positions. More important, however, the term “decentralization” has also become a buzzword in management, and large companies are racing to break their departments down into smaller, more autonomous “profit centers.” A typical case was the reorganization of Esmark, Inc., a huge company with operations in the food, chemical, oil, and insurance industries. In the past, Esmark had an unwieldy business. The only way it could develop coordinated effort was to divide it into bite-size bitts. The result: an Esmark cut into 1,000 different “profit centers,” each one largely responsible for its own operation. The net effect was to lift the routine decision-making from the chairman’s shoulders. Decentralization is evident everywhere but in Esmark’s financial controls. What is important is not Esmark—which has probably reorganized itself more than once since—but the general tendency it illustrates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies are also in the process of continual reorganization, decentralizing, sometimes overshooting and swinging back, but gradually, over time, reducing centralized control over their day-to-day operations. At an even deeper level, large organizations are changing the authority patterns that underpinned centralism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The typical Second Wave firm or government agency was organized around the principle of “one human, one boss.” While an employee or an executive might have many subordinates, one would never report to more than one single superior. This principle meant that the channels of command all went to the center. Today it is fascinating to watch that system crack under its own weight in the advanced industries, in the services, the professions, and many government agencies. The fact is, growing multitudes of us today have more than a single boss. Big organizations are increasingly honeycombed by temporary units like task forces, interdepartmental committees, and project teams. This phenomenon is called “ad-hocracy.” Since then, many large companies have moved to incorporate these transient units into a radically new formal structure called “matrix organization.” Instead of centralized control, matrix organization employs what is known as a “multiple command system.” Under this arrangement, each employee is attached to a department and reports to a superior in customary fashion. However, one is also assigned to one or more teams for jobs that cannot be done by a single department. Thus a typical project team may have people from manufacturing, from research, sales, engineering, finances, and from other departments as well. The members of this team all report to the project leader as well as to a “regular” boss. The result is that vast numbers of people today report to one boss for purely administrative purposes and another (or a succession of others) for practical get-the-work-done purposes. This system lets employees give attention to more than one task at a time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The new system speeds up the flow of information and avoids their looking at problems through the narrow slit of a single department. It helps the organization respond to different, quickly changing circumstances. However, it also actively subverts centralized control. Spreading from such early users as General Electric in the United States of America and Skandia Insurance in Sweden, the matrix-style organization is now found in everything from hospitals and accounting firms to the U.S. Congress (where all sorts of new, semiformal “clearinghouses” and “caucuses” are springing up across committee lines). Matrix, in the words of Professor S.M. Davis of Boston University and P. R. Lawrence of Harvard, “is not just another minor management techniques or a passing fad, it represents a sharp break; matrix represents a new species of business organization.” And this new species is inherently less centralized than the old one-boss system that characterized the Second Wave era. Most important, we are also radically decentralizing the economy as a whole. Witness the rising power of small regional banks in the United State of America as against that of the handful of traditional “money market” gains. (As industry becomes more geographically dispersed, firms that previously had to rely on “money center” banks have increasingly turned to the regionals. The future of U.S. banking no longer lies with money market banks.) And as with the banking system, so too with the economy itself. The Second Wave gave rise to the first truly national markets and the very concept of a national economy. Along with these came the development of national tools for economic management—central planning in the socialist nations, central banks and national monetary and fiscal policies in the capitalist sector. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Today both these sets of tools are failing—to the mystification of the Second Wave economists and politicians who try to manage the system. Although the fact is only dimly appreciated as yet, national economies are swiftly breaking down into regional and sectoral parts—subnational economics with distinctive and differing problems of their own. Regions, whether the Sun Belt in the United States of America, the Mezzogiorno in Italy, or Kansai in Japan, instead of growing more alike as they did during the industrial era, are beginning to diverge from one another in terms of energy requirements, resources, occupational mix, educational levels, culture, and other key factors. Moreover, many of these subnational economies have now reached the scale of national economies only a couple of generations ago. Failure to recognize this accounts in good measure for the bankruptcy of government efforts to stabilize the economy. Every attempt to offset inflation or unemployment through nationwide tax rebates or hikes, or through monetary or credit manipulation, or through other uniform, undifferentiated policies, merely aggravates the disease. Those who attempt to manage Third Wave economics with such centralized Second Wave tools are like a doctor who arrives at a hospital one morning and blindly prescribes the same shot of Adrenalin for all patients—regardless of whether they have a broken leg, a ruptured spleen, a brain tumor, or an ingrown toenail. Only disaggregated, increasingly decentralized economic management can work in the new economy, for it, too, is becoming progressively decentralized at the very moment it seems most global and uniform. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
All these anti-centralist tendencies—in politics, in corporate of government organizations, and in the economy itself (reinforced by parallel developments in the media, in the distribution of computer power, in energy systems, and in many other fields)—are creating a wholly new society and making yesterday’s rules obsolete. Although a precise behavioural profile of social anxiety has yet to be developed, it is evident that this problem interferes with the skilled use of many nonverbal behaviours. For example, people with social anxiety gaze less, particularly while talking, and talk less than people who are socially secure. Gaze and talk duration are clear behaviour markers of social skill. In addition, social anxiety has been associated with poor vocal tone. What is particularly noteworthy is that investigators found that the nonverbal skills deficits (exempli gratia, gaze, vocal tone, speech duration) were most pronounced among those with social anxiety, and were not attributable to those with social anxiety, and were not attributable to anxiety in more in general. Socially anxious individuals also interact with others at a greater distance. One function of nonverbal skills that appears to be particularly disrupted among socially anxious individuals is conversational turn taking. People use nonverbal behaviours to manage and negotiate conversation. The effective use of certain nonverbal behaviours that are critical to the turn-taking function, such as gesture and pausing, appear to be impaired by the increase cognitive load of socially anxious persons in conversational settings. Research evidence from studies of planning, discussion of unfamiliar topics, and responding to difficult questions indicates that increased cognitive load can interfere with effective use of nonverbal turn-taking behaviours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This same phenomenon may also be responsible for disrupting the timing, not just the duration, of nonverbal behaviours that serve the turn-taking function. People often think of interruption as a breakdown of turn taking. At the same time, interruptions are a definite sign of enthusiasm and involvement in a conversation. It is therefore understandable that socially anxious people are less likely than socially secure individuals to interrupt their conversation partners. Another nonverbal skill that is impaired by social anxiety is deception. Although this may not be the most prosocial nonverbal function, it is generally considered to require considerable skill in the management of nonverbal behaviours. In one study, socially anxious people were less successful than socially secure individuals at deceiving others. Socially anxious subjects in this study exhibited a deceptive nonverbal demeanor that made them appear to be dishonest, regardless of whether or not they really were. A recent meta-analysis identified various themes of functions of the nonverbal behaviours of people with social anxiety. Some behaviours, such as speech dysfluencies and self-manipulative gestures, are characteristic of increased social arousal and are very prevalent among socially anxious individuals. Diminished verbal output, and inhibited initiation of conversation are behaviours that signify diminished behavioural involvement, which is also characteristic of socially anxious persons. Each of these nonverbal profiles is consistent with poor or problematic social skills. Social skills deficits associated with social anxiety may also extend into the domain of verbal behaviours. In a unique study of social anxiety and verbal behaviour, it was demonstrated that socially anxious people tend to make more “safe” utterances such as questions, acknowledgments, and confirmation, and to avoid more “risky” utterances such as those expressing objective information. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The functional values of “safe” utterances is that they allow the socially anxious person to be responsive while simultaneously making few bids for the floor during conversation. Consistent with this explanation, social anxiety has also been found to influence people’s willingness to self-disclose to others. Socially anxious subjects in this study were less likely than nonanxious control to engage in risky self-disclosures, such as mentioning gender-role-inconsistent information about the self to same-gender conversational partner. In meta-analysis, social anxiety has been found to be positively associated with cautious self-deceptions, expressions of similarity, conformity, and innocuous sociability, which is behaviour that indicates interest and agreement without getting actively involved in the interaction. This is accomplished though communication behaviours such as asking questions, using back-channel responses (exempli gratia, “uh-huh,” “I see,” “hmm” while the partner is talking), and not interrupting. “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. It is not honouring to God to go around with a nagging, negative feeling, always thinking that something is wrong. You may not even know why you do it, but you tend to think that things are never going to work out well for you. It is almost as though you have a cloud of doom and gloom following you around. That attitude will keep you from believing for the good things of God. The Bible teaches us to “cast down every negative thought and every wrong imagination,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. Yet it is so easy to slip into assuming the worst. Maybe you get the pain in your side, and the first thought that comes to your mind is that you are dying. Before long, your imagination is running wild, and you are seeing yourself in all sorts of negative scenarios. If you believe it and see it in your imagination long enough, many times those negative things will come to pass. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
You cannot allow fear have its way with you. “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honourable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise,” reports Philippians. Rather than thinking bad thoughts, focus on the fact that God has promised He will give Hid angels charge over your family. Say something such as “Thank you, Father, that Your angels are protecting my family members. Thank you that my children are safe and sound in the palm of Your hand.” It is all too easy to give in to fear and allow your imagination to run wild. Always remember: God honours faith; the enemy attacks with fear. Cast your thoughts on seeing good things happening in your life. Develop the habit of staying optimistic in your thoughts and conversations. Live in faith, not in fear. Make a decision today that you will no longer give in to negatives worries and fears, but instead you will think on things that are pure and wholesome and of good report. If you will do your part, God will keep you in perfect peace. Now for another witness let us go to Mark 11, verses 23 and 24. Here Jesus is teaching the greatest faith principle the World has ever known. It will absolutely transform your life. Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea and shall not doubt in one’s heart, but shall believe that those things which one saith shall come to pass; one shall have what one believed. One did not say that one would have what one hoped for. One said one would have whatsoever one saith. Then He connects that verse of scripture to the next one by saying it will also work in prayer. Verse 23 is not a prayer scripture. It is the faith principle. It is spiritual law. Just as the law of gravity will work, so will this law work when it is applied correctly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Verse 24 is the prayer scripture. Therefore it will work in prayer. Therefore I say unto you, What things so ever ye DESIRE…Notice the words ye desire. It does not say what God desires, does it? No. Now let us put it in our language. He said, “Whatever you desire when you pray, you believe that you receive, and you shall have it.” Someone has said, “Oh. but if it is not God’s will, you cannot have it. So go ahead and pray for it; and if it is God’s will, you will receive. If it is not, you will not receive it anyway.” I beg your pardon! The Bible says you will. People are deceived in this area. Israel wanted a king. It was not God’s will for them to have one, but they received a king. That is why it is so very important that you learn God’s will before you pray. It would be better for you to spend a week reading and searching the Word of God before you ever form your prayer, than to just pray and assume it is God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, the 5th chapter, verses 1 and 2, we find this admonition: When you go into the house of the Lord, let your words be few. Then in Psalm 37, verse 7, we read, Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. The Hebrew translation says, “to be silent to the Lord.” Sometimes we do too much praying or we pray the wrong way at the wrong time. For instance, a man, as he was being robbed, cried out, “Oh God, do not let them find that $100 bill I hid in my shoe.” Now that is unwise! He told the thief what he needed to know. Sometimes we have given Satan valuable information while praying. We should learn when to be silent and when to pray. If it is not in line with the Word of God, or if it is not done accurately, prayer will get you into more trouble than you know how to handle. The effectiveness of prayer is governed by spiritual law. Sometimes people say that prayer could not hurt anyone. That is like saying, “Electricity cooks my food and washes my clothes and no one could get hurt by electricity.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Well, as long as you use it wisely and obey the laws that govern that power, it will work for you. However, if you violate the laws that govern that force, the same force that washes your clothes and cooks your food can also destroy. Prayer is designed to work for you, not against you. The Word of God was designed to work for you; but when you cross up the rules, it is like trying to play baseball with football rules. It does not work. Sometimes we use the wrong rules in prayer. There are different kinds of prayer and there are different rules for each kind. There is the prayer of dedication, the prayer of thanksgiving and praise, the prayer of intercession, the prayer of petition. We are talking about the prayer of petition. Do not get the rules for the prayer of dedication and worship mixed up with the prayer of petition. When you do, you get the thing shorted out and it will not work. Rightly divide the Word of Truth; search out these rules and apply them correctly. Then your prayers will move Heaven and Earth in your behalf. In fact, we read in the Word of God in Philippians 2.9-10, John 16.23, and Mark 16.17-18, that Jesus has been highly exalted and has given a name above every name and He has given that name to us to control the force of evil. The authority of this Earth has been given to man. We have authority in prayer and move the forces of Heaven in our behalf. We have authority in prayer by the words of our mouths to bind evil forces—the power of darkness—and render them harmless and ineffective against us. We do not need more power; we just need to apply the spiritual laws that God has given us. Jesus said, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them (Mark 11.24). Did not say anything about God’s will, did He? This is one verse of scripture that would contradict the interpretation of 1 John 5.14, “if it is God’s will.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
My Lord, I wish to know what has to be known. To love what has to be loved. To praise what tickles You the most. To appreciate what You think precious. To vituperate what soils the eyes. To put less reliance on visible and audible evidence when it comes to forming a judgment; that is what the Lord in Isaiah did (11.3). To inquire always, first and foremost, into the pleasure of the Divine Will. Often human senses fail when it comes to making a sound judgment. There fail too lovers of the present age when they allow what they see to cloud their judgment. Thinking something does not make it so. For example, is a person to be thought better just because one’s peers have decided one is so? I do not think so. That is how one liar deceives another liar, by praising one to the skies! And so on with the vain, the blind, the infirm. All of which is another way of saying, cheap praises is never a bargain for those who buy it. In the end, “the only thing that matters is how a person looks to the eyes of the Lord; that is it, nothing more.” That is the humble way Holy Father Francis from Assis put it. My dear friend, you just do not have the staying power when it comes to upping your desire for the virtuous life. I might say the same thing when it comes to moving up a grade in contemplation. While you are attempting both, you have to, because of the Original Corruption, descends to the Lower Depths, carrying, however unwillingly and tediously, the burden of life among the Corruptibles. Therefore, while you are still in the flesh, you have to weep about the burden of the flesh. So weep this! You do not have the strength to continue your spiritual pursuits. However, if you want to preserve, hie yourself to the nearest humble acts and find recreation in doing good deeds. Do continue to expect God’s Adventual and Supernal Visitation. It is going to happen! As for your feeling of exile and alienation, patiently endure until God visit you again and free you from all these anxieties. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
That is when God will make you forget your labours and enjoy your quiet. God will extend before you a vista, that is to say, a meadow of fragrant Scriptures in which to graze. You will run, with expanded heart and lung, the straight and narrow way of God’s Commandments, as God’s Psalmist has sung (119.32). And you will say, if the Letter to the Romans is any guide (8.18), “The passions of the present are not comparable with those of the future; that is to say, no glory now, but all glory then. Please forgive me, Father, for allowing fear and worry to dominate my thoughts. I am You child, and I know that Your power working in me is greater than what anyone or anything can do against me. I will trust in You today. When in the state of fear, we propose, one moves headlong into three progressively deteriorating levels. The actualizing level is one which one usually experiences as a child. However, when one leaves the actualizing mode, moved by the fears instilled by parents, teachers, and society, one’s life becomes more and more constricted. First, as one moved inward from the outer sphere, one enters levels of less mobility, greater rigidity, and more severe “shut-upness.” Second, as the pattern of fear becomes more and more severe, moving inwardly to each more and more severe, moving inwardly to each more tightly encased inner circle, the experiencing of the primary polarities of love/anger and strength/weakness becomes more and more constricted. And third, the center of the nonactualizing person is filled with fear, not love. The greater the fear the person experiences, the thicker the ego boundary becomes. For the actualizing person (the outermost circle) the ego boundary is open and permeable, thus enabling the person to be responsive to others and to the many elements of one’s life situation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Such a person can be emotionally moved by the feelings or experience of others, and can also react to others with the full intensity of one’s feelings, without cover-up. If one gets angry, one can show it honestly and directly without making a flowery or emotional scene. If one feels loving, one expresses it clearly. Or if one chooses not to express a particular feeling, one is still fully aware of it. Vitality is not diminished, as it is with the person who is fearfully constricting awareness of all feelings. The progressive levels in the process of deterioration we term manipulative style, character disorder, and psychosis. In each of these levels, the ego boundary becomes thicker and more rigid, as though the person were building a coat of armour or wall around the inner self. Some of these terms may be new to the reader, but we suggest that they are viable ways of looking at human behaviour that can enrich one’s understanding of self and others. Christianity is in accord with the claim of modern clinical psychology that not coming to terms with basic anxiety and fear blocks growth and breaks down relationships. Manipulative styles, character disorders, and psychoses are maladaptive survival mechanism based of fear. The advancing mystic has to undergo a very real temptation at certain points of one’s career—a temptation not unlike that of Jesus by Satan to great Worldly honours or that of Buddha by Mara to great sensual indulgence. It may come through crafty instigations of one’s enemies or through the innocent flatteries of one’s friends. One must beware especially of those whose excessive faith would exalt one to the role of a master, or perchance even glorify one as a new messiah! One must be on guard against being seduced by the attractions of power or the disguises of sensuality. One may have to suffer the hostility of unseen malignant force besetting the path at certain stages, especially at advanced stages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
You force yourself into a Master’s presence and take the consequences of the immense forces around one playing on yourself. If you are weak in character anywhere the dark forces will use the disturbance by directing the forces engendered to that spot and may compass your ruin. It is so always. Pass the boundary that hedges in the occult realm, and quick forces, new ones, dreadful ones, must be met. Then if you are not strong you may become a wreck for that life. This is the danger. This is one reason why Masters do not appear and do not act directly very often, but nearly always by intermediate degrees. Those who are working for the survival of Truth in a truthless World thereby become targets for powerful forces of hatred, wrath, and falsehood. Whoever publicly bears a deeply spiritual message to humanity, has to suffer from evil’s opposition. These are warped minds who, fumbling on the lower levels of human existence, spit venom and spill hatred over the human who declares the existence of higher ones. These hostile manifestations invariably make their appearance after the teacher had made an appearance anywhere. Light must inevitably cast a shadow. Yet on the credit side they served a useful purpose. They help one and they help one’s probationers. They remind one that one must not stake a claim on any part of this Earth’s surface or in any human heart. They test the intuition and keenness of the probationers. When these have survived all the tests, one may accept them and begin their real inner work together; thereafter God Himself cannot prize them apart from their teacher, for then they know with whom they are dealing. The course of life brings encounters with those who are either inspired by, or symbolically represent, the adverse powers which at times beset it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Subconscious evil creeps out of its cage in moments of temptation. The neophyte who enters the portals becomes at once a victim of the malicious attention of Shaitans (demons) who plague one with a multitude of temptations and work on one’s mind. Rare is one who does not succumb. Tests can appear in very ordinary, quite prosaic situations. The things which hamper the student’s progress are varied, and although they may bring despondency and discouragement, impatience and rebellion, they need not and should not be permitted to bring the loss of all hope. Difficulties there must be, but they need not make us cowards. The times of swift progress are generally followed by times of slow moving; success alternates with failure as day with night. One must go on with the faith and trust that obstacles are not for all time, that fluctuations on the path are inevitable, and that one’s own inner divine possibilities are the best guarantee of ultimate attainment. The trials of the path, as indeed the trials of life itself, as inescapable. One should endure the tribulations with the inner conviction that a brighter World awaits one; hope and faith will lead one to it. Peace be to Earth and to airy space! Peace be to Heaven, peace to the waters, peace to the plant and peace to the trees! May all the powers grant me peace! By this invocation of peace may peace bring peace! With this peace the dreadful I now appease, with this peace the cruel I now appease. With this peace all evil I now appease. So that peace may prevail, happiness prevail! May everything for us be peaceful! Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, ruler of the Universe who hast sanctified us by Thy precepts and hast enjoined upon us the Counting of the Omer. This the eternal day of the Omer. You have been taught, and you know: the Lord is God; there is none else. He alone performeth wonderous things, for His lovingkindness endureth forever. There is none like unto Thee among the mighty, O Lord, and there are no works like unto Thine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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A Verbal Contract is Not Worth the Paper it is Written on!
Pick your enemies carefully or you will never make it in Los Angeles. Sovereignty is indivisible for the same reason that it is inalienable. For either the will is general (for a will to be general, it need not always be unanimous; however, it is necessary for all the votes to be counted. Any formal exclusion is a breach of generality), or it is not. It is the will of either the people as a whole or of only a part. In the first case, this declared will is an act of sovereignty and constitutes law. In the second case, it is merely a private will, or an act of magistracy. At most it is a decree. However, our political theorists, unable to divine sovereignty in its principle, divide it in its object. They divide it into force and will, into legislative and executive power, into rights of imposing taxes, of justice and of war, into internal administration and power to negotiate with foreigners. Occasionally they confuse all these parts and sometimes they separate them. They turn the sovereign into a fantastic being made of interconnected pieces. It is as if they built a human out of several bodies, one of which had eyes, another had arms, another feet, and nothing more. Japanese sleight-of-hand artists are said to dismember a child before the eyes of spectators, then, throwing all the parts in the air one after the other, they make the child fall back down alive and all in one piece. These conjuring acts of our political theorists are more or less like these performances. After having taken apart the social body by means of a sleight-of-hand worthy of a carnival, they put the pieces back together who knows how. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
This error comes from not having formed precise notions of sovereign authority, and from having taken for parts of that authority what were merely emanations from it. Thus, for example, the acts of declaring war and making peace have been viewed as acts of sovereignty, which they are not, since each of these acts is not a law but merely an application of the law, a particular act determining the legal circumstances, as will be clearly seen when the idea attached to the word law comes to be defined. In reviewing the other divisions in the same way, one would find that one is mistaken every time one believes one sees sovereignty divided, and that the rights one takes to be the parts this sovereignty are all subordinated to it and always presuppose supreme wills which these rights merely put into effect. It would be impossible to say how much this lack of precision has obscured the decisions of authors who have written about political right when they wanted to judge the respective rights of kings and peoples on the basis of the principles they had established. Anyone can see, in Chapters III and IV of Book I of Grotius, how this learned man and his translator, Barbeyrac, become entangled and caught up in their sophisms, for fear of either saying too much or too little according to their perspectives, and of offending the interests they needed to reconcile. Grotius, taking refuge in France, unhappy with his homeland and desirous of paying court o Louis XIII (to whom his book is dedicated), spares no pain to rob the people of all their rights and to invest kings with them by every possible artifice. This would also have been the wish of Barbeyrac, who dedicated his translation to King George I of England. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
However, unfortunately the expulsion of James II (which he calls an abdication) forced him to be evasive and on his guard and to beat around the bush, in order to avoid making William out to be a usurper. If these two writers had adopted the true principles, all their difficulties would have been alleviated and they would always have been consistent. However, sad to say, they would have told the truth and paid court only to the people. For truth does not lead to fortune, and the populace grants neither ambassadorships, university chairs nor pensions. The Third Wave does more than alter Second Wave patterns of synchronization. It attacks another basic feature of industrial life: standardization. The hidden code of Second Wave society encouraged a steamroller standardization of many things—from values, weights, distances, sizes, time, and currencies to product and prices. Second Wave business people worked hard to make every widget identical, and some still do. Today’s savviest business person, as we have seen, know how to customize (as opposed to standardize) at lowest cost, and find ingenious ways of applying the latest technology to the individualization of products and services. In employment the numbers of workers doing identical work grows smaller and smaller as the variety of occupation increases. Wages and fringe benefits begin to vary more from worker to worker. Workers themselves become more different from one another, and since they (and we) are also consumers, the differences immediately translate into the market place. The shift away from traditional mass production thus is accompanied by a parallel de-massification of marketing, merchandising, and of consumption. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Consumers begin to make their choices not only because a product fulfills a specific material or psychological function but also because of the way it fits into the larger configuration of products and services they require. These highly individualized configurations are transient, as are the lifestyles they help to define. Consumption, like production, becomes configurational. Post-standardized production brings with it post-standardized consumption. Even prices, standardized during the Second Wave period, begin to be less standard now, since custom products require custom pricing. The price tag for an Ultimate Driving Machine or any other automobile depends on the particular package of options selected; the price of a hi-fi set similarly depends on the units that are plugged together and on how much work the buyer wishes to do; the prices of aircraft, offshore oils rigs, ships, computers, and other high-technology items vary form one unit to the next. In politics we see similar trends. Our views are increasingly non-standard as consensus breaks down in nation after nation and thousands of “issue groups” spring up, each fighting for its own narrow, often temporary, set of goals. In turn, the culture itself is increasingly de-standardized. Thus we breakup of the mass mind as the new communications media come into play. The de-massification of the mass media—the rise of mini-magazines, newletters, blogs, and small scale, often Xeroxed, communications along with social media, email, text messages, WiFi, wireless cable, digital video and music streaming, and computer—shatters the standardized image of the World propagated by Second Wave communications technologies, and pumps a diversity of ideas, symbols, and values. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Not only are we using customized products, we are using diverse symbols to customize our view of the World. Art News summarized the views of Dieter Honisch, director of the National Gallery in West Berlin: “What is admired in Cologne may not be accepted in Munich and a Stuttgart success may not impress the Hamburg public. Ruled by sectional interest, the country is losing its sense of national culture.” Nothing underlies this process of cultural de-standardization more crisply than a recent article in Christianity Today, a leading voice of conservative Protestantism in America. The editor writes, “Many Christians seem confused by the availability of so many different translations of the Bible. Older Christians did not face so many choices.” Then comes the punch line. “Christianity Today recommends that no version should be the ‘standard.’”Even within the narrow bounds of Biblical translation, as in religion generally, the notion of a single standard passing. Our religious views, like our tastes, are becoming less uniform and standardized. The net effect is to carry us away from the Huxleyan or Orwellian society of faceless, de-individualized humanoids that a simple extension of Second Wave tendencies would suggest and, instead, toward a profusion of lifestyles and more highly individualized personalities. We are watching the rise of a “post-standardized mind” and a “post-standardized public.” Because of what one is and what one seeks to do, the quester has special trials, special experiences and temptations, apart from the ordinary ones which accompany all human activities. Elaborate traps are set at intervals along one’s road, made up of a combination of one’s own weaknesses with persons or events related to them. One must be wary of replacing into complacency. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Complacency can cause an individual to become sick. When a person is sick, one may be affected with disease or ill health, queasy, nauseated; spiritually or morally unsound or corrpt. One could be disturbed by strong emotion, filled with disgust or chagrin, morbid, highly distasteful, lacking vigor, badly outclassed, incapable of producing profitable yields of a crop; outstandingly or amazingly good or impressive. Whatever the case maybe, the individual needs to be prepared for tests and temptations in a variety of forms before being released to the public. The rise of a “post-standardized mind” and a “post-standardized public,” this brings its own social, psychological, and philosophical problems, some of which we are already feeling in the loneliness and social isolation around us, but these are dramatically different from the problems of mass conformity that exercised us during the industrial age. Because the Third Wave is not yet dominant even in the most technically advanced nations, we continue to feel the tug of powerful Second Wave currents. We are still completing some of the unfinished business of the Second Wave. For example, hardcover book publishing in the United States of America (the best books to buy), long a backward industry, was just reaching the stage of mass-merchandizing that paperback publishing and most other consumer industries attain more than two generations ago, until audio books and electronic books came about. However, there is a class of docents who want to keep Americana alive and are encouraging Americans to still buy hardcover books and use as many physical library resources to do their reports, and to also recycle books and build their own libraries. (By the way, Thiftbooks.com is a great place to buy new, used, and collective books and other media items.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Other Second Wave movements seem almost quixotic, like the one that urges us at this late stage to adopt the metric system in the United States of America to bring American measurements into conformity with those used in Europe. Still others derive from bureaucratic empire building, like the effort of Common Market technocrats in Brussels to “harmonise” everything from auto mirrors to college diplomas—“harmonisation” being the current gobbledygook for industrial-style standardization. Finally, there are movements aimed at literally turning back the clock—like the back-to-basics movements in United States of America schools. Legitimately outraged by the disaster in mass education, it does not recognize that a de-massified society calls for new education strategies, but seeks instead to restore and enforce Second Wave uniformity in the schools. Nevertheless, all these attempts to achieve uniformity are essentially the rearguard actions of a spent civilization. The thrust of the Third Wave change is toward increased diversity, not toward the further standardization of life. And this is just as true of ideas, political convictions, proclivities dealing with pleasures of the flesh, educational methods, eating habits, religious views, American cultural attitudes, musical taste, fashion, and family forms as it is of automated production. An historic turning point has been reached, and standardization, another of the ruling principles of Second Wave civilization, is being replaced. This is creating a lot of interpersonal problems for many members of the human and animal communities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Social anxiety arises when people are motivated to make a desired impression on others but feel that they may not be successful in doing so. Two components of social anxiety can be distilled from this perspective. First, social anxiety occurs when a person has some motivation to leave a desired impression on others. Second, social anxiety involves some subjective probability, reflecting the anxious person’s doubt about one’s ability to succeed in making that impression. Some of the components of social anxiety may be functional when one considers the evolutionary basis for the need to belong. The emotional distress that people sense when they feel that they have made undesirable impressions on others can deter them from making such impressions in the first place, make them interrupt what they are doing to make he undesired impression, and/or motivate behaviours to repair the damage caused by their behaviour. All of these are functional for humans as social beings who depend on others for their livelihood and survival. Unfortunately, for some people this emotional distress becomes crippling; I has the effect of drastically reducing their social contacts and/or producing exactly the kind of disastrous social behaviour that worries them. It is tantalizingly hard to effect the passage from the lower to the higher state. For between them lies an intermediate zone of consciousness which possesses an ensnaring quality and in which the ego makes its last desperate effort to keep one captive. Hence this zone is the course of attractive psychic experiences, of spiritual self-aggrandizements, of so-called messianic personal claims and redemptive missions, of great truths cunningly coalesced into great deceptions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
A human may travel quite a distance on the way towards this goal of self-conquest and then, as success begins to appear on the horizon, may fail and fall from it in the last few tests. One’s very success may begin to generate vanity, pride, self-importance, ambition, and arrogance. In this way one’s ego is once more stimulated instead of being subjugated. Thus one steps aside from the path although one has already gone so far along it. Self-presentational concerns are at the heart of all socially oriented anxiety problems (exempli gratia, social anxiety disorder, communication apprehension, shyness, public speaking anxiety, reticence). In the context of an interpersonal paradigm, one must ask these questions” “What leads people to feel that they will not be able to make a desired impression on others? Ans what are the interpersonal consequences of such feelings?” As in all psychosocial problems, the answers to these questions are multiple; they involve problematic experiences in the family or origin, poor social skills, maladaptive reactions and interpretations of social encounters, rejection from others, and loneliness. If impulsiveness is present, certain negative tendences of one’s character, by now controlled and largely suppressed but still laying latent in the subconscious, may rush up to the surface at intervals. When one is taken off one’s guard, they appear in speech or even action until one recovers oneself. The damage is done and although one returns to normal freedom from these faults, the consequences may remain and make one suffer for a disproportionate period. The farther one advances, the more important is the lapse. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Deep down in the lowest layers of the subconscious nature there, luck evil tendencies and evil memories belonging to the far past and not yet wholly wiped out by the spiritual rebirth. It is these tendencies which rise to the surface layers and challenge us at crucial moments when we seek initiation into the Higher Self or when we seek acceptance from a Master. In their totality they have been named by the Western Rosicrucians as the “dweller on the threshold.” No human can be taken possession of by one’s Higher Self or enter into a permanent relation with a Master unless and until one develops within oneself sufficient calm and sufficient strength to meet and overcome these arisen tendencies, whose character is marked by extreme sensuality or extreme cunning or extreme brutality, or even by a combination of the two or three of these. They are crude remnants and ugly reminders of the savage violence which one has inherited from pre-human reincarnations. One’s failure follows inevitably from one’s attempt to serve two masters. The ego is strong and cunning and clamant. The Overself is silent and patient and remote. In every battle the dice are loaded in the ego’s favour. In every battle high principle runs counter to innate prejudice. People with social anxiety tend to exhibit deficiencies in social skills. As in the case of depression, a model of social skills deficits has emerged as one of the theoretical paradigms in the explanation of social anxiety and social phobia. According to this perspective, people with poor social skills are expected to experience negative outcomes from their interpersonal encounters. Over time this causes these people to dread social interactions and anticipate negative responses from others. Of course, this anticipation may create a self-fulfilling prophecy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
If the ego cannot trap one through one’s vices, it will try to do so through one’s virtues. When one has made enough progress to warrant it, one will be led cunningly and insensibly into spiritual pride. Too quickly and too mistakenly one will believe oneself to be set apar from other humans by one’s attainments. When this belief is strong and sustained, that is, when one’s malady conceit calls for a necessary cure, a pit will be dug unconsciously for one by other humans and one’s own ego will lead one straight into it. Out of the suffering which will follow this downfall, one will have a change to grow humbler. The risk is greater because a human emissary of the adverse element in Nature will automatically appear at critical moments and consciously or unconsciously seek hypnotically or passively to lead one astray as one has gone astray. Our own World-wide experience, embracing the written reports and spoken confidences of thousands of individual cases of mystical, and occult seekers, both Old World and Occidental, has gravely taught the need of this warning. Furthermore, the avoidance of social interaction that often follows social anxiety may lead to an atrophying of social skills, which can only further worsen the circumstances. Thus far, research evidence is generally supportive of the hypothesis that social anxiety is linked to poor social skills, although the causal ordering of these variables has yet to be definitively established. Whoever seeks to tread this path such as the one shown here will sooner or later find that these forces set themselves in opposition to one’s interior journey. One’s way will be blocked by external circumstances that entangle one in hopeless struggles or heart-breaking oppressions and enslavements, or by physical attacks which seek to sweep one off one’s feet and destroy one’s higher aspirations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
On general measures of social skills, people with social anxiety rate their own social skills more negatively than their nonanxious counterparts do. People who know and/or observe the social behaviour of socially anxious people also rate them low in social skills. Even parents rate their socially anxious children’s social skills more poorly than the parents of nonanxious children rate their offspring’s skills. Although socially anxious individuals may exhibit problems with social skills, they tend to perceive these problems more negatively than others do, suggesting that they may be unduly negative in their self-evaluations. Persons in one’s immediate environment may be moved by these invisible forces to work against one, causing uprisings of hatred and misunderstanding; one-time friends may turn into treacherous enemies more virulent than the poison of a cobra. Public critics will appear and endeavour to nullify whatever good one is doing for humanity, or to prevent its continuance. The single aim and object of all these attempts will be to prevent one’s alignment with the Overself, to render mental quiet impossible, or to keep one’s heart and mind crushed down to Earth and Earthly things. One must needs suffer these things. Their power, scope, and duration may be diminished, however. The path is best not only by pitfalls arising out of one’s own human failings, but at critical times by unconscious or conscious evil beings in human form who seek to destroy faith through falsehoods and to undermine reliance on true guidance through sidetracks and traps. “If you have been raised with Christ [to a new life, thus sharing His resurrection from the dead], aim at and seek the [rich, eternal treasures] that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. And set your minds and keep them set on what is above (the higher things), not on the things that are on the Earth. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
“For [as far as this World is concerned] you have died, and your [new, real] life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, Who is our life, appears, then you also will appear with Him in [the splendour of His] glory,” reports Colossians 3.1-4. We must continually choose to keep our minds set on the higher things. Notice again that there is something we are to do—we must continually choose, day in and day out, twenty-four hours a day, to keep our minds set on the higher things. What are those things that are above, the higher things? Quite simply, they are the beneficial things of God. The apostle Paul provides a great list by which we can evaluate our thoughts: “Whatever things are true. Whatever things are noble, whatever things are just, whatever things are pure, whatever things are lovely, whatever things are of good report, if there is any virtue and if there is anything praiseworthy—meditate on these things,” reports Philippians 4.8. Learn to look for he best in every situation. If you look hard enough and keep the right attitude, no matter what you are going though, you can find something good about the experience. If you get fired from your job, you can choose to be negative and bitter and blame God and your coworkers. Or, you can say, God, I know You are in control of my life, and when door closes, You always open a bigger and better door. So Father, I cannot wait to see what You have in store for me. One must thank the Lord for His guidance and protection and for keeping us perfect in His will. One must make a choice to keep one’s mind focused on the better things. It is not going to automatically happen. One must be determined and put forth some effort to keep one’s mind set on God’s best. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
We must be especially on guard during times of adversity, in times of personal challenges. When trouble is on the horizon, often the first thoughts that come to mind are not higher thoughts; they are not good thoughts. Negative thoughts bombard us from every possible angle. Right there, we must choose to trust God and not allow ourselves to get down and discouraged or just give up. We can determine by our own choices which way our lives are going to go. If you choose to stay focused on the beneficial and keep your mind set on the good things of God, all the forces of darkness are no going to be able to keep you from moving forward and fulfilling your destiny. However, if you make the mistake of dwelling on the negative, focusing on your problems and your impossibilities, it is basically backing away from the success God has in store for you. One must decide which way one wants to go. Psychologists are convinced that our lives move in the direction of our most dominant thoughts. Throughout this day, engage your minds in thoughts of joy, peace, success, abundance, and blessings, and one will move toward those things, drawing them to oneself at the same time. Now that is a magnetic personality! Father, help me to see as much as I can in every person and in every situation. I choose to have an optimistic outlook on life. O Father, just and always to be Praised, the hour comes for Your servant to be proved. O Father who must be loved, it is the right time—this very hour—that Your servant suffer something in Your behalf. Father Perpetually Venerated, my time has come—You knew it already from all eternity—that Your servant should lower one’s public profile for a while and live only the interior life with You. For the briefest time one will be treated as dirt, humbled and homeless, trod under the feet of Humankind, writhed by one’s passions, wreathed by one’s sargassos. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
All that so one may rise again with You in the dawn of new light and be clarified in the Celestials. Holy Father, so You ordained, and so You wished. This is a fact, and I perceive it as so. Recently in group therapy with Amanda and Ken, a forty-year-old woman declared her frustration with life. “Next week I am going to a twenty-year reunion of my high-school class. Only I am terribly embarrassed because I have accomplished exactly nothing in the last twenty years!” She had raised several children. However, she still felt lacking because in many ways her life had been completely dominated by her possessive and dictating husband. She had tried many tactics over the years, including fighting, pouting, or keeping silent. Now all feeling for her spouse was gone, and while the couple continued to occupy the same house, there was no emotional or intellectual communication. An important thing that the group fed back to her was the possibility that the next twenty years would not have to be a repeat of the last twenty. She could find the power in herself to change, even in basic ways, if she desired it enough to give her fears and helplessness. This was hard for her to believe. The key turning point for her came when she finally admitted a deep desire to make something out of her life, and expressed a willingness to face her many fears. Among them were fears that she was too old to find an occupation, that her marriage would dissolve, that her children would reject her, and that no one could like her. Fear and anxiety are built into human existence. We must all learn to cope with them. Fear is also known as basic anxiety; free-floating fear. Through a variety of adverse influences, a child may not be permitted to grow according to one’s individual needs and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
As a result of being stifled, the child does not develop a feeling of belonging, but instead a profound insecurity and vague apprehensiveness, for which I use the term basic anxiety. It has one’s feeling of being isolated and helpless in a World conceived as potentially hostile. The cramping pressure of one’s basic anxiety prevents the child from relating oneself to others with the spontaneity of one’s real feelings. Fear is the reason so many people get stuck in life and stop growing. Or, more specifically, inordinate amounts of fear cause a person to stop growing. Everyone experiences basic anxiety. It is how we handle the basic anxiety that is so important. Do we use the fear as a catalyst for growth, or do we become paralyzed by it? Love, ager, strength, and weakness represent four basic polarities. Humans, however, are like the amoeba. The amoeba is a one-celled creature that constricts when a threat or danger arises. When fear is present in people, they, like the amoeba, often constrict to the center of the polarities. Do it is with the deteriorating personality. The resistance to expressing feelings is manifested by a feeling of basic anxiety (fear). It is as if the fear exists at the zero-point of the polarities of the core. This is the point of indifference, deadness, or apathy, where many people prefer to remain, thus avoiding risking feelings that are needed for being in touch with others. People must often begin to express their feelings by expressing their fear, for in the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. In expressing their basic anxiety of feelings, people paradoxically begin to risk moving out from dead center to the various levels of feeling expressions. Prayer is the key to Heaven’s storehouse, but faith unlocks the door. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
A prayer without faith is like a key without a hand to turn it. In 1 John 5.14-15 we find some great truths about prayer: “And this is the confidence that we have in Him, that if we ask anything according to His will, he heareth us: And if we know that He hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.” Let us read it again and look at some key words. “This is the confidence.” Or, this is the faith. We have this confidence in Him, that if we ask anything, according to His will, He hears us. “And if we know that He hears us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of Him.” Notice that two key words here are anything and whatsoever. John said you can ask anything that you desire and have whatsoever you ask. If we know that He hears us, we know that we have whatsoever we desire of Him. If God hears you, if you get an audience with Him, you already have granted to you as your present possession what you ask. This is the confidence that we have in God, that, if we ask anything, God will present you with your request. Let say it this way so you can see it, “If you ask according to His will for asking.” His Word is His will. This passage is not dealing with God’s will for you to have or not to have a certain thing. This is not even involved in this verse of scripture. Many have thought it was and it has held them in bondage for years. They said, “If I pray for something that is not God’s will, then I will not receive it.” Therefore they did not take time to find the will of God, but prayed saying, “Lord, if it be Your will.” There was no faith in that prayer. No need of praying that prayer. You are wasting your time. You do not know whether God has heard you, so you cannot release faith in your prayer. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
That prayer will produce for you because it des not qualify on the basis of God’s rules for asking. Answered prayer is governed by spiritual laws (God’s Word). Many times our prayers have gone unanswered because we did not determine the will of God before asking. Therefore we could not release faith in that prayer. Then on other occasions we have prayed beyond God’s ability to answer. If He did do what we ask, He would violate His Word. God’s will concerning your having or not having does not mean you should pray for just anything whether it is God’s will or not, but you can do that. The Bible says you can. If you know He heard you, you will have whatever you desired, you will have the petitions you requested—right, wrong, good, bad or indifferent. It is very dangerous for a person to pray for something assuming that it is God’s will. You can believe and receive things that are not God’s will. Israel received a king to rule over them. It was not God’s will, but they requested it. Now there are some things that are immaterial with God. Whether you drive a blue Ultimate Driving Machine or a red Ultimate Driving Machine does not matter to Him unless it matters to you. According to the Word in Mark 11.24, if you desire a red one, pray for a red one Do not pray for just a car—be specific! God has set a spiritual law before us. If we will learn to operate under the rules of His law, we will get our prayers answered. If we know that He hears us, whatsoever we ask, the idea present in verse 14 is to ask according to God’s will for asking. I want to show you why you cannot interpret that verse the way most people have, namely, “if it is God’s will for you to have it.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
The Bible says in the mouth of two or three witnesses let every word be established; so let us go to the Word of God and find some more witnesses. Let us learn to interpret the Word of God in the light of the rest of the Bible. Do not just take one verse of the scripture and say, “That is what He said and that is all there is to it.” That can hold you in bondage. For instance, here it seems to be saying something that it really does not say. If you ask anything according to His will, He hears you. He is talking about your asking according to God’s rulebook for asking, His will for asking. What is God’s will for asking? “Let one ask in faith, nothing wavering. For one that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that human think that one shall receive anything of the Lord. A double minded human is unstable in all one’s ways,” reports James 1.6-8. That is one of the rules for asking anything from God. The insight, once caught, and however briefly, will leave behind a calm discontent with the triviality of ordinary life, a lucid recognition of its pathetic futility and emptiness, as well as a calm dissatisfaction with the human oneself. One will, at the least, win an enlarged conception of life, and at the most, an ennobled character. Better still, one will feel for the first time what it is like to attain an inner equilibrium. The glimpse may give one a dynamic charge of power, or leave one bereft of all aggression—depending on the particular need or phase of the moment. The door of one’s inner consciousness has opened; the regeneration of one’s moral nature have begun. The truth will come into the innermost chambers of one’s consciousness, sometimes abruptly but sometimes sluggishly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
And because it comes in this way, because it comes from the God within one, it will be dynamic, creative, powerful. As one becomes aware of this sublime influx, so will one son become aware that character is aletering with it, and so will others become aware that one’s conduct is shaping itself around nobler standards. When a human discovers that one oneself is the bearer of divine forces, one ceases to run hither and thither in search of other humans. Once the soul has revealed its lovely self to one, one cannot help adoring it, cannot help the feeling of being carried away in lifelong pursuit of it. The attraction is not of one’s own choosing. It is as natural and inevitable as the movement of the sunflower towards the sun. The soul’s power of control has a distinct and useful place in the human life and constitutes a valuable aspect of God’s grace. Consciousness of the Spirit is obtained through prayer. Deep peace of the shining stars to you, which stay invisible till darkness falls and discloses their pure and shining presence beaming down in compassion on our turning World. Deep peace of the shining stars to you! Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you, of unpretentious folk who, watching and waiting, spend long hours out on the hillside, expecting in simplicity some Coming of the Lord. Deep peace of the watching shepherds to you! Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you, who, swift as the wave and pervasive as the air, quiet as the Earth and shining like a star, breathes unto us His Peace and His Spirit. Deep peace of the Son of Peace to you! Remember one whose ask ‘mid sedge was drawn from edge of water, Thy shepherd son who could not sleep before his sheep had water. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
And when Thy flock did likewise burn with thirst and yearn for water, he struck the rock, there gushed a rill, to give their fil of water. For Moses’ sake send water! Remember one, Thy Temple-priest, who hallowed feast with water. Atonement’s sun declined to night with fivefold rite of water. The Law was read, and then afresh he laved his flesh with water. Remote, in dread, he served his folk that swiftly broke Like water. For Aaron’s sake send water! Remember last the tribes who fled across the bed of water. Thy chosen caste for whom turned sweet the bitter sheet of water. For Thee their race have ever shed their hearts’ best red like water. Without Thy face their spirits whirl as in a swirl of water! For America’s sake send water! For Thou art the Lord our God who causest the wind to blow and the rain to descend: for a blessing and not for a curse. Amen. For life and not for death. Amen. For plenty and not for famine. Amen. Sovereign of Universe, as we count the days of the Omer, we recall the time when our people were established in the land of America. May this observance serve as another reminder of the need to reclaim the soil of the Holy Land so that it may again flow with milk and honey and provide a homeland for our scattered folk. May our love for America’s land quicken our love for the Constitution of the United States of America, the Holy Bible, The Ten Commandments, and The Book of Mormon, America’s heritage. As in the past, may God and His Beloved Son Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit become the center of our spiritual life from which again shall come Thy word, O Lord, revealing Thy will to all humans. Lo, I am about to fulfill the precept of the Counting of the Omer, as it is written in the Torah: Ye shall count unto you from the morrow after the day of rest, from the day that ye brought an omer of grain as a wave-offering, seven complete weeks they shall be; until the morrow of the seventh week shall ye number fifty says. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included! It’s never been this fun to entertain!
Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/new-home-lincoln-homesite-14/
Good Things Often Happen to Bad People!
We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the World we inherit. Loneliness is a discrepancy between a person’s desired and achieved relationships with other people. Depression and loneliness are two psychological problems that are strongly associated. There are a great number of interpersonal, as well as psychological, similarities between the two problems. Problems with social skills are equally evident among depressed persons and lonely individuals. Difficulties in establishing and maintaining rewarding and intimate relationships are also very prevalent in loneliness. Both depressed and lonely people have a difficult time making friends, communicate poorly with family members, and experience low social integration. As in the case of people with depression, there is reason to suspect the family relationships of people who are lonely. Children’s loneliness tends to be positively correlated with that of their parents, just as in depression. What the lonely person appears to long for are meaningful and intimate friendships. Relationships with family members, on the other hand, do little to prevent or ameliorate the experience of loneliness. In fact, the more social support students have from their family, the more lonely they are. Although the increased family support may have been a result of the students’ loneliness, it is clear that these types of relationships do little to help a lonely person’s situation. In fact, very close family relationships may set up people for future loneliness. Retrospective reports of early childhood experiences indicate that children who had an excessively close, warm, and nurturing relationship with at least one parent were significantly more lonely as elderly adults than a group of controls. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When it comes to producing lonely children, the effects of overinvolvement from parents can be as noxious as underinvolvement or neglect. This is due in part to the fact that parental overinvolvement can create a sense of narcissism in the child. It has also been suggested that extremely close parent-children build great expectations that other relationships chronically fail to meet, and that such relationships may displace the interactions that children would have with peers. Given the extent of problems with social skills, personal relationships, and family relationships in both depression and loneliness, the exceptionally high rate of comorbidity between these two problems is understandable. Why is it that these two pervasive problems should coexist with such regularity? Well, in addition to sharing common interpersonal and psychological antecedents, problems such as depression and loneliness are causally related to each other. From an interpersonal standpoint, there are several plausible versions of such relationships. Firs, people who are depressed often infect others with their negative mood and elicit interpersonal rejection. As this rejection accumulates and personal relationships become scarce, depressed persons would be expected to experience loneliness. If we look at these variables in reverse order, depression may be a more generalized reaction to prolonged loneliness. Momentary or state loneliness may be a painful experience that many can endure without global distress. However, as loneliness persists, people may become emotionally worn down, resulting in a major depressive episode. Human beings are inherently predisposed to find rewards in social relationships. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
For people who become chronically dissatisfied with the quality of such relationships, depression may be viewed as the inevitable consequence of this extinction of social rewards. Finally, depression and loneliness may each be associated with common interpersonal and psychological variables that contribute to each condition. One such interpersonal variable may be shyness. People who are characteristically shy, and lacking social support, are particularly vulnerable to developing depression. However, this relationship is partially mediated by the experience of loneliness, which is itself predicted by the interaction of shyness and low social support. Loneliness is conceptualized as a proximal contributor to depression, which indicates that its presence is a sign of impending depression. Presently, there is at least some support for the view of loneliness as a casual factor in depression. Ultimately, depression and loneliness may share a common causal origin, one of which may be shyness. Both depression and loneliness have clear links to problems with interpersonal communication and relationships. These include deficits in social skills, and problems with general personal as well as family relationships. Such problems, when sufficiently severe and chronic, surely have the potential to precipitate episodes of either state. However, interpersonal communication problems are certainly not the cause of all cases of depression or loneliness. Depression is one of the most common mental problems. Depression is highly comorbid with loneliness and has a very powerful relationship with disrupted communication behaviour and troubled interpersonal relationships. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Racism is a mental health issue because racism causes trauma. And trauma can lead to mental illnesses, which need to be taken seriously. Systemic racism (also called structural or institutional racism) is racism that exists across society within, and between institutions/organizations across society. It refers to the complex interactions of large scale societal systems, practices, ideologies, and programs that produce and perpetuate inequalities for marginalized groups. The key aspect of structural or systematic racism is that these marco-level mechanisms operate independent of the intentions and actions of individuals, so that even if individual racism is not present, the adverse conditions and inequalities for marginalized racial groups will continue to exists. Examples are housing discrimination, government surveillance, social segregation, racial profiling, predatory banking, access to healthcare, hiring/promotion practices, and mandatory minimum sentences. God loves all His children and makes salvation available to all. God created he many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” “Throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through, full of lust and deception. Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes,” report Ephesians 4.22-23. You may not realize it, but you can choose your thoughts. Nobody can make you dwell on something. One decides what one will entertain in one’s mind. One’s mind is similar to a giant computer in that one’s brain stores every thought one has ever had. When can one stare at the Sun without a parasol, that is to say, contemplate God’s clarity without blinking an eye? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The fact that our brains are supercomputers is encouraging when one is trying to find one’s car keys, but it is not such good news when one considers the amount of smut, foul language, ungodly concepts, and other negative input with which we are inundated every day of our lives. Nevertheless, simply because a destructive thought is stored in one’s mental computer does no mean one has to pull it up and run it on the main screen of one’s mind. Only when one’s senses the desire of Eternal Beatitude rising in one’s soul is when we can fully understand the Word of God. Only when one thinks one’s soul is about to make the Grand Exit. To hasten that time, open your heart, spread wide your desire, and accept this holy inspiration. Return the fullest thanks to Supernal Goodness; she has dealt so decently with you, visited you so thoughtfully, grabbed hold of you so powerfully, before your own fat self fell to the Earth. Just do not think you had anything to do with any of this. You did not think it up, and you did not sweat it out! However, it had everything to do with Supernal Grace and Divine Kindness. However, if you make the mistake and start dwelling on the negative aspects of life, those thoughts will affect your emotions, your attitudes, and—if you continue to give it free rein in your mind—it will inevitably affect your actions. You will be much more prone to discouragement and depression, and if you continue pondering those negative thoughts, they hold the potential to sap the energy and strength right out of you. You will lose your motivation to move forward in a positive direction. The more we dwell on the enemy’s lies, the more garbage we willingly allow one to dump into out minds. It is also as though we have flung the door wide open and put up a sign that reads: “Trash goes here!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
What are you allowing your mind to dwell on? Are you constantly contemplating negative things? How you view life makes all the difference in the World—especially for you! It is unrealistic to ignore problems and live in denial, pretending that nothing bad ever happens to us. Bad things do sometimes happen to good people, just as good things often happen to bad people. Pretense is not the answer; nor is playing semantic games to make yourself sound more spiritual. If you are sick, it is okay to admit it; but keep your thoughts on your Saviour. If your body is tried, your spirit is weary, sometimes the most rational and spiritual thing to do is to get some res. However, focus your thoughts on the Saviour who has promised, “Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength,” reports Isaiah 40.31. Tough times come to all of us. Jesus Christ said, “In this life you will have trouble, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the World,” reports John 16.33. He was saying that when troublesome times come, we can choose our attitudes. We can choose to believe that Jesus Christ is greater than our problems; we can choose the right thoughts. Today, if you will dwell on the promises of God’s Word, you will be filled with hope and grace. You will develop a successful and faithful attitude. Like bees to flowers, you will draw the sweetness of God. Many people want to wait until their situation improves before they have an attitude of gratitude. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. One has the lexical order wrong. One must show an attitude of gratitude first, and then God will turn your situation around. As long as you harbour that poor, defeated foolish and ghoulish outlooks, one will continue to live in doom and gloom. “Strip off that old nature and put on the new man. Be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind, having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude,” reports Ephesians 4.22-24. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
You cannot sit back passively and expect this new person to suddenly appear, much like a baby cannot sit there with a poopy diaper and expect it to magically become fresh and clean without any effort. The baby has to cry and scream until he gets a clean diaper. “As a person thinks in one’s heart, so one will become,” reports Proverbs 23.7. Wen one thinks thoughts of failure, one is destined to fail. You will be stuck in the poopy pamper. When one thinks thoughts of mediocrity, one is destined to live an average life. However, when one aligns one’s thoughts with God’s thoughts and one starts dwelling on the promises of His Word, when one constantly dwells on His success, favour, faith, power, and strength, nothing can hold one back. Make up your mind today to think optimistically, excellent thoughts, and one will be propelled toward greatness, inevitably bound for increase, promotion, and God’s supernatural blessings. As you stockpile your virtues and increase your holdings in humility, you will be preparing to battle for God, and eventually to buttle for God, as is the duty of a fervent servant soul. Flame glows, as you have no doubt noticed, but without smoke it does not ascend. So as the desires for Celestials on your part flame up, they do not smoke; that is to say, they are not free from the temptation of carnal affection. You do the right things for the honour of God—that is to say, pray desiringly to Him—but all is not right with you. Why? More soot than wisp. Is that not the case with your own desire? You have clouded your own mind into thinking that your desire was perfectly suitable. However, it was not. It was not white smoke rising; it was just black soot falling. How to put time to good effect. Do not go looking for delectables for yourself. Do find what is acceptable and honourific to God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If you can make this midlife correction, then you will prefer God’s regulations to every desideratum of yours, whether in the past or the future, and follow it cheerfully. I know your desire, and many of the times God has heard you lusting for it in the night. You would like to be cavorting around the playing fields of the Lord with the children of God; Paul would have it that way, that is what he wrote to the Romans (8.21). That will be then, but here is now. The thought of the Eternal Home and Celestial Homeland delights you. Alas, that hour has yet to come. Yours is another clock, ticking another time. The time for war, the time for labour, the time for temptation. Replenish your depleted soul with the Summum Bonum—that should be your wish. However, alas, the time is not ripe. God is the One. Look for God, until the Kingdom of God comes; Luke has quoted Him on this already (22.18). Today, I chose to dwell on good thoughts, thoughts that based on the truths of Your Word, Father; thoughts that will build me up rather than tear me down. Thank You for renewing my mind and giving me a fresh new attitude of hope. Up to this point, My dear friend, you had to be put to the test and exercised in many different situations. For these, intermediate consolations have been issued to you, but the Final Lump Sum is not due jus yet. Therefore, stay cheery and keep in fighting trim. Especially when it comes to fighting against, as well as to just enduring, the contraries of nature. “Rejoice in the Lord always [delight, gladden yourselves in Him]; again I say, Rejoice. Let all humans know and perceive and recognize your unselfishness (your considerateness, your forbearing spirit). The Lord is near [He s coming soon]. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
“Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything, but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition (definite requests), with thanksgiving, continue to make your wants known to God. And God’s peace [shall be yours, that tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and so fearing nothing from God and being content with its Earthly lot of whatever sort that is, that peace] which transcends all understanding shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. For the rest, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honourable and seemly, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and loveable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virtue and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things [fix your mins on them], reports Philippians 4.4-8. Often you have to do what you do not want to do; and it is important to leave behind what you truly hold dear. That will forward others’ interests, but it will not necessarily promote yours. What some will say will be heard, but there is no guarantee that what you will say will be worth hearing. Some will beg on the streets, and their pockets will be filled; you will hold your hand out on the corner, and no one will look your way. Some will develop a large following, but you will remain a comparative unknown. Bits and bobs will be done by others, but your immense contributions will go unnoticed. Because of experiences like these, your nature will always be thrown into a hissing fit. However, if you can manage to hang on to your tongue, you will take a giant stride along the path of spiritual progress. In these and many similars, the faithful servant of the Lord usually has to be proved; that is to say, to bring oneself low and to snap one’s attachment to all things. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Die you must to the things of this World, as you already know. However, there is scarcely somesuch in which you need to die more than this; namely, to endure, to suffer what makes your will scream, what does against your grain, what makes you wince at the mere scrape of it. That is especially so when disconveniences are the order of the day. Why? They just do not make sense to you. Even so, because you do not dare resist the Higher Power, you insinuate yourself into an already existing line of authority. Now that must seem hard to you, My dear friend—to walk around awaiting the nod from another Devout who is no worthier than yourself. It is like looking into a mirror and trying not to see yourself. However, think of the fruit of these labours, My dear Devout, the swiftly approaching End and the extravagantly large Reward. Do that, and you will lose your grounds for complaint, but you will surely have the strongest possible ground for patience. From just a small investment in Free Will Limited here on Earth, you will be able to trade up to Free Will Forever in Heaven. There is where you will find everything you want, everything you can possibly desire. You will have the faculty of doing nothing but good, without fear of losing a thing. Yours will be always one with Mine—no secrecies, no privacies. There, nobody will cross you; nobody will complain about you. Nobody will trip you up. No one will go around you. All your desiderata will be present to you at once and the same time, and each and every one will entertain your whole spirit, filling you with refreshment and continuing to top you off. In Heaven, God will match Celestial Comelies—that is to say, glories—with each of the Earthly Uncomelies—that is to say, contumelies—you have had to endure; the woolly white pallium of distinction, as Prophet Isaiah might have put it (6.13), in place of the rough bronze monk’s cloth of sorrow; a seat in the Kingdom of the Ages in place of your stool of ignorance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In Heaven, making special guest appearances will be two fruits of Obedience. Labour of Penitence will rejoice, and Humble Subjection will be crowed with glorious fanfare. That will be then, but this is now. Incline yourself humbly under than hands of Humankind. Do not let yourself get hot and bothered about what someone may have said about your or another may have ordered you to do. However, take great care that whether a Prelate, a Priest, or a Devout demand something of you, you do it whole and entire for the good of the situation and to fulfill all expectations. Odd thing, though! One person asks for a tit; another, for a tat; both become celebrities and are praised to the skies. However, when you do the very same thing, no joy or glory attaches to you. Why? It is that your only joy, if I may say it, My dear Devout, will be found in contempt of self. Which may not be so bad if it means in the Long Run that you will become My pride and joy. One desire, and one alone is all you need, this side of death or that side of life: that God will always be glorified in you. “And my God will liberally supply (fill to full) your every need according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory forever and ever (though the endless eternities of the eternities). Amen (so be it),” reports Philippians 4.19-20. Lord, do not fully understand the meaning of this experience. I am filled with awe. Your love goes beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I know that someday I will trust you so much that I will not feel afraid; I will not draw back when you express your love to me. Thank you for being so patient. I have much to learn. Good night. Many Christian readers think that psychology undermines faith. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, if your faith is built on the foundation that learning to love God with your whole being, and learning to love others as yourself is the highest priority of the Christian life, then our message will affirm your faith. A psychological understanding of personality can contribute to the effectiveness with which Christians seek to live out their faith. We are also concerned with relationships between person and between a person and God. How can anyone, including a growing Christian, get the most out of life? We have coined a term—“the actualizing Christian”—to describe an approach to living a Christian life based on awareness, honesty, and trust. We believe this lifestyle leads to the graced fulfillment of one’s God-given potentials in life. It results in the full development of one’s personality and the increased capacity to have intimate and enduring relationships with others and God. Actualizing is a lifelong process, not a final state or a rigid ideal of perfectionism. It is a vision of how we can grow throughout the stages of life. The journey of actualizing is an opening of new doors, a becoming, a probing, a going inwards to one’s center, a developing of relationships. Every arrival is a new beginning! We believe that the growth of many people, especially those raised in the New World culture, has been limited by a lack of trust of their whole being—intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual. For many people, “head knowledge” is the stuff of life. If it is not logical, rational, and objective, then it is not so important. So these individuals have great difficulty experiencing their intuition or expressing their feelings. For others, emotionality is overemphasized at the expense of clear thinking and responsible planning. Yet others have difficulty when it comes to the body. They consider the body as somehow evil or at least neutral and fail to recognize the importance of the physical realm of human existence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
One of the awesome affirmations of the Christian faith is that Jesus, the Son of God, expressed His deity through a human body. He clearly demonstrated that the physical realm is important and, beyond that, that it is to be valued positively. Actualizing Christians rely upon important information derived from their entire natural and supernatural beings. The growing Christian learns to listen carefully to the messages of the body. A headache may mean we are too tense about life. A backache may mean we have chronically overextended ourselves. An ulcer may mean that we hate someone. In actualizing, we learn to respect the wisdom of our own feeling and inner intuition. This this is called the wisdom organism. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the process going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings and express themselves in their own unique ways. The actualizing Christian learns throughout life by continually exploring, expanding, and revising the meaning of one’s beliefs and values. In this open-ended approach, there is a desire to always grow beyond one’s prejudices and premature conclusions about life. In psychological terms, one has an open perceptual field in which new configurations of meaning constantly emerge. In religions terms, one tends to be sensitive to the heart and mind of Christ—one is easily moved by the spirit of God. Everything in the World is moving dynamically in the direction of completion, fulfillment, and actualization. Through the process, there is a vital link between the person’s or thing’s actual characteristics at a given moment and what will characterize it as a fully developed entity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
For instance, the acorn has within it the potential of becoming an oak tree. However, it is only through the process of growth over time that the tiny acorn experiences transformation and actualization. The idea behind entelechy is that the ultimate end or purpose toward which the acorn is developing is embedded in the acorn itself. The internal blueprint pushes, energizes, and guides the acorn in fulfilling its project of becoming a mature oak. In much the same way the person who is rooted in God is being transformed over time into the unique individual that one was created to be. Although the actualizing process is pleasurable, it is not simply a hedonistic pursuit of fun or happiness. There will be real travail for anyone who desires to become a genuinely actualizing person. However, there will be real joy too—the joy of being what one is and becoming more of what one can be. This involves risk, faith, vulnerability, and adventure. We need to learn to place a high priority on our growth toward authentic personhood. It will not happen automatically. Even if we want to, we cannot change ourselves suddenly and drastically. Rather, real and enduring change is a gradual, steady process of becoming. It is nurtured by the courageous acceptance of our whole being—strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, talents and deficits. And, if we take it for granted, it may never occur. Just as the athlete trains and warms up before the beginning of the hundred-yard dash, we must learn how to warm ourselves up to the process of actualizing. It does not happen all at once. We need to discover our energies; heighten our awareness of the challenges for meaning that life is inviting us to embrace; and gain access to the spiritual resources of the core of our being. Only then will we be able to live life with sensitivity, wisdom, and vitality that is possible for us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Learning to live such a life requires concrete and specific guidelines. First of all, the spiritual core, the center of the personality, provides the function of lending stability to the always-evolving nature of the person. The physical appearance of the person changes throughout life in definite ways. The emotional responses change through a single day. The values and attitudes are altered over the course of weeks, months, and years. However, the core self, the center of spiritual identity, remain the same. Recognize and affirm that you are a Center of pure self-consciousness and self-realization. This is the permanent factor in every varying flow of your personal life. It is this which gives one the sense of being, or permanence, of inner security. You are a center of awareness and power. The spiritual core is an individual’s God-given personhood, one’s “God within.” The Holy Spirit dwells here. The core reflects the fact that one is made in the image of God, and shares with God the capacity for awareness, choice, and intimacy. Whether that potential is fully realized during the course of a person’s lifetime depends on one’s responsiveness to the wisdom of the core. The fact remains that the awakening to the Overself leaves great witness and striking testimony that it has passed over a humans’ head. It brings new and subtle powers, an altered outlook upon people and events, and a deep calm in the very center of one’s being. When one is given one’s primal glimpse of the spiritual possibilities of humans, one is immeasurably exalted. When one discovers the dynamic power of the Overself for the first and hears the beautiful hidden rhythm of its life, one’s heart becomes as the heart of Hercules and for hours, days, or weeks one walks on air. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One begins to price is fleshly desires at their true worth and treads them under foot. One has been permitted to taste of the spirit’s fruits, and one knows that they alone are good. A sense of being lifted up from all Worldly cares will pervade one for some time as an afterglow of this experience. The gracious feeling swims away again and leaves one not forlorn but forsworn. One will never gain be alone. The remembrance of what happened is by itself enough to be company for one the rest of one’s life. Through our blessings and invocations, we acknowledge this network of forces that flows through the World, awakening the deeper levels of our consciousness to effect these patterns of change. Deep peace of the running wave to you, of water flowing, rising, and falling, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding. May the stream of your life flow unimpeded! Deep peace of the running wave to you! O look down upon us from Thy dwelling place on high and forgive Thy servant who now worships before Thee, so that Thou wilt prolong one’s days and pardon one’s sins, iniquities, and transgression. Extend Thy right hand to receive one in perfect repentance, and open Thy good treasure to satisfy thirsting creatures, as it is written in the Scripture: The Lord shall open unto thee His good treasure, the Heaven, to give the rain unto your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand. Amen. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included!
Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
The Dead and the Living Can Never be One—God Has Forbidden it!
Life is richest when you realize that we are all snowflakes. Each of us is absolutely beautiful and unique. And we are here for a very short time. Mrs. Winchester was a pretty little brunette, rather pale, with dark hair, brilliant brown eyes, a resolute mouth and a bright, intelligent expression. She was orderly, trim and feverishly energetic, and seemed to live every moment of her life. The Winchester mansion was like a paradise on Earth; and in this light I still regarded it, until a great change came over the temperature, and the month of April introduced me to red-hot winds, sleepless nights, and the intolerable “brain fever” bird. The next morning, rested and invigorated, we set out on a tour of inspection; and it is almost worthwhile to undergo a certain amount of baking on the sweltering heat of the plains, in order to enjoy those deep first draughts of cool hill air, instead of a stifling, dust-laden atmosphere, and to appreciate the green valleys and blue hills by force of contrast to the far-stretching, eye-smarting, white glaring roads that intersect the burnt-up plains—roads and plains that even the pariah abandon, salamander though he be! No doubt the work of some extremely roughish-looking and grotesque imps and demons, who were inflicting various torments. However, to our delight and surprise, Mrs. Winchester had by no means overdraw the advantages of her new estate. The Grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion was solidly built of wood, brick, and stone, nine storied, and ample in size. It stood on kind of a shelf cut out of the hill side, and was surrounded by a pretty flower garden, full of roses, fuchsias, carnations. There was also a fruit orchard, many exotic trees and plants, and an avenue of palm trees. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
There was a delightful, flagged verandah. The stairs were very steep. At the head of them, the passage and rooms were repeated. There were very small nooks, a switchback staircase, which has seven flights with forty-four steps, rising only about nine feet, since each step was just two inches. Miles of twisting hallways, secret passageways in the walls, a labyrinth of rooms, and dressing-rooms, 13 bathrooms, and plenty of good water. From the fourth-floor balcony, there was a glorious view, across a valley, far away, to the snowy range. As we looked around the drawing-room, here were carpets, curtains, solid, very solid chairs, and Berlin wool worked screens, a card-table, and any quantity of pictures. All the rooms were well, almost handsomely, furnished, in an old-fashioned style. There was no scarcity of wardrobes, looking-glasses, or even armchairs, in the bedrooms, and they pantry was fitted out—a most singular circumstance—with a large supply of handsome glass and china, lamps, old moderators, coffee and tea pots, plated side dishes, and candlesticks, cooking utensils and spoons and forks, wine coasters, and a cake-backet. The chins was Spoke, the plate old family heirlooms, with a crest—a winged horse—on everything, down to the very mustard spoons. There were gold- and silverplated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows, German silver and bronze inlaid doors, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood. Handsome Dresden china vases, nice boxes of firewood in every room, clocks, real hair mattresses—in short, it was a treasure trove. It was well built with some peculiar effects such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that go nowhere and that opened onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
It is estimated that there were some 500 to 600 rooms in the house. However, it is haunted! According to a Boston medium, Mrs. Winchester and her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits. Supposedly the untimely deaths of her daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester would be the next victim. We soon forget about the dismal prophecy, being too gay and too busy to give her, or it a thought. We had so many engagements—tennis parties and tournaments, picnics, concerts, dances and little dinners. We ourselves gave occasional afternoon teas in the verandah, using the best Spode cups and saucers and the old silver cake-basket, and were warmly complimented on our good fortune in being guests in such a charming house and garden. Mrs. Winchester also had an African grey parrot—a rare bird indeed—and a cute little dog named Zip. Later that night, we had dinner in a handsome and somewhat antique-looking room. A cheerful wood-fire blazed in the capacious hearth; a little at one side an old-fashioned table, with richly-carved legs, was placed—destined, no doubt, to receive the supper, for which preparations were going forward; and ranged with exam regularity stood the tall-backed chairs whose ungracefulness was more than counterbalanced by their comfort. A stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the undersuit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its fold rested upon plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face!—all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them the impression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy redness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far blow the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon—the frightful sport of satanic possession. It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves. There was something indescribably odd, even horrible about all his motions, something undefinable, something unnatural, unhuman—it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies; and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Theophilus Dunn inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room. During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a death-like stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest caused by the process of respiration. These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. He saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into the apartment. Sharp guests of wind and warning rumblings of thunder that seemed to shake the mountains, blew away the table cloth. As it was whirling into space, Dunn drew his sword, and raising the candle as o throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the figure had glided. No figure was there—nothing but the furniture which had belonged to the room, and yet he could not be deceived as to the fact that something had moved before them into the chamber. A sickening dread came upon him, and the cold perspiration broke out in heavy drops upon his forehead; nor was he more composed when he heard the increased urgency, they agony of entreaty, which Mrs. Winchester implored him not to leave for a moment. “I saw him,” she said. “He is there! I cannot be deceived—I know him. He is by me—he is with me—he is in the room. Then, for God’s sake, as you would save me, do no stir from beside me!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Mrs. Winchester had it prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urger everyone to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating again and again, “The dead and the living cannot be one—God has forbidden it!” and then again, “Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleep-walkers.” There was a Greek curse inscribed on a lead tablet in the drawing room from the city of Selinus in Sicily. Mrs. Winchester used it to communicate with gods and spirits. A spirit had been summoned and bound to the tablet to make sure the curse was effective. Souls after death do as yet love their body which they left, as those souls do whose bodies want due burial or have left their bodies by violent death, and as yet wander about their carcasses in a troubled and moist spirit, being, as it were, allured by something that hath an affinity with them. Many spirits had been invoked that night, this one had been brought out and seated on a sixteen-sided stand (an improvement on the double pentacle called Solomon’s seat). Mrs. Winchester lay in the inner chamber, the door of which was open; and by the side of the bed, at her urgent desire, stood her niece Marion “Daisey” Marriam Marriott; a candle burned in the bedchamber, and three were lighted in the outer apartment. Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton arrived, and cleared his voice, as if about to commence a prayer; but before he had time to begin, a sudden gust of air blew out the candle which served to illuminate the room in which Mrs. Winchester lay, and she with hurried alarm, explained: “Sir Lancelot, bring in another candle; the darkness is unsafe.” Sir Lancelot stepped from the bedchamber into the other, in order to supply what she desired. “O God! do not go, Sir Lancelot!” shrieked the unhappy Mrs. Winchester; and at the same time she sprang from the bed and darted after him, in order, by her grasp, to detain him. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
However, the warning came too late, for scarcely had he passed the threshold, and hardly had Mrs. Winchester has time to utter the startling explanation, when the door which divided the two rooms closed violently after him, as if swung to by a strong blast of wind. Sir Lancelot and Dunn both rushed to the door, but their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much as to sake it. Shriek after shriek burst from the inner chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror. Sir Lancelot and Dunn applied every energy and strained every nerve to force open the door; but all in vain. There was no sound of struggling from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness, and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill as if thrown open. One last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human, swelled from the room, and suddenly there followed a death-like silence. A light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed to the window; and almost at the same instant the door gave way, and yielding to the pressure of the external applicants, they were nearly precipitated into the room. It was empty. The window was open, and Sir Lancelot sprang to the chair and gazed out upon the fruit orchard and the lake below. He saw no form, but he beheld, or thought he beheld, the waters of the broad lake beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass. No trace of Mrs. Winchester was ever after discovered, nor was anything certain respecting her mysterious wooer detected or even suspected; no clue whereby to trace the intricacies of the labyrinth, and to arrive at a distinct conclusion was to be found. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
However, an incident occurred, which, though it will not be received by our rational readers as at all approaching to evidence upon the matter, nevertheless produced a strong and a lasting impression upon the mind of Sir Lancelot. Many years after the events at the Winchester Mansion, which we have detailed, Sir Lancelot, then remotely situated, received an intimation of his father’s death, and of his intended burial upon a fixed day in an independent chapel in Bath late in the day upon which the funeral was appointed to take place. The procession had not then arrived. Evening closed in, and still it did not appear. Sir Lancelot strolled down to the church—he found it open; notice of the arrival of the funeral had been given, and the vault in which the body was to be laid had been opened. The official who corresponds to our sexton, on seeing a well-dressed gentleman, whose object was to attend the expected funeral, pacing the aisle of the chapel, hospitably invited him to share with him the comforts of a blazing wood fire, which as was his custom in winter time upon such occasions, he had kindled on the hearth of a chamber which communicated by a flight of steps with the vault below. In this chamber Sir Lancelot and his entertainer seated themselves; and the sexton, after some fruitless attempts to engage his guest in conversation, was obliged to apply himself to his tobacco-pipe and can to solace his solitude. In spite of his grief and cares, the fatigues of a rapid journey of nearly forty hours gradually overcame the mind and body of Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, and he sank into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by someone shaking him gently by the shoulder. He first thought that the old sexton had called him, but he was no longer in the room. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
There was a kind of ghostly twilight. The ghostly lights passed and disappeared in the gathering darkness. He roused himself, and as soon as he could clearly see what was around him, he perceived a female form, clothed in a kind of black robe of muslin, part of which was so disposed as to act as a veil, and in her hand she carried a lamp. She was moving rather away from him, and towards the flight of steps which conducted towards the vaults. Sir Lancelot felt a vague alarm at the sight of this figure, and at the same time an irresistible impulse to follow his guidance. He followed it towards the vaults, but when it reached the head of the stairs, he paused; the figure paused also, and turning gently round, displayed, by the light of the lamp it carried, the face and features of the beloved, Sarah Winchesters. There was nothing horrible, or even sad, in the countenance. On the contrary, it wore the same arch smile which used to enchant him long before in his happy days. A feeling of awe and interest, too intense to be resisted, prompted him to follow the specter, if specter it were. She descended the stairs—he followed; and, turning to the left through a narrow passage she led him, to his infinite surprise, through the door to nowhere, into what appeared to be an old-fashioned Victorian apartment. Abundance of costly antique furniture was disposed about the room, and in one corner stood a four-post bed, with heavy black cloth curtains, and by the light of the lamp which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror stricken clergyman, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Theophilus Dunn. Sir Lancelottt had hardly seen him when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the vaults. He was laying in a cell of considerable size, which had not been disturbed for a long time, and had fallen beside a large coffin which was supported upon small stone pillars, a security against the attacks of vermin. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
To his dying day Sir Lancelot was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made the Winchester Mansion sought after, but even more so as presenting occurrences in Mrs. Winchester’s interviews and journals that defy explanation. However, Mrs. Winchester’s mysterious fate must ever remain a matter of speculation. Yes; sometimes at night the most terrible weeping and sobbing can be heard coming from the “Daisy bedroom,” and a phantom horse can be heard plunging in the carriage house, and the wild, unearthly and utterly appalling shriek. The scene of horrible dinner parities has even been seen in the dining room. A party of ghouls meets there a few times of year, after midnight, and are assembled with the spoils of the graves they have violated, and are feasting on the flesh of long-buried corpses. One of the servants even saw his own wife, who, by the way, never touched supper at home, playing no inconsiderable part in the hideous banquet. Hundreds of wild stories have appeared about this mysterious mansion. It seems odd that none of her relatives or former employees ever came forward to contradict these stories, despite the fact that many of them lived for forty years after the estate was opened for tours. For some reason, did they feel threatened by talking—or did they continue to guard Mrs. Winchesters privacy? At the Winchester Mystery House, we may never be able to separate fact from legend—so here are some stories that have been told since the late 1800s and early 1900s. We leave it to guests and readers to decide for themselves why Mrs. Winchester really built the house the way she did, or what is it really? A portal or just a museum? #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Winchester Mystery House is an extravagant maze of Victorian craftmanship—marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guides must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours. Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion—such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built the descends seven steps and then rises eleven? By the way, Harry Houdini, an occultist, was attracted to the Winchester and tried to escape from the mansiin blindfolded; he also died Halloween 1926.
Winchester Mystery House
What it feels like walking through a microscopic spiderweb….🕷🕸
All Hallows’ Eve, Lost in the House tour tickets are still available for tonight. Hurry and purchase before they sell out!
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The Thoughts from Many Hearts Might be Revealed!
The strongest is never enough to be master of all the time, unless one transforms force into right and obedience into duty. Hence the right of the strongest, a right that seems like something intended ironically and is actually established as a basic principle. However, will no one explain this word to me? Force is a physical power; I fail to see what morality can result from its effects. To give in to force is an act of necessity, not of will. At most, it is an act of prudence. In what sense could it be a duty? Let us suppose for a moment that there is such a thing as this alleged right. I maintain that all the results from it is an inexplicable mish-match. For once force produces the right, the effect changes places with the cause. Every force that is superior to the first succeeds to its right. As soon as one can disobey with impunity, one can do so legitimately; and since the strongest is always right, the only thing to do is to make oneself the strongest. For what kind of right is it that perishes when the force on which it is based ceases? If one must obey because of force, one need not do so out of duty; and if one is no longer forced to obey one is no longer obliged. Clearly then, this word “right” adds nothing to force. It is utterly meaningless here. Obey the powers that be. If that means giving in to force, the precept is sound, but superfluous. I reply it will never be violated. All power comes from God—I admit it—but so does every disease. Does this mean that calling in a physician is prohibited? If a brigand takes me by surprise at the edge of a wooded area, is it not only that case that I must surrender my purse, but even that I am in good conscious bound to surrender it, if I were able to withhold it? After all, the pistol he holds is also a power. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Let us then agree that force does not bring about right, and that one is obliged to obey only legitimate powers. Studies of speech content and depression have generally focused on topics and themes that emerge in the discourse of people with depression. A married couple with a depressed partner is more likely than a nondepressed couple to express dysphoric feelings and negative well-being verbally, to talk more about well-being, to ask questions about well-being, and (in the case of the depressed partner) to engage in negative self-evaluation. Depressed spouses have also reported being more verbally aggressive and less constructive in problem solving—a view corroborated by their nondepressed spouses—when engaged in marital interaction. When depressed students were asked to get acquainted with another student, they emitted fewer statements that reflected an optimistic appraisal of their partners, and made more directly negative statements than their nondepressed peers. Similar findings of negative verbal content among depressed speakers were obtained in studies of interactions with strangers, unstructured interviews, 10-minute monologues, telephone conversations with confidants, and psychotherapy sessions. Likewise, depressed individuals communicate self-devaluation, sadness, and general negativity to their interpersonal partners. It now appears that negative verbal content is especially pronounced in interactions between depressed people and intimate others. In addition, depressed subjects are more inclined to emit unsolicited self-disclosures, and are more like to disclose following a partner self-disclosure, then were the nondepressed subjects. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
This indicates not only that depressed subjects self-disclose more than their nondepressed counterparts do, but that their timing of these disclosures is often inappropriate and the content is often negative. The timing of disclosures tend to be inappropriate because they are often provided in the absence of any utterance from the partner that solicits such information (exempli gratia, “How have you been?”). This finding is noteworthy, in that self-disclosures have been shown to be a key ingredient in the rejection of depressed persons by others. As might be expected, the depressed subjects rated the negative topics as more appropriate for discussion than the nondepressed subjects did. Human beings use facial expressions, both consciously and unconsciously, to send information to others about their emotional states and attitudes. Most available evidence indicates that depressed people are less facially animated than nondepressed people, except when it comes to conveying sadness through the face. This trend is very evident. However, both depressed subjects and nondepressed subjects controls evidence similar abilities to self-regulate a happy facial state when requested to do so; however, when no instructions were offered, the controls spontaneously assumed a happy expression, whole the depressed subjects showed no evidence of a happy expression. Depressed people also have higher incidence of corrugated brow, squinting or closed eyes, and turned-down mouth, and were more frequently judged as looking “depressed.” People who are unaware of negative affective states in others may continue to engage in aversive behaviours, such as excessive reassurance seeking. This may serve only to further produce rejection from others, making the reassurance increasingly difficult to obtain, and thereby perpetuating depressive symptoms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Furthermore, hyposensitive may be a consequence of protracted depression. If depressed people elicit rejection from others over a period of time, some may develop hyposensitive as a means of preserving social interaction and avoiding social isolation. Thus some depressed people may learn to ignore signs of negative affect in others. These may be the cases of depression that are the most intractable. Because looking while speaking is a behaviour associated with confidence and status, it is likely that depressed people’s negative feelings about themselves precipitate this gaze avoidance. Undoubtedly, this lack of eye contact does not give other people a good impression. Depressed individuals are also more likely to hold their head in a downward position than nondepressed persons. Many of the things that people normally do to indicate interest, attention, and enthusiasm in conversation, such as smiling, making eye contact, speaking in an animated tone, and using gestures, are often lacking in the interpersonal communication of depressed people. The inhibited use of these behaviours, which are often treated as microindicators of social skills, is consistent with the self-reports and observer ratings of depressed people’s social skills. The extent to which the inhibited interpersonal behaviour of depressed people reflects true skills deficits (id est, inability to use these skills) or a lack of motivation has yet to be precisely determined. It is clear that people with depression are less motivated to communicate with other people. This may at least partially explain why depression is associated with restricted communication behaviour. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Evidence from vastly divergent sources converges to suggest that many people with depression have documentable problems with social skills. However, there is at least some evidence to support three different potential relationships between social skills and depression. First, social skills deficits may be a causal antecedent to depression. Poor social skills make it difficult to secure beneficial reinforcement through social interaction, and equally difficult to avoid punishing responses in social contexts. People with poor social skills have a difficult time making a good impression on others, and instead often come across as inept, uninterested, and dull. The resultant abundance of punishing social response and absence of beneficial social reinforcement are thought to contribute to eventual depression. Lower social skill scores are predicted in worsening of depressive symptoms. Yet, the covariation between poos social skills and depression may be explained by other possible relationships. A second possibility is that poor social skills are a consequence of depression. Many of the symptoms of depression have implications for inhibited production of skilled social behaviour. For example, depression is generally accompanied by a number of psychomotor symptoms that entail slowed and delayed motor behaviours. These psychomotor tendencies include slowed speech, long response latencies, diminished eye contact, and increased nervous gesturing (id est, adaptors of body-focused gestures). These are the same behaviours that are considered indicative of poor social skills. Still, not all evidence conclusively supports the hypothesis that poor social skills follow depression, but enough evidence exists to suggest that it is a likely explanation for at least some cases. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Only those people who have poor social skills, and who experience events and outcomes that they perceive as stressful, are predicted to develop depressive symptoms. It is therefore the combination of poor social skills and negative life events that is thought to produce depressive distress. The reasoning behind this model is that people with good social skills can marshal the kind and quantity of social support that will be effective for coping with stressful event. On the other hand people with poor social skills are expected to experience more stressors, and be less able to secure assistance and social support for dealing with those stressors when they do occur. There is also an indication that the relationship between stressful life events and depression is strongest amongst those with the poorest social skills. On the other hand, those with high social skills scores exhibit a relationship near zero between stressful life events and depression. In other words, poor social skills make people vulnerable to the development of depression when faced with stressors, whereas good social skills produced a prophylactic effect in the face of stressors. A diverse collection of research findings shows that people with depression often have concomitant problems with social skills. Three theoretical explanations for this association have been offered: Poor social skills are a causal antecedent to depression, depression leads to a deterioration of social skills and/or poor social skills create a vulnerability to depression. The evidence associated with these hypotheses is just beginning to emerge, and thus far there is at least some supportive evidence for each. These findings highlight the complexity of the relationship between social skills and depression. There is every reason to believe that the nature of this relationship is not the same for all people with depression. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Being happy is not the result of a carefree life, but of a careful effort to recognize the Lord’s hand in our lives. When we do so, we cannot help but feel the love God had for us. Expressing daily gratitude will allow one to enjoy one’s own bouquet of Heavenly blessings. “Let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith,” reports Hebrews 12.1-2. God has an individual plan for each of our lives. Just because something works for someone else does not necessarily mean it will work for everyone. If one makes a mistake of trying to copy others, one may become frustrated, depressed, and will waste a lot of time and energy. In addition, one may also miss the things God has in store for one to do. The most important thing in life is to do the best you can. Stand firm, and hope in God. Words are just words. They fly through the air, airy aerialists that they are. However, if they are harsh words, they land on one’s head with a thud. No, no lumps, but yes, lot of pain. If one deserved the lumps for something one did, think how willingly one would reform in order that the pain would stop. However, if you are not conscious of having done a wrong, then think how one can turn the pain to one’s spiritual advantage. Even if one could not survive an all-out war of words, one could put up with a few verbal volleys for a while without making a big deal out of it. However, how can these little darts pierce you to the heart unless you are a carnal human who pays more attention to what the carny human says about one. That is because one is afraid of being despised; one does not want to be reprehended for one’s excesses, and so one seeks refuge under an arbour of excuses. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Granted, you will face enormous pressure to do what everyone else is doing, to try to please everybody and meet all their expectations. If you are not careful, though, your life can become a blur, a pale imitation rather than an original. However, you do not have to please everyone else; you need to please only God. The truth is, if you are going to live life at your pace and become successful, you may not be able to mee other people’s expectations. Spend more time on introspection, and you will find—surprise!—that even now, after some years away from the World, the World is still very much alive in you; in fact, you are still doing what Humankind thinks quite fashionable. You cannot be everything to everybody. You will have to accept the fact that some people may not like you. Everybody is not going to agree with every decision you make. You probably will not be able to keep every person in your life happy. However, you cannot let the demands, pressures, and expectation from others stop you from doing what you know God wants you to do. Why do you refuse to come down from your marble pedestal and be confronted with your faults? It just stands to reason that you are not a truly humble Devout, nor from the look of you a Devout truly silenced to the World, nor does the World appear crucified to you—I can tell by your eyes. There are the characteristics that Paul stressed to the Galatians 6.14. “But far be if from me to glory [in anything or anyone] except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ (the Messiah), through Whom the World has been crucified to me, and I to the World!,” reports Galatians 6.14. When you face difficult decisions or uncertain choices, it helps to seek counsel from someone you respect. Certainly, as the Bible says, “there is safety in a multitude of counselors,” reports Proverbs 24.6, and we should not be stubborn. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
We should always stay open and be willing to take advice. However, after you have prayed about something and looked at all the options, be bold enough to make a decision that is right for you. If you are trying to please everybody else by doing things you do not really want to do, so you will not hurt someone’s feelings or because you are trying to keep everybody happy, you will be cheating yourself and everyone around you. You can run yourself in circles trying to be something that you are not, and you will run the risk of missing out on God’s best for your own life. “Nevertheless, in public worship, I would rather say five words with my understanding and intelligently in order to instruct others, than ten thousand word in a [strange] tongue (language),” reports 1 Corinthians 14.19. Look here now, my dear friend, gather the most malicious words in the dictionary, then imagine they all apply to you. How would you react? You could scream! You could howl! Or you could think, What harm can they do? Especially if I shrug them off. After all, they weigh as little as a tittle and have not enough pluck to pluck a hair from your head. And no one has a more accurate hair count than God. “But not a hair of your heard shall perish,” reports Luke 21.18. A Devout whose heart is not in the monastery and does not have God in one’s sights is an easy target for a vituperous word. On the other hand, the Devout who had shared confidence with God and has no appetite to be one’s own human will be able to stand down all verbal abuse. God is the Judge, Knower of All Secrets. God knows all the ins and outs of every human act. God knows the wrongdoer as well as the wrong done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The wrong itself comes by way of God, and God permit it to happen. Why? “The thoughts from many hearts might be revealed,” reports Luke 2.35. God will sentence the guilt and the innocent in public; God have tried them already in His chambers. The testimony of Humankind often falls short of the truth. God’s judgement, on the other hand, is always true. It will stand and will not be reversed on appeal. The record is not available to the general public; only a few have access. The transcripts have been read for errors, omissions, emendations, and so on. None found; none needed. When the foolish among us hear this, they get that milky, faraway look in their eyes as if to say that Truth, whatever else she may be, just is not fair. Therefore, whenever you need a quick decision, come to God. In no instance rely on your own judgement. As the Book of Proverbs put it (12.21), the just person will not be confused or confounded because “whatever happens to one will come from God.” Even though some unjust charge is brought against you, you should not pay much attention to it. Best thing to do is to shrug it off. If a charge against you is resolved when someone believable witnesses come forward, you should not throw a victory part for a hundred of your closet friends. “I read the hearts and loins of Humankind,” rightly said God’s John in the book of Revelation (2.23), and God does not pass judgement the way Humankind does; John put down these words when God was in the temple (7.24). Sometimes on Earth, one can get too much advice. Conflicting opinions can cause confusion. People often reflect on their own lives and what they have and will do, so their opinion may not even reflect you. Often someone found guilty in an Earthly court is praised for one’s conduct by the Celestial Court. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Follow your own heart in light of God’s Word and do what you feel is right and good for you. Father, thank You, for giving me the interpersonal confidence to be me. Please help me to run my race and to not be concerned about what other people expect of me. As long as You are pleased with me, I am happy! O Lord God, Just Judge, strong and patient, You know the fragility and depravity of Humankind Hence, be my strength and my total trust. Conscience is not enough for me. You know what I do not know. And so I ought to humbly accept Your penance for my eyer transgression. Act forgivingly toward me every time I commit a sin of omission, and yet again please grant me more and more grace of sufferance. Your copious mercy is better for my obtaining indulgence than Your justice against my defending my conscious. “I am not conscious of anything bad I have done,” as Paul wrote in First Corinthians 4.4; nevertheless I cannot justify my behaviour in this. The reason? Remove mercy from the equation, as the Psalmist once said (143.2), and no living creature will every be justified in Your sight. The divine procession can be derived only from the actions which remain within the agent. In a nature which is intellectual, and in the divine nature these actions are two, the acts of intelligence and of will. The act of sensation, which also appears to be an operation within the agent, takes places outside the intellectual nature, nor can it be reckoned as wholly removed from the sphere of external actions; for the act of sensations is perfected by the action of the sensible object upon sense. It follows that no other procession is possible in God but the procession of the Word, and of Love. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Power is the principle whereby one thing acts on another. Hence it is that external action points to power. Thus the divine power does not imply the procession of a divine person; but is indicated by the procession therefrom of creatures. As Boethius says (De Hebdom.), goodness belongs to the essence and not to the operation, unless considered as the object of the will. Thus, as the divine procession must be denominated from certain actions; no other processions can be understood in God according to goodness and the like attributes except those of the Word and of love, according as God understands and loves His own essence, truth and goodness. God understands all things by one simple act; and by one act also He wills all things. Hence there cannot exist in Him a procession of Word from Word, nor of Love from Love; for there is in Him only one perfect Word, one perfect Love; thereby being manifested His perfect fecundity. Most questers experience this momentary elation, this cosmic paean of exultation, at some time. In some the wish to re-experience it becomes a craving which cases them to lose their balance, to be repeatedly depressed and unhappy at its loss. Thus what was intended to increase their happiness becomes a source of further misery! If one is young in the life of the Spirit, ignorant of its laws and inexperienced in its ways, one may take the fading of the Glimpse amiss. One may complain too long or bemoan too much, thus inviting that dread experience, the dark night of the soul. One’s own great joy in the glimpse is natural and inevitable, but if one clings to it to the point where it is succeeded by great disappointment when the glimpse disappears, then it is merely another mood of the personal ego. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In that case one will certainly be left feeling empty when it leaves one, and one probably be troubled by the thought that something has gone wrong. It is a common mistake among those who have this glimpse for the first tie, and even for the second time, to expect it to last forever. However, when they find that it has no more immortality than the other experiences of the human mind, they suffer needlessly, not understanding, bewildered. To bestow this glimpse upon someone with no previous preparation of it, with an undeveloped psyche and an imperfect character, someone too backward spiritually to profit properly by it, may be to bestow a dangerous gift. It is likely to be misused as it is certain to be misconceived. If the experience is not fully understood, or if it comes to one quite unprepared for it, or if it comes too prematurely, it may be half-misunderstood and its teaching half-misconceived. In that case the will to act may become paralysed, the mind over-conscious of futility and evanescence. These holy visitations ought not to make one conceited or proud or fatten one’s ego or make one lose one’s wits. If they do, one is in spiritual danger so that what ought to be a blessing becomes a curse. These visitations of higher presence may deceive one into thinking that one has reached a higher degree than one really has. If so, one may expect their light and strength to abide permanently with one. In that case one may plunge into emotional reactions of gloom and disappointment when they ebb. It would be better for one to receive them gratefully as well as to regard their passing as tests of one’s resignation to the higher self and of one’s trust that its inner working is not mistaken. It knows quite well what It is doing in and for one. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
To have had the glimpse and yet to ignore it in subsequent life, or to utilize it only for the purpose of exalting the ego, s deliberately to tell a lie to oneself, consciously to be unfaithful to truth. When a person gets this experience without guidelines and in total surprise, within a family living in the common ignorance of such matters, one may let bewilderment come to destroy the new lucidity. After the glimpse has passes away—and a warning that it usually odes so is needed by beginners—either thankfulness for the visitation or discouragement by its loss may set in. One waits for an inner event that shall be thrilling and spectacular. One does not wait for one that shall be as gentle, as silent, as the fall of dew, so of course one is disappointed and falls into some kind of negative thoughts. Such moments are so precious that, when they are found to be irretrievable, a deep melancholy often settles on a human. Since people are not accustomed to these glimpses, they are easily swept off by the first few into emotional extravagances. One approaches these moods with delight but remembers them with despair. They are cored with happiness yet one feels frustrated by their evanescence. A wiser attitude understands that there is no need to grieve because the flash has gone, the ecstasy faded, the light shut out again. It knows that the Overself is still within one, even though these emotional or egoistic reactions try to trick one into believing otherwise. The Lord declares the purpose and contributions of one’s labours are “to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. If the contributions that you can make in a career are negligible or dishonourable, then the career itself is in question. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Employment is a necessary part of our lives on Earth; it gives us the means to provide for our families. Work is also an important gospel principle. It fosters growth and develops us. God condemns idleness and encourages us to “do many good things of our own free will,” reports Doctrines and Covenants 58.27. The Lord not only wants us to provide for our families but to be “anxiously engaged in a good cause,” Doctrine and Covenants 58.27. Good employment is important for us to better provide for our families and to serve faithfully in the Church. But flextime, while widely publicized, is only a small part of the general restricting of time that the Third Wave carries with it. We are also seeing a powerful shift toward increasing night work. This is occurring not so much in the traditional manufacturing centers like Akron or Baltimore, which have always had a lot of workers on night shifts, but in the rapidly expanding services and in the advanced, computer-based industries. The modern city, is a Gorgon that never sleeps and in which a growing proportion of citizens work outside the [normal] diurnal rhythms. Across the board in the technological nations the number of night workers now runs between 15 to 25 percent of all employees. Even more dramatic has been the spread of part-time work—and the active preference for it expressed by large numbers of people. Approximately 33 percent of Americans work part-time. For Walmart, more than 500,000 workers are part-time hourly associates. In all, there are nearly one voluntary worker for every three full-time workers in the United States of America, and part-time work force has been growing rapidly. So far has this process advances that a study by researchers at Georgetown University suggested that in the future almost all job could be part-time. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Entitled Permanent Part-Time Employment: The Manager’s Perspective, the study covered 68 corporations, more than half of which already used part-timers. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the percentage of unemployed workers who want only part-time work has doubled in the past twenty years. This opening up of part-time jobs is particularly welcomed by women, by the elderly and semi-retired, and by many young people who are willing to settle for a smaller paycheck in return for time to pursue their own hobbies, sports, or religious, artistic, or political interests. What we see, therefore, is a fundamental break with Second Wave synchronization. The combination of flextime, part-time, and night work means that more and more people are working outside the nine-to-five (or any fixed schedule) system, and that entire society is shifting to round-the-clock operations. New consumer patterns, meanwhile, directly parallel changes in the time structure of production. Note, for instance, the proliferation of all-night supermarkets. “Will the 4 A.M. shopper, long considered a hallmark of California kookiness, become a regular feature of life in the less flamboyant East?” ask The New York Times. The answer is a resounding “Yes!” A spokesman for a supermarket chain in the eastern United States of America says his company will keep its stores open all night because “people are staying up later than they used to.” The Times feature writer spends a night at a typical store and reports on the varied customers who take advantage of the late hours: a truck driver whose wife is ill shops for one’s family of six, a young woman on her way to a postmidnight date pops by to purchase a greeting card, a man up late with a sick daughter rushes in to buy her a toy banjo and stops to pick up a hibachi as well, a woman drops by after her ceramics class to do the week’s shopping, a motorcyclist roars up at 3.00 A.M. to buy a deck of cards, two men straggle in at dawn on their way to go fishing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Mealtimes are also affected by these changes and are similarly desynchronized. People do not all eat at the same time, as most of them once did. The rigid three-meal-a-day pattern is broken as more and more fast-food shops spring up, serving billions of meals at all hours. Television watching changes, too, as programmers devise shows specifically aimed at “urban adults, night workers, and just plain insomniacs.” Banks, meanwhile, give up their celebrated “bankers’ hours.” Manhattan’s giant Citibank runs television commercials for its new automated banking system: “You are about to witness the dawn of a revolution in banking. This is Citibank’s new twenty-four-hour service…where you can do most of everyday banking anytime you want. So if Dean Winchester wants to check his balance at the crack of dawn, he can do it. And Sam Winchester can transfer money from saving into checking anytime he wants to…You know and I know that life does not stop at three P.M. Monday to Friday. The Citi never sleeps.” If, therefore, we look across the board at the way our society now treats time, we find a subtle but powerful shift away from the rhythms of the Second Wave and toward a new temporal structure in our lives. In fact, what is happening is a de-massification of time that precisely parallels the de-massification of other features of social life as the Third Wave is in effect. What a thing it is to sit absolutely alone, in the forest, at night, cherished by this wonderful, unintelligible, perfectly innocent speech, the most comforting speech in the World, the talk that rain makes by itself all over the ridges, and the talk of the watercourses everywhere in the hollows! Nobody started it, nobody is going to stop it. It will talk as long as it wants, this rain. As long as it talks, I am going to listen. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
We need not deny the presence of evil in the World in order to deny its permanence. It is here, but it is only a transient thing. moreover, it exists not as a personified power like Satan, nor as a subtle unseen opponent of everything divine, but only as a condition of ignorance in the human mind and as a passing phase of its evolution. In short, it is merely a way of human thinking and it will disappear when deeper thinking reveals the why and wherefore of things. It lasts only as long as the dominance of the ego lasts. The prehistoric animals are now totally gone and the only monster to be found on Earth today is MAN. His history is splashed with war and hate and crime. There would appear to be little of the angel in him so far. Prayer is the ultimate way to awaken the God-Power. It also cancels evil karma of the past and allows the consciousness to dwell only in the immediate moment. This is something like The Eternal Now sensed by the philosopher and gives the self-actualized a kind of peace, a freedom from cares and fears. O hear to the herald of sure salvation, I hear my Beloved, His voice is nigh, He comes with his myriads of hovering angels, on the Mount of Olives to stand and cry. The herald comes—be the trumpet sounded, beneath His tread He knocks—at His radiant glance the hill-side shall half from the eastward be rent and reft. Fulfilled is His ancient prophetic saying, the herald is come with saints around; by all upon Earth shall a still small voice to the uttermost islands be heard resound. The seed He begot and the seed He reared hath been born as a child from its mother’s womb. However, then hath travailed and who brought forth, and a similar thing hath been told to whom? The perfectly Pure hath achieved this marvel, what mortal hath seen such a wondrous way? Salvation, Redemption in one united, the Earth bringing forth in a single day! #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
Welcome home. 🥰 Could this exterior be your view each day? We think so!
Appearances are deceiving; it’s actually one of our larger floorplans! You’ll see 3 bedrooms and 2.5 baths once you cross that threshold. The Meadows Residence 1 is a great example of thoughtfully designed, single story living.
Residence One at Cresleigh Meadows holds 2,054 square feet of single story living. The open concept design includes three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. Through the charming front porch enter into the foyer, where two secondary bedrooms lead off to a Jack and Jill bathroom.
The kitchen comes fully equipped with a large eat-in island, stainless steel appliances, and quartz counters. The great room is spacious and full of natural light. The Owner’s suite is nestled in the rear of the home separate from the secondary bedrooms, providing maximum privacy. Enjoy a spa like experience in the Owner’s bathroom with a large walk in shower and large soaking tub.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
When are You Going to Face the Real World?
The good and the bad are all part of the World-picture, although their proportions vary as the time-wheel turns around. It is the function of such opposing forces, environments, or persons to compel one to negotiate them properly, or suffer the consequences. Often what manages to get the public eye ends up with little or no spiritual profit. However, just as often what the public eye fails to notice is of the greatest possible spiritual importance. It would be a totally unobservant or totally theoretic person who denied the presence of evil, but it would be an ill-informed one who did not perceive that its life and power are circumscribed. I hope I shall not be misunderstood for saying that I saw clearly how the physical expression of evil is a necessary prerequisite to the spiritual redemption from evil. For what the sinner does is after all only an outcome of what one thinks. If the doing of wrong actions will, by the higher law of recompense, bring one ultimately the physical punitive consequences of those actions, they will also bring one—and again ultimately—the thought that the two are inseparably connected together. This is a step—admittedly only a first step—toward that repentance and that purification which make redemption possible. The notion that the God-Power is engaged in a desperate struggle with an evil power, that God calls on humans to give His help and that the outcome of this warfare depends to any extent on such help—this notion is a ridiculous one. My experience of life and observation of others have taught me that there is no situation in which you will find good alone present without some concomitant evil. To look for undiluted good is utopian, unrealistic, and self-deceptive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
The procession of love in God ought not to be called generation. In evidence whereof we must consider that the intellect and the will differ in this respect, that the intellect is made actual by the object understood residing according to its own likeness in the intellect; whereas the will is made actual, not by any similitude of the object willed within it, but by its having a certain inclination to the thing willed. Thus the procession of the intellect is by way of similitude, and is called generation, because every generator begets its own like; whereas the procession of the will is not by way of similitude of the object willed within it, but by its having a certain inclination to the thing willed. Thus the procession of the intellect is by way of similitude, and is called generation, because every generator begets its own like; whereas the procession of the will is not by way of similitude, but rather by way of impulse and movement towards an object. So what proceeds in God by way of love, does not proceed as begotten, or as son, but proceeds rather as spirit; which name expresses a certain vital movement and impulse, accordingly as anyone is described as moved or impelled by love to perform an action. All that exists in God is one with the divine nature. Hence the proper notion of this or that procession, by which one procession is distinguished from another, cannot be on the part of this unity: but the proper notion of this or that procession must be taken from the order of one procession in God takes its name from the proper notion of will and intellect; the name being imposed to signify what its nature really is; and so it is that the Person proceeding as love receives the divine nature, but is not said to be born. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Likeness belongs in a different way to the word and to love. It belongs to the word as being the likeness of the object understood, as the thing generated is the likeness of the generator; but it belongs to love, not as though love itself were a likeness, but because likeness is the principle of love. Thus it does not follow that love is begotten, but that the one begotten is the principle of love. We can name God only from creatures. As creatures generation is the only principle of communication of nature, procession in God has no proper or special name, expect that of generation. Hence the procession which is not generation has remained without a special name; but it can be called spiration, as it is the procession of the Spirit. The awful fact of innate evil, the hideous mystery of innate sin, must be recognized and faced. We cannot make bad humans into good humans; but Nature, Life, with millions of years at her disposal, can. Evil arises where the good is still undeveloped from its latency, but sometimes it is the distortion of the good. We will understand this problem better when we understand that the presence of good and evil in the Universe does not signify a division of power but a division of thought. Thought is the cause; thought is the cure. Satan can pretend to be an Angel of Light. There are adepts in evil who hide their real aim behind an outward show of altruistic purpose. These secret purposes disguise themselves in a convenient form, and if no other is convenient they will even use some open purpose which stands in total opposition to them. They emerge in the most unlikely and unlooked-for places. The evil in human relations springs from the ignorance in human beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
As each one brings the principle of truth into one’s own consciousness, one brings it into one’s relations with others as a result. The love which accompanies it denies birth to cruelty, anger, and lust or dissolves any which already exist. Although it is perfectly true that divine goodness is at the heart of things, it is no less true that demonic evil is on the surface of things. The followers of simple cults which stubbornly try to see only the goodness and not the evil, which deny things as they are and indulged wishful thinking, have themselves and their leaders to blame when disaster awakens them to the errors in the map they are following. They would do better to arouse themselves, while there is yet time, to keep a soundly balanced attitude, neither falling over to one side or the other overmuch, yet always remembering that superphysical experience between the incarnations is disproportionately good and free from evil, by contrast with physical plane experience. Let us not insult human reason by denying human evil. In any universal arrangement or personal situation, there is either gross disorder, with its consequent turmoil trouble and suffering, or there is real order, with its harmonious co-operation with the divine will working outward from the divine center—be it humans’ heart or the sun’s rays. The great ills (miscalled evils) of bodily life, such as disease and poverty, are often forced upon one by an implacable fate. However, it would be a delusion to class them always with the great evils of mental life, such as hate and cruelty. For their control is frequently beyond one’s power, and their course may have to be endured, whereas sinful thoughts and their resultant deeds are not independent of one’s control and may be avoided. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Why is it that people are dazzled with this-Worldly thingamajigs? Well, unless they come to their right minds soon, they will amuse themselves to death. When right principles, theories, or concepts are taken up by the wrong persons, they become wrong themselves—because misused, falsified, prevented. Suffering is not always an evil. It is often educative. All evil is then seen to spring from separativeness, which is a stage inevitable to all creatures as they follow the line of unfoldment. Evil therefore is the adverse element in Nature. Humans can conquer it in one’s mind by conquering separativeness and realizing the All as oneself. At the same time one discovers that the whole creation is really a mental one, hence like but not the same as a dream; and if one keeps awake to the Static Reality whilst in the midst of the Earthly dream, the whole World becomes merely a school for educating consciousness. The suffering, evil, and the like are transient aspects leaving permanent results. The wedding of Heaven and Earth can never be brought about, since the Perfect and the Imperfect are incompatibles. However, they can be brought into some sort of equilibrium, into better balance, so that life in the World would not be as bad as it is. Those who ignorantly believe that God needs their help to ensure His triumph over evil in the World, have yet to learn that this triumph has been eternally accomplished already. The human being who can affect this situation either by helping or hindering does not exist. It is a disturbing concept which holds that man’s goodness seldom becomes actualized without the presence of, and struggle against man’s evil. If men engaged themselves more in asking not “What is good and what is evil?” but rather “What is the Highest Good?” the first question would get itself answered automatically and peace would then follow anyway. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
When the evil in humans is washed out, one will find in all its goodness the original stuff of which one is made—beneficent to all, a joy to oneself. However, because we affirm that the powers of evil will destroy themselves in the end, this must not be mistaken to mean that we may all sit down in smug complacency. We ought not to make this an excuse for inaction. On the contrary, it should inspire us to stronger efforts to preserve the noblest things in life from their attack. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good humans do nothing. The night’s darkness shelters the evil forces, the sun’s brightness tells us where the divine ones are centralized. “My God will supply all your needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus,” Philippians 4.19. As God’s children, we are able to live an abundant life. That is acceptable. In fact, we should even expect to be blessed. Indeed, it is as important to learn how to receive a blessing as it is to be willing to give one. If you come from a poor environment, or do not have a lot of material possession, that is fine. God has many blessings in store for you. However, all the good things in life are not material. Yet it is nice to also have material comforts. Therefore, do not allow the image of lack and limitation become the motion picture you constantly play in your head. It is good to be humble, but seeing yourself prospering is also healthy. One should seek to rise to new levels of success. Start looking through the eyes of faith and keep that image of happiness and success in your heart and mind. You may not be as affluent as you like, at the moment, but with hard work, dedication, education, and payer, anything is possible. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
God has called for human help, and no one is coming. We are his last resort! How often on Earth has God put His trust in a human being, even in a Devout, and yet been disappointed! However, then again how often has God found a helping hand where He had no reason to expect one? The conclusion? Vain is the hope for consistency in human behaviour. However, God is always consistent; if the Psalmist has it right (37.39), then the Just are always saved. Only God can find the good in everything that happens to us. Left to ourselves, we are infirm and unstable, falliable and fallable. The Christ Holy Bible and Book of Mormon clearly shows that God takes pleasure in prospering His children. As His children prosper spiritually, physically, and materially, their increase brings God a sense of satisfaction that we can only imagine. If I introduced Leo and Annie to you, and they went to school with no shoes on, had holds in their clothes, and dirt under their fingernails, you would probably say, “That man is not a god father. He does not take good care of his children.” Indeed, my children’s poverty would be a direct reflection on me as their day. Just like a governor who brags about having the 5th largest economy in the World and over a twenty-five-billion-dollar surplus, but has the highest homeless population in the developed World. Perhaps, taxes are so high people cannot afford to live? Perhaps the people need a rebate of some of their money? Perhaps there should be a record number of affordable housing units going up on undeveloped land? Perhaps taxpayer funded sports arenas could be converted into affordable lofts? #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
Nonetheless, when we go through life with a poverty mentality, it is not glorifying to God. It does not honour His great name. No, God is honoured and pleased when we develop a prosperous mindset. God wants to supply every need you have, and He will! With that being said, do not expect much from your politicians. Do not turn to the news for answers. Pick up the Bible, go to church and pray to God for all that you seek. God, I thank You that You have better things in store for me than I would even choose for myself, that Your dream for me is even grander than my dream for myself, and Your resources are inexhaustible! Devouts like me keep a good monastic muzzle on ourselves in everything we say or do. However, will that caution and circumspection really prevent us from being axed and battleaxed? All I know, O Lord, is that whoever confides in You and “speaks from a simple heart”—a characteristic much favoured in the Wisdom of Solomon (1.1)—does not fall so easily. Oh, he will slip—he is bound to—but God will come to his rescue or, at the very least, God will offer one some help. That is because God does not desert whoever has put one’s hope in Him for the Long Haul. A rare find is the faithful friend who preserves through all the ups and downs of friendship. God is the most faithful of friends, O Lord, and without You there is no such thing as Friendships. “For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the World that He [even] gave up His only begotten (unique) Son, so that whoever believes in (trusts in, clings to, relies on) Him shall not perish (come to destruction, not be lost) but have eternal (everlasting) life,” reports John 3.16. The spiritual event, the mystical experience, is there but its presentation to the conscious mind—manipulated by one’s personal tendencies to an extent which exaggerates their importance—creates a mixed result. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
However, the glow of this transcendence lingers in the heart for long after its actual manifestation. It suffuses one with unearthly happiness and fills one with solemn reverence. When this mood is fully upon one, one may find it hard to talk to anyone for some time afterward. One emerges from the experience feeling surrounded by peace and protected by supernormal powers. The glimpse vanishes, slowly with a few, quickly with most, leaving its effects in one’s recognition of greater possibilities in life and grander ones in oneself. One comes back from the glimpse not only renewed in grace but purged in character, not only less egoistic but more detached, hence calmer. It is only a mood, of course, and may vanish in a few minutes, hours, or days. However, whereas most other moods pass from memory and are unrecallable, this kind is unforgettable. This wonderful and memorable experience, call it Void or call it God, will for some time afterwards become a kind of background to the events of one’s life and to one, oneself. Illumination arising from suffering seems to last longer than that arising from happiness because the latter is easier to lose. One is likely to become careless with that which comes from happiness. Whatever the height reached, the glory felt during the glimpse, one still lives on as a human being after it has passed. Thoughts reappear, ordinary emotions are felt again. The uplifted consciousness falls back, the rapturous moments pass away. One must then revert to the ordinary animal-intellectual life of everyday, to all the human implications of one’s existence. Why try, vainly, to deny them? #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
One has seen some truth and may want to share it. However, in what manner can one communicate that which is not intellectually measurable? If the glimpse does not last, is a human discovers, or rather comes back to find, that one still is human, one should be pleased that it came at all. It is not easy and it may need a long period of practice and remembrance, but something of this afterglow may be kept and retained even amid the turmoil of the World’s work. In those glorious enchanted moments which immediately succeed the glimpse, almost anything seems possible. The glimpse comes to be treasured in memory as something very precious and quite unique, most intimate and not freely talked about with others. Slowly and dimply one will become aware of one’s surroundings and one’s body. Little by little one will struggle back to them as if from some far planet. The recovery of consciousness will be only intermittent at first, only in brief snatches achieved with difficulty. However, later it will be heled and kept for longer periods until it remains altogether. The afterglow of this experience may be a sensation of its curative power, leaving nerves and heart healed of their troubled negative conditions, or of it purifying power, leaving the mind freed of its undesired and undesirable thoughts. The glimpse leaves an afterglow of truth, a reassurance of support. One’s heart will be warmed and one’s will moved as a consequence of this experience. The test will come when one has to descend from the mountain-peck of mediation into the valleys of prosaic everyday living. Can one adjust the greatness one has seen and felt to this smaller narrower World or will one lose it therein? #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The closer one comes to the Overself the more reticent one becomes about it. Even though the glimpse is so impressive, the subsequent activities of the day put it out of one’s mind until one is able to relax, perhaps at bedtime. When the spark of inspiration fades out, new ideas often go with it, of if they come, the power to utilize them escapes one. If the glimpse slips away from the greater calm, where does it go? Into the ever-active outward-turned thinking movement. From this inner World of Essence we descend to the outer World of Experience. “For every wrongdoer hates (loathes, detests) the Light, and will not come out into the Light, but shrinks from it, least one’s work (one’s deeds, one’s activities, one’s conduct) be exposed and reproved. However, one who practices truth [who does what is right] comes out into the Light; so that ones works may be plainly shown to be what they are—wrought with God [divinely prompted, sone with God’s help, in dependence upon Him],” reports John 3.20-21. Once there was a holy soul, St. Agatha, a wealthy girl who had vowed her virginity to Christ in the third century. As the official record of her martyrdom showed, she was brutally tortured and died in prison, but not before dropping this pearl of spiritual wisdom: “My mind is grounded and founded in Christ.” If only that were your sentiment also, then your every fear would not sting so, nor every unkind word stab. While the missionaries were on their trip westward, Joseph and his friends were busy in New York doing the Lord’s work. Parley Pratt’s nineteen-year-old brother, Orson, was much interested in Christ’s work in the latter day and went to Joseph requesting that he seek the Lord to know what his work would be. Joseph prayed earnestly in behalf of this young man. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
By revelation given in November, Jesus Christ said: “My son Orson, hearken and hear and behold what I, the Lord God, shall say unto you. Blessed are you because you have believed, and more blessed are you because you are called of me to preach my gospel; to lift up your voice as with the sound of a trump, both long and loud, and cry repentance unto a crooked and perverse generation; preparing the way of the Lord for His second coming. The time is soon at hand, that I shall come in a cloud with power and great glory, and it shall be a great day at the time of my coming. Therefore prophesy and it shall be given by the power of the Holy Ghost; and if you are faithful, behold, I am with you until I come.” In December Sidney Rigdon and his friend, Edward Partridge, traveled from Kirtland to New York to visit Joseph Smith and to learn more about the church. Joseph prayed to know in what manner they might serve. After much prayer, the Son of God said: “Listen to the voice of the Lord your God…I am Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who was crucified for the sins of the World. Behold, verily, verily I say unto my servant Sidney, I have looked upon thee and thy works. I have heard thy prayers and prepared thee for a great work. I have heard thy prayers and prepared thee for a greater work. Thou art blessed, for thou shalt do great things. And it shall come to pass, that there shall be a great work in the land…and I will show miracles, signs and wonders, unto all those who believe on my name. And whoso shall ask it in my name, in faith, they shall cast our devils; they shall heal the sick; they shall cause the blind to receive their sight, and the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak, and the lame to walk. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
“And the time speedily cometh that great things are to be shown forth unto the children of humans; but without faith shall not anything be shown. I haven sent forth the fullness of my gospel by the hand of my servant Joseph. Wherefore watch over one that one’s faith fail not, and it shall be given by the Comforter, the Holy Ghost, that knoweth all things; and a commandment I give unto thee, that thou shalt write for him. And the Scriptures shall be given even as they are in mine own bosom, to the salvation of mine own elect; for they will hear my voice, and shall see me. Lift up your hearts and be glad; your redemption draweth nigh. Fear not, little flock, the kingdom is yours until I come.” At about the same time this revelation came for Sidney Rigdon, a revelation was received directed to Edward Partridge, in which the Christ said: “I say unto you, my servant Edward, that you are blessed, and your sins are forgiven you, and you are called to preach my gospel. You shall receive my Spirit, the Holy Ghost, even the Comforter, which shall teach you he peaceable things of the kingdom. And you shall declare it with a loud voice, saying, Hosanna, blessed be the name of the most high God.” In a revelation given to Joseph in June, 1830 (Doctrine and Covenants 22), the Lord had explained that Moses had been told that men would one day take away many of the words which Moses and others had written, but that God would raise up another man who would give the words back to the people. By this God meant that parts of the Bible which Moses and others had written would be left out of the Scriptures or be lost, and another man would be inspired by God’s Spirit to know what had been omitted or lost and put them back in the Bible. This man was to be Joseph Smith, Jr., and Sidney Rigdon was to help him. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Sidney Rigdon was a student of the of the Bible, having spent years in its study. He had an unusual understanding of the Scriptures and at one time had resigned as minister because the church of which he was pastor did not teach according to the Bible. Truly the Lord had prepared him for a greater work. As Joseph and Sidney Rigdon worked together, God inspired them by his Holy Spirit that they might understand the things they read in the Bible. When two or more Scripture passages conflicted, God helped them to know what was right. The prophecy of Enoch is one book which is mentioned in the Bible but which had been omitted, apparently having been lost. Enoch was the righteous human who built the perfect city of Zion which was taken to Heaven. Enoch lived many hundreds of years before Jesus’ time. God made it known to Joseph Smith by his Holy Spirit what the prophecy of Enoch contained, and as God inspired his mind, he wrote about it. Joseph Learned that Enoch built the city of Zion where all were of one heart and mind and lived in righteousness. Enoch had been shown a vision in which he saw everything that was to happen to the World in the future. He saw Noah who built an ark to save the few righteous people from the flood which destroyed the wicked ones. He saw the coming of Jesus, the Son of God, who was born in a manger, and who came to show people the right way to live. He saw this Son of God crucified on a cross, and a great storm. He saw him raised from the dead and ascend into Heaven. In his visions Enoch saw the time when Jesus’ gospel would again return to the Earth. He saw the righteous gathered from all over the Earth to place called Zion, and to this place Enoch saw the Son of God come to live for a thousand year. The Lord has shown Enoch all things, even to the end of the World. Enoch saw the righteous people receive great joy, and the wicked ones fear God’s judgment against them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
God directed Joseph to put this lost book—the prophecy of Enoch—into the Holy Scriptures so it might be of help to those who study it to understand about God and his purpose. If they understood, they might become better people than they could otherwise be. This prophecy has also been included in the Doctrine and Covenants as Section 36. Joseph and Sidney Rigdon were working hard on the Inspired Version of the Scriptures when they received instructions by revelation in which the Lord said: “Behold, I say unto you, that it is not expedient in me that ye should translate any more until ye shall go to the Ohio. Ans again a commandment I give unto the church, that it is expedient in me that they should assemble together at the Ohio, against the time that my servant Oliver Cowdery shall return unto them. So Joseph and Sidney Rigdon laid aside their work on the Inspired Version of the Scriptures to preach and strengthen the church, and to prepare for an assembly of the Saints at Kirtland. The wonder of the human soul which, even surrounded by the depravity and folly of today, can still aspire nobly and think loftily, would be quite puzzling did we not know the dual nature of the human entity and the divine nature of the laws which govern it. So long as separate egos exist—separate from the cosmic ego in their own view, that is—so long will their ignorance produce what we call evil. The ego, let loose upon the World, uninstructed and unbridled, cannot in the final reckoning benefit the World. To talk of service, without wisdom or character, may squander its goodwill in egoistic mire. Note too that the resources of commerce and industry, far from making the tax more endurable through an abundance of money, only make it more burdensome. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
I will not dwell upon a very obvious point, namely that, although a greater or lesser quantity of money in a state can give it more or less credit outside the state, it in no way alters the real fortune of the citizens and does not make them any more or less comfortable. However, I must make two important remarks. First, unless the state has extra commodities and the abundance of money comes from export trade, only the commercial towns are aware of this abundance, and the peasant only become relatively poorer. Second, since the price of everything increases with the increase in money, taxes must be increased proportionately, so that the famer finds oneself under a great burden without having greater resources. It should be noted that the tax on lands is actually a tax on its product. While everyone agrees that nothing is so dangerous as a tax on grain paid by the buyer, how is it we do not see that it is a hundred times worse if this tax is paid by the farmer oneself. Is it not the most direct method possible of depopulating the homeland, and thus in the long run of ruining it? For there is no worse scarcity for a nation than that of humans. Only the true statesman can rise one’s sights above the financial objectives of imposing greater taxes. Only one can transform onerous burdens into useful regulations of public administration. Only one can make the people wonder whether such establishments have for their purpose the good of the nation rather than the production of taxes. Duties on the importation of foreign merchandise which the local people are eager to have but which the homeland does not need; on the exportation of domestically produced merchandise of which the homeland has none to spare and which foreigners cannot do without; on the product of useless and excessively lucrative arts; on the entry into towns of pure luxuries, and in general on all luxury items will all achieve this twofold purpose. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
It is by means of such taxes, which ease the burden of poverty and place the onus on wealth, that one must prevent the continual increase in the inequality of fortunes, the subjection of a multitude of workers and useless servants to the rich, the multiplication of idle people in the cities, and the desertion of rural areas. It is important to place a proportion between the price of thing and the duties imposed on them such that the greediness of private individuals is not too strongly tempted by the size of the profits to commit fraud. Moreover, smuggling must be made difficult by singling out merchandise that is more difficult to conceal. Finally, it is appropriate for the tax to be paid by the one who uses the thing taxed rather than the one who sells it, to whom the quantity of the duties with which one is charged would provide greater temptations and means of committing fraud. This is the usual practice in countries where the taxes are the heaviest and the best paid in the World. The merchant pays nothing. Only the buyer pays the duty, without any murmuring or sedition resulting, for since the provisions necessary for life, such as rice and grain, are completely exempt, the people are not oppressed and the tax falls only on the wealth. Moreover, all these precautions ought to be dictated not so much by the fear of smuggling as by the attention the government ought to pay to protecting private individuals from the seduction of illegitimate profits, which, after having turned them into bad citizens, would waste no time turning them into dishonest people. Let heavy taxes be levied on livery servants, carriages, mirrors, chandeliers and furnishings, on fabric and gilding, on the courtyards and the gardens of law makers, on public entertainment of all kinds, and on the idle processions, such as those of buffoons. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In sort, on that group of objects of luxury, amusement and idleness that catch everyone’s eye and that can scarcely be hidden, since their whole purpose is to be on display, and they would be useless if they should fail to be seen. There is no cause for fear that the proceeds of such taxes would be arbitrary, since they are imposed only on things that are not absolutely necessary. It shows a poor knowledge of humans to believe that human who have once been seduced by luxury can ever renounce it. They would a hundred times rather renounce necessities, preferring to die of hunger than of shame. The increase in their expense is only a new reason for sustaining it, when the vanity of displaying oneself as wealthy will reap its reward from the price of the things as well as the expanse of the tax. As long as there are rich people, and the state cannot contrive a revenue less onerous and more secure than one based on this distinction. Would you rather have the state getting revenue only by taxing them life out of its citizens, or allow them to compete on a limited basis with private industry, which may result in them becoming more economical? For some reason, industry would have nothing to suffer from an economic order that enriched the public finances, revitalized agriculture by relieving the farmer, and imperceptibly brought all fortunes close to that intermediate level of wealth which constitutes the true force of a state. I confess it could happen that these taxes might contribute to making some fashions come and go more quickly; but it would never happen without substituting others on which the worker would earn a profit without the public treasury taking a loss. In short, suppose the spirit of the government was constantly to levy all taxes on the superfluities of the rich, one of two things might happen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Either the rich would remove their superfluities to turn them into something useful, which would redound to the profit of the state, in which case, the imposition of taxes would have produced the effect of the best sumptuary laws. The expenses of the state will of necessity have diminished with those of private individuals; and the public treasury in this way would not receive less than it would thereby gain for having to pay out less. Or, if the rich do not cut back on any of their extravagances, the public treasury would have, in tax proceeds on these extravagances, the resources it was seeking in order to provide for the real needs of the state. In the first case, the public treasury is enriched by reducing expenditures. In the second case, it is enriched by the useless expenditures of private individuals. Let us add to all this an important distinction in the matter of political right, and to which governments, jealous of doing everything by themselves, should pay great attention. I have said that since personal taxes and taxes on absolute necessities attack the right to property and consequently the true foundation of public society, they are always subject to dangerous consequences, if they are not established with the express consent of the people or its representatives. It is not the same for duties on things whose use can be forbidden. For then, since the private individual is absolutely constrained to pay, one’s contributions can be reckoned as voluntary. Thus the individual consent of each of the contributions takes the place of the general consent, and even presupposes it in a certain way. For why would the people be opposed to any tax levy that falls only on whoever wants to pay it? It would appear to me certain that whatever is not prescribed by the laws or not contrary to mores and that the government can forbid, it can permit a payment of a duty. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
If, for example, the government can forbid the use of carriages, a fortiori it can impose a tax on carriages, a wise and useful way to blame their use without terminating it. Then one can view the tax as a type of fine, whose proceeds compensate for the abuse it punishes. Someone may perhaps object that since those called impostors, that is, those who impose or invent the taxes, are in the class of the rich, they will not take care to spare others at their own expense and to burden themselves in order to relieve the poor. However, such ideas must be rejected. If in each nation those to whom the sovereign commits the government of the peoples were, in virtue of their position, the enemies of the state, it would not be worth the trouble to inquire what they should do to make people happy. In millions of middle-class homes a ritual drama is enacted: the recently graduated son or daughter arrives late for dinner, snarls, flings down the wants ads, and proclaims the nine-to-five jobs, and the mother, exhausted and depressed from paying the latest batch of bills, are outraged. They have been through this before. Having seen good times and bad, they suggest a secure job with a big corporation. They young person sneers. Small companies are better. No company is best of all. An advanced degree? What for? It is all a terrible waste! Aghast, the parents see their suggestions dismissed one after another. Their frustration mounts until, at last, they utter the ultimate parental cry: “When are you going to face the real World?” Such scenes are not limited to affluent homes in the United States of America or even Europe. Japanese corporate moguls mutter in their sake about the swift decline of the work ethic and corporate loyalty, of industrial punctuality and discipline among the young. Even in Russia middle-class parents face similar challenges form youth. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Is this just another case of epater les parents—the traditional generational conflict? Or is there something new here? Can it be that young people and their parents are simply not talking about the same “real World”? The fact is that what we are seeing is not merely the classical confrontation of romantic youth and realistic elders. Indeed, what was once realistic may no longer be. For the basic code of behaviour, containing the ground rules of social life, is changing rapidly as the onrushing Third Wave. We saw earlier how the Second Wave brought with it a “code book” of principles or rules that governed everyday behaviour. Such principles as synchronization, standardization, or maximization were applied in business, in government, and in a daily life obsessed with punctuality and schedules. Today a countercode book is emerging—new ground rules for the new life we are building on a de-massified economy, on de-massified media, on new family and corporate structures. Many of the seemingly senseless battles between young and old, as well as other conflicts in our classrooms, boardrooms, and political backrooms are, in fact, nothing more than clashes over which code book to apply. The new code book directly attacks much of what the Second Wave person has been taught to believe in—from the importance of punctuality and synchronization to the need for conformity and standardization. It challenges the presumed efficiency of centralization and professionalization. It compels us to reconsider our conviction that bigger is better and our nations of “concentration.” To understand this new code, and how it contrasts with the old one, is to understand instantly many of otherwise confusing conflicts that swirl around us, exhausting our energies and threatening our personal power, prestige, or paycheck. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Prayer and focus on God is important for Spirit-Energy. This also helps the concentration of thoughts. The refusal to study the Bible or pray is short-sighted, narrow-minded, and unjustified, for this lays some foundation for the mental and higher planes of existence. Devotion to God is not concerned only with gaining abnormal physical power as the opponents seem to believe, but also with gaining physical health, freedom from sickness, abundant vitality, and especially a purified nervous system and disciplined instincts. God can bestow youthful elasticity to the body, and He will give deeper, more refreshing sleep; also, one passes into sleep more quickly. The steadiness which prayer provides has an effect on the consciousness, to, and it is an indirect means of attaining the requisite concentration, and ultimately, because of the effect on the interaction of heart and brain, the requiste inhibition of thiking. Thus, the art of prayer for self-healing and self-control has come to be traditionally handed down to the present day. Bakerman God, I am your living bread, strong, Bakerman God. I am your low, soft, and being-shaped loaf. I am your rising bread, well-kneaded by some divine and knotty pair of knuckles, by your warm Earth hands. I am bread well-kneaded. Put me in fire, Bakerman God, put me in your own bright fire. I am warm, warm as you from fire. I am white and gold, soft and hard, brown and round. I am so warm from the fire. Break me, Bakerman God. I am broken under your caring Word. Drop me in your special grace. The while for water we entreat Thee now, athirst as willows by the waterside, the pouring forth of old, remember Thou! O God of our salvation, save Thou us! These bearings boughs held upward in the way they sprout from Earth; these burdened by their plea, O answer, when in sudden need they pray. O God of our salvation, save Thou us! #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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The Awareness of Human Destructiveness Bursts!
Many humans, at one time, were primarily isolated, but enter relationships with members of the human family in order to satisfy their striving for please. Many of the relationships were sought after and conceived in a way that resemble relations in the marketplace. Each was only concerned with the satisfaction of one’s needs, but it is precisely for the sake of this satisfaction that one had entered into relations with others who offer what one needs, and need what one offers. Each living cell is supposed to be endowed with the two basic qualities of living matter, Eros (love) and the striving for death. We are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Impeded aggressiveness seems to involve a grave injury. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! However, the most powerful impeding factor of all and one totally beyond any possibility of control is the death instinct. In theory of death instinct, the awareness of human destructiveness bursts forth in full strength, and destructiveness becomes the one pole of existence which, fighting with the other pole, Eros, forms they very essence of life. Destructiveness becomes a primary phenomenon of life. It is true that evil forces do exist but not true that they exist on the highest level. Insight into the ultimate sees the not. Evil is certainly present, plain to sight and unpleasant to experience, but it is not altogether, nor only what it seems. It is really an appearance, and reconcilable with the benign source of good. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Eros, present in every cell of living substance, has as its aim the unification and integration of smaller units into the unity of humankind. This is love that does not involve pleasures of the flesh, also known as the “love instinct”; love is identified with life and growth, and—fighting with the death instinct—it determines human existence. Humans are no longer conceived of as primarily isolated and egotistical, as l’homme machine, but as being primarily related to others, impelled by the life instincts which make one need union with others. Life, love, and growth are one and the same, more deeply rooted and fundamental then pleasures of the flesh and other pleasures. The change is vision shows clearly in this new evaluation of the Christian biblical commandment, “Though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Anything that encouraged the growth of emotional ties between humans must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling those toward a loved object, though without having an aim for pleasures of the flesh. There is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion itself uses the same words: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human society is to a large extent based on them. Why is history such a record of wars, oppressions, exploitations, invasions, and persecutions? Why have all the saviours, avatars, prophet, and saints succeeded only with individual humans here and there, not with the mass of humankind? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Is the religious dream of universal goodness nothing more than a dream? It is not a help but a self-deception to ignore the double polarity of existence, the yin-and-yang in the Universe, the shadow-self in humans. Only outside of religion, in the philosophic realm of the ultimate being, the Unique, the Real, where the entire World itself is cast out, can we talk of friction-free consciousness, and only in the deepest meditation can we share it. Although the experience is a temporary one, the peace in it so passes the understanding that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is its fit name. Here indeed is the Good raised to its highest degree. Here is a demonstration that human evil is but privation of good. What may be true on the ultimate level—the non-existence of evil, the reality of the Good, the True, the Beautiful—becomes false on the level of duality. Here the twofold powers, the opposites, do not exist, do hold the World in their sway. To deny relative evil here is to confuse different planes of being. The human who would deliberately harm one’s fellows for one’s own ends is a sinner. Evil arises only when an entity goes astray into the delusions of separateness and materialism, and thence into conflict with other entities. There is no ultimate and eternal principle of evil, but there are forces of evil, unseen entities who have gone so far astray and are so powerful in themselves that they work against goodness, truth, and justice. However, by their very nature such entities are doomed to eventual destruction, and even their work of opposition is utilized for good in the end and becomes the resistance against which evolution tests its own achievements, the grindstone against which is sharpens humans’ intelligence, the mirror in which its shows one one’s flaws. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The lower nature in incurably hostile to the higher one. It prefers its fleeting joys with their attendant miseries, its ugly sins wit their painful consequences, because this spells life to it. Everything and everyone has a negative side. One could fill up a lifetime looking for and finding it. One could go on grumbling, criticizing, ranting, and hating. However, there is also the beneficial side of it. The philosophical attitudes seeks deeper, keeps calmer, for it finds equilibrium on another plane. The descent from faith in Holy Spirit to faith in unholy spirits happens to those who are either too weak to remain at such a high altitude or too incapable of rising from a sensate view of existence. Evil can take every form, even that of the guru, the quest, and the leaner. Some yeas ago someone asked me, “What about absolute evil?” The answer is this: with Confucius we say that sin is due to ignorance, and with Pythagoras that evil is due to the absence of good. Ignorance leads to selfishness and extreme ignorance leads to extreme selfishness, which in turn leads to extreme evil. Now, all these are relative conditions and pass away in time as the person leans one’s lessons though the series of experience and corrects one’s mistake during reincarnations. There cannot be an absolute evil because there is only one Absolute Power, one God, one Supreme Being; and it is this which inspires the highest goodness know to humans when one discovers its presence, through the Overself, in one’s heart. In that sense only I said there was an absolute good. The pairs of opposites exist only in the finite, relative, and limited World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
There is no opposite to the Supreme Power in the timeless and infinite World, no Satan with whom God is in everlasting conflict. However, on its own level, Mind knows neither good nor bad. There is only IS-ness. It seems that there is evil in the World, but why? What bad humans have done is to let their evil grow like a noxious weed too large and their good too little, whereas good humans have cultivated a high proportion of goodness. There is no absolute evil. It is truer to talk of absolute god for that is there first. Why? Because God is there first. Humans came later and broke the divine laws little by little. They created their own evil consequences. Or for different reasons they harm others and have later to suffer for it. Humans were once looked at as machines driven by chemical processes: feelings, affects and emotions were explained as being caused by specific and identifiable physiological processes. Most of hormonology and of the neurophysiological findings of the last decades were unknown to these humans, yet with daring and ingenuity they insisted on the correctness of their approach. Needs and interests for which no somatic sources could be found were ignored, and the understanding of those processes which were not neglected followed the principles of mechanistic thinking. The model of human behaviour could be repeated today in a properly programmed computer. One develops a certain amount of tension which at a certain threshold has to be relieved and reduced, while this realization is checked by another part, the ego, which observes reality and inhibits relief when it conflicts with the needs for survival. This Freudian robot would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction robot, but the programming would be different. Its first law would be not to hurt human beings, but to avoid self-damage or self-destruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, the new theory does not follow this mechanistic “physiologizing” model. It is centered on a biological orientation in which fundamental forces of life (and its opposite: death) become the primal forces of motivating humans. The nature of the cell—that is, of all living substance—becomes the theoretical basis for a theory of motivation, not a physiological process that goes on in certain organs of the body. The new theory was perhaps closer to a vitalistic philosophy than to the concept of the German mechanistic materialists. What motivated Dr. Freud to postulate the death instinct? One factor was probably the impact of the First World War. He, like many other humans of his time and age, had shred the optimistic vision so characteristic of the European middle class, and saw oneself suddenly confronted with a fury of hate and destruction hardly believable before August 1, 1914. From there, Dr. Freud became a man preoccupied with death. He thought of dying every day, after he was forty; he had attacks of Todesangst (“fear of death”), and sometimes he would add to his “goodbye”: “You might never see me again.” One might surmise that Dr. Freud’s disposition would have impressed him as a confirmation of his fear of death, and thus contributed to the formulation of death instinct. This preoccupation with death grew in intensity and led him to a concept in which the conflict between life and death was at the center of human experience, rather than the conflict between the two life-affirmative drives, pleasures of the flesh and ego drives. To assume that humans need to die because death is the hidden goal of one’s life might be considered a kind of comfort destined to alleviate one’s fear of death. And it is true, when people’s lives are in danger and they lack security that they learn not to fear death. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It seems likely that many hearts in American society have waxed cold since September 11, 2001, when there was an attack on American soil that claimed the lives of over 3,500 people. Many people were too young to realize how devastating it was at the moment, but I believe the tragedy affected everyone much like Dr. Freud was confronted with the fury of hate and destruction from August 1, 1914. Acts on war in your homeland make people realize that life is not promised and it can have a psychological impact. “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. Begin today to believe that what you have hoped for is going to happen, that good things are on their way. Notice, faith has to do with the unseen World. You may not be able to perceive anything beneficial happening in your life with your natural eyes today. In fact, everything may be falling apart—your finances, your health, your business, your relationships with your family and friend. All kind of problems may be on the horizon. However, do not be discoursed, turn your focus to the supernatural World, look to God and Jesus Christ for solutions and know that your harmony and peace will be restored. The World tells you that you need to live out loud and seeing is believing. However, God says seek ye the Kingdom of Heave first, and all these things will be added to you. Look through your Heavenly eyes of faith, and once you confirm something by faith, it will manifest in the physical World. What do you do when you see others being honored or elevated? You could feel bad about their feeling good. Or you could consider these as occasions for your feeling good about feeling bad. Why? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
If only you knew it, the contempt of humans on Earth should not cause you to shed a single tear. What should you do? Direct your heart toward God in Heaven. In the past, many men did not view woman as equals with men, but some did. Overall, there was a patriarchal bias. However, the very essence of the Platonic myth is that male and female were once one and were then divided into halves, which implies, of course, that the two halves are equals, that they form a polarity endowed with the tendency to unite. Eros (love) aims at complicating life and preserving it, and hence is also conservative, because with the emergence of life an instinct is born which is to preserve it. However, we must ask, if it is the nature of the instinct to re-establish the earliest state of existence, inorganic matter, how can it at the same time tend to re-establish a later form of existence, namely life? Well, according to Plato’s report in the Symposium concerning the original unity of man who was then divided into halves by Zeus, after this division, each desiring his other half, they came together and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one. The living substance at the same time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through martial union and procreation. These instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of the protists, in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged with dangerous stimuli—stimuli which compelled them to form a protective cortical layer. These splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the combination of two souls. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
So it is no wonder so many people feel so fractured and incomplete. Their living substance was torn apart. Do you see things getting better in your life? Or are you just drifting along, accepting whatever comes your way? “I know I was not going to get that Cresleigh Havenwood House Residence 4. Noting good ever happens to me.” “This is just my lot in life. I knew I would never get that BMW 750Li with Xdrive.” “I knew I would never be blessed.” In the face of God’s blinding glory, many of us have to be blinkered. Perhaps that is why, without our peripheral vision, we are so easily hoodwinked by Vanity. If I assess myself correctly, never has an injury been done to me by another creature, and hence I have no right, at least not yet, to make a ruckus against God, my Righteous if Riotous Lord. Why? Because I have sinned against God frequently and gravely. Deservedly, therefore, should every creature pick up one’s pike against me. So it is only reasonable to conclude that confusion and contempt are my just due. Yours, however, is praise, honour, and glory. And in the light of these considerations, unless I prepare myself—by being looked down upon by every giraffe, outsped by every gazelle, overlooked by every gryphon—I can be neither pacified and stabilized interiorly, spiritually illuminated, nor fully one with God. Do not limit God with your small thinking. Have extraordinary vision for your life and live with faith and expectancy. You will be surprised that you will become what you believe. Some of the reasons are blessings are delayed in the fulfillment of the promise for year after year, is simply the fact that we cannot see it through our eyes of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Is God trying to do something out of the ordinary in your life? Be sure to get into agreement with God. Do not tell God the reasons why things cannot happen. All the time God is trying to plant new seed of success inside of us. He is showing us that if we do not conceive in our hearts through faith, it will never come to pass. “The things which are impossible with humans are possible with God,” reports Luke 18.27. Let that word plant faith inside of your heart. You do not have to figure out how God is going to solve your problems, but turn the situation over to God. God can do what human beings cannot or will not do. God is supernatural. If you can put your trust and confidence in the Lord, God will surely bring it to pass. If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible. In God, the love of a friend should stand. God is Ever-living, Everlasting Truth, your friend will not shed a tear if you live of die. It is because of God that love of a friend should stand. It is because of God that one should be loved, that is to say, everyone who is seemed good to you and who is very dear in this life. Without God the love of friendship will not have the strength to last. Nor is the love of friendship true and clear unless God is an integral part of it; that is as His Augustine described it in his Confessions (4.4). Which is another way of saying, you ought to be dead to two-person friendships, especially when the other person is another creature. However, when the other person is God, then something odd happens. The closer you approach God, the farther you recede from every friendly solace. Also the higher you ascend to God, the deeper you descend into yourself and the viler you appear to yourself. I want to get a grander vision for my life, Father, and then live it out with faith and expectancy, knowing that I will become what I believe. Today, I will focus on You, who You are and what You can do in and through me. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Whoever attributes good to oneself only makes it more difficult for oneself to receive the grace of God. Why? Because, as the spiritual wisdom echoing Proverbs (3.34), Psalms (55.22), and First Peter (5.5) has it, the grace of the Holy Spirit always seeks the humble heart. To annihilate yourself, to empty yourself of all created love—that is what you ought to do. And what I ought to do is fill that very same space with a very great grace. When you warm to the wonderfulness of the created World, the Creator’s respect for you begins to cool. Because of the Creator, if for no other reason, learn how to conquer yourself in all things. Do that, and you will have the strength to reach out to Divine Knowledge. However slight it may be, unruly love and irregular respect delay, even detour, your spiritual progress. The anal libido has a deep affinity to the death instinct. Now, controlling and possessing are certainly tendencies opposite of loving, furthering, liberating, which form a syndrome among themselves. However, “possession” and “control” do not contain the very essence of destructiveness, the wish to destroy, and hostility toward life. No doubt, the anal character has a deep interest in and affinity to feces as part of their general affinity to all that is not alive. Feces are the product finally eliminated by the body, being of no further use to it. The anal character is attracted by feces as one is attracted by everything that is useless for life, such as dirt, death, decay. We can say that the tendency to control and possess is only one aspect of the anal character, but milder and less malignant than hatred of life. Eros (love), therefore is looked upon as the biologically normal aim of development, while the death instinct is seen to be based on a failure of normal development and in this sense a pathological, though deeply rooted striving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
If one wants to entertain a biological speculation one might relate anality to the fact that orientation by smell is characteristic of all four-legged mammals, and that the erect posture implies the change from orientation by smell to orientation by sight. The change in function of the old olfactory brain would correspond to the same transformation of orientation. In view of this, one might consider that the anal character constitutes a regressive phase of biological development for which there might even be a constitutional-genetic basis. The anality of the individual could be considered as representing an evolutionary repetition of a biological human functioning. The theoretician arrives at the conclusion that humans have only the alternative between destroying oneself (slowly, by illness) or destroying others; or—putting it in other words—between causing suffering either to oneself or to others. The humanist rebels against the idea of this tragic alternative that would make war a rational solution of this aspect of human existence. An alternate is repression of the instinctual demands, which are the development of culture and civilization. Some people say the Europeans created such a successful society because they learned the art of self-control. The repressed instinctual drive was “sublimated” into valuable cultural channels, but still at the expense of full human happiness. On the other hand, repression led not only to increasing civilization but also to the development of neurosis among the many in whom the repressive process did not work successfully. Lack of civilization combined with full happiness or civilization combined with neurosis and diminished happiness seemed to be the alternative. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The contradiction between the death instinct and Eros confronts humans with a real and truly tragic alternative, a real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. Something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. What happens to the aggressor when one renders one’s desire for aggression innocuous? One’s aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed toward one’s own ego. There it is take over by a portion of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. The transformation of destructiveness into a self-punishing conscience does not seem to be as much as an advantage as it may seem to imply. According to this theory of conscience, it would have to be as cruel as the death instinct, since it is charged with its energies, and no reason is given why the death instinct should be “wakened” and “disarmed.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Rather, it would see that the following analogy expresses the real consequences of this thought more logically: a city that has been ruled by a cruel enemy defeats one with the help of a dictator who then sets up a system that is just as cruel as that of the defeated enemy; and this, what is gained? The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed toward objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. This is a good example of sublimation; the aim of the instinct is not weakened, but it is directed toward other socially valuable aims, in this case the “control over nature.” This sounds, indeed, like a perfect solution. Humans are freed from the tragic choice of destroying either others or themselves, because the energy of the destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating planets, weaving cloth, building Cresleigh Homes, manufacturing pottery and many more activities including the construction of Ultimate Driving Machines, railroads, airplanes, skyscraper: al these are acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather then the death instinct. With the possible exception of killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, material production is not destructive but constructive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus is quite seriously deserved to be called a death instinct, while procreation is the instinct represented by the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of social organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to day, by destroying an extraneous one. Some portion of the death instinct, however, remain operative within the organism, and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this internalization of the destructive instinct. We have even been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to the diversion inwards of aggressiveness. If this process is carried too far, you will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter; it is possibly unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction of the external World, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found. When the good is absent, the evil is present. The cynic who denies the existence of the good, the dreamer who denies the existence of the evil—each ignores the other half of life as evidence in history and in the World around one. When we go to the roots—that is what “radically” literally means—and discover that a great deal of our conscious thinking only veils our real thoughts and feelings and hides the truth; most of our conscious thought is a sham, a mere rationalization of thoughts and desires which we prefer not to be aware of. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
This is revolutionary because it leads people to open their eyes to the reality of the structure of the society they live in and hence to the wish to change it in accordance with the interests and desires of the vast majority. Much of the liberal middle class was suspected of being neurotic because their liberation of pleasures of the flesh is largely part of the ever-increasing consumerism. If people are taught to spend and spend, rather than, as in the nineteenth century, to save and save, if they were transformed into “consumers,” one had not only to permit but encourage consumption of pleasures of the flesh. It is after all the most simple and the cheapest of all consumption. Conservatives used to have a strict code of chastity and liberty of pleasures of the flesh lead to an anticonservative revolutionary attitude. If anything, historical development has shown that liberation of pleasures of the flesh has served the development of consumerism and weakened political radicalism. What more people really want is not to become more human, more free, more independent—that would mean more critical and revolutionary-minded—but they want to suffer no more than the average member of their class. They hardly see a really happy person, only a few people who have succeeded in being relatively satisfied with their lot, especially if they are successful and admired by others. Naturally, quite a few people, having a sympathetic listener to talk to, feel better, aside from the fact that as years go by experience in living makes the average person improve one’s lot, except those who are too sick to learn from experience. The contemporary capitalist society is considered to be the highest, most developed form of social structure. It is because all other social structures are more primitive or utopian, and not really successful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
An ever-growing number of people have become aware that capitalist society is just one of innumerable social structures and is neither more nor less “real” than the societies of Central African tribes. The invention of artillery and fortifications has in our times forces the sovereigns of Europe to reestablish the use of regular standing troops to guard their fortresses. Yet however, legitimate the motives, there is reason to fear that the effect will be no less fatal. It will be no less necessary to depopulate the rural areas in order to raise armies and garrisons. To maintain them it will be no less necessary to oppress the peoples. And these dangerous establishments have in recent times been growing so rapidly in all of our part of the World, that no one can foresee anything but the imminent depopulation of Europe, and sooner, or later, the ruin of the people who inhabit it. Be that as it may, it should be noted that such institutions necessarily subvert the public domain, leaving only the wearisome resources of subsidies and taxes, which remain for me to discuss. It would be remembered here that the foundation of the social compact is property, together with its first condition that each person should be maintained in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one. It is true that by the same treaty each person at least tacitly obliges oneself to be assessed for public needs. However, since this commitment cannot hard the fundamental law and presumes that contributors acknowledge the evidence of need, it is clear that to be legitimate, this assessment should be voluntary. It is not based on a private will, as if it were necessary to have the consent of each citizen, who should pay only as much as one pleases. This would be directly contrary to the spirit of the confederation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Rather, it should be through the general will, by majority vote, and on the basis of proportional rates that leave no room for an arbitrary imposition of taxes. This truth (that taxes can be legitimately established only by the general consent of the people or its representatives) had generally been recognized by all the philosophers and jurists who have any reputation in matters of political right. While some of them have established maxims that appear contrary, it is easy to see the private motives that moved them to do so. They stipulate so many conditions and restrictions that it all boils down to exactly the same thing. For whether the people can reuse it or whether the sovereign should not demand it, is a matter of indifference as far as right is concerned. And if it is only a question of force, it is utterly pointless to inquire what is or is not legitimate. The contributions levied on the people are of two kinds: real taxes (levied on things) and personal taxes (paid by the head). Both are called taxes or subsidies. When the people sets the amount it pays, it is called a subsidy; when it grants the entire proceeds of an assessment, it is a tax. In The Spirit of the Laws we find that a head tax is more in keeping with servitude, while a real tax is more suited to liberty. This would be incontestable, were everyone’s head share equal. For nothing would be more disproportionate than such a tax. It is especially in an exacting observance of proportions that the spirit of liberty consists. However, if a head tax is exactly proportioned to the means of private individuals and is thus at once both and personal, it is the most equitable and, as a result, the one best suited to free humans. At first these proportions appear quite easy to observe, because, being relative to each person’s position, the indications are always public. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, besides the fact that greed, influence-peddling, and fraud know how to leave no evidence behind, it is rare that an account is taken of all the elements that should enter into these calculations. First, one ought to consider the relationship of quantities according to which, all things being equal, someone who has ten times more goods than someone else should pay ten times more. Second, one ought to consider the relationship of use, that is, the distinction between what is necessary and what is superfluous. Someone who has only the bare necessities of life should not pay anything at all. Taxing someone who has superfluities can, in time of need, be extended to everything over and above the necessities of life. To this one will declare that, given one’s rank, what would be superfluous for a human of inferior standing is necessary for one. However, that is a lie. For humans of superior standing have two legs, just like a cowherd, and, like the cowherd, has only one stomach. Moreover, this alleged necessity of life is so little necessary to one’s standing that, if one knew how to renounce these things for some worthy cause, one could only be respected more. The people would prostrate themselves before a minister who would go on foot to the council because one had sold one’s Ultimate Driving Machines when the state had a pressing need. Finally, the law does not demand magnificence of anyone, and propriety is never reason against right. A cultivated human of taste and feeling can find much that is beautiful in nature and art; and if one is also a moral idealist, one will find much that is good and virtuous in human life and experience. However, it would be incomplete to stop there and ignore the fact that there is also around us much that is base, dark, and even evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The two sides put together form a complete observation. However, it is only the mystics and philosopher who can see—because it requires a deeper penetration than the intellect and the sense can give—that the dark side deals with the World of appearances, a World which is fleeting and ephemeral, whereas the good side and the beautiful side is merely a hint of that other World closer to Reality. Evil is a very real problem in this World of time and space. Evil forces exist and must be fought with all our strength. Nevetheless the Power out of which all things and all entities come is a beneficent one. Love is its radiation. There is no evil and no pain in it. They begin only on the lower level of separation and differentiation. Wild air, World-mothering air, nestling me everywhere, that each eyelash or hair girdles; goes home betwixt the fleeciest, frilest-flixed snowflake; that is fairly mixed with riddles, and is rife in every least thing is life; this needful, never spent, and nursing element; my more than meat and drink, my meal at every wink; their air, which, by life’s law, my lung must draw and draw now but to breathe its praise. Please give rain. We are the pure who camped by water. For Jacob’s sake who set the rods in water, O speed us! He strained and rolled the stone from off the water. Please give rain! Blest heirs to Torah’s quickening water, O save us! To win for them and for their offspring water. Please give rain! Today as then we cry for water. For Moses’ sake who found his people water, O speed us! He smote the rock and lo! out gushed the water. O save us, mighty God! Please give us rain! Our sires sang round the well of water. O save us! Because of Moses at Meribah’s water, O speed us! At Thy command he gave the thirsting water. O save us, mighty God! please give rain! Thy holy servants poured Thee water. O save us! For Thy chief minstrel’s sake who longed for water, O speed us! Yet turned and made libation with the water, O save us, mighty God! Please give rain! Four plants we wave that love the water, O save us! For American’s sake, the home of living water, O speed us! The parched Earth open to the Heavens’ water, O save us, mighty God! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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More Wonders of the Invisible World
Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. And California had its full share of obscurity. People groping their way in the dark are unlikely to be either stable or judicious, and thus it is hardly surprising that much of the legends about witchcraft are violent and partisan. The Devil improves the darkness of this affair to push us into a blind man’s buffet, and we are even ready to be sinfully, yea, hotly and madly mauling one another in the dark. Some people want to contact the dead and consider seances, but they are dangerous because it is easy for a gate to be opened and something evil to come along with the spirit you want to contact. There is an old urban legend about “Bloody Mary.” If you chant “Bloody Marry” thirteen times into a mirror in a dark room, her spirit will appear. Some say she will prophesize for you, other versions say she will attack you. Historically, Bloody Mary was a nickname for Mary I of England, who suffered several miscarriages. She was also alleged to be a witch and was burned at the stake. Divination by mirror has been practiced in nearly all cultures for as long as mirrors have been around. Before that, any reflective surface, especially still water, was used to prophesy or catch a glimpse of the future. In many of these legends, the danger is that while you are trying to catch a glimpse of your future, you might also see some aspect of Death. Tradition also holds that at the moment of death, all the mirrors in the house should be covered so hey do not trap the departing spirit. Ancient Greeks and Native Americans believed that the reflection contained the soul, and could be capture by water. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
It is bad luck to break mirrors because they are reflections of the soul, and also because they hold the future. That is why the seven years of bad luck occurs, you have broken your future. Many of the persons confessing these myths are witches by their own confession and have therefore abjured God and Chris, and given themselves up to the Devil, the Father of Lies. And what credit is to be given to the testimony of such against the lives of others? Many historians believe these early American legends are important and endeavor that the complete history of secret California witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost. The preservation of that history might in a be a singular benefit unto the church and unto the World, which makes many solicitous about it. Mrs. Winchester, who has been strangely visited by some shining spirits during the construction of her mansion, believed they were good Angels in her opinion of them. She intimated several things unto her friends, whereof some were to be kept secret. She also said that a new storm of witchcraft would fall upon the country to chastise the iniquity that was used in the willful smothering and covering of the last, and that many fierce opposites to the discovery of witchcraft would be thereby convinced. Many people are looking to acquire authentic, single-family Victorian homes because they believe in the renaissance of witchcraft and these homes possess souls, spirit, ghost, hidden occult symbol, and are supposedly spiritual nexuses. They are a power source to contacting the other World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
All spirits have something in common, but it matters who they are haunting. It matters what their traditions were when they were alive. In many Native American legends, they have thousands of Gods, and each of them had attendant monsters and demons. Pishachas are beings who haunt places where violent deaths have occurred. They eat human flesh and are supposed to be the sons of anger. They haunt cemeteries and places where cremations have taken place and can change their shape and become invisible. Sometimes they attack and eat their victims, in other instances they possess them and drive them insane. It is believed because there was some covenanting with the Devil they had committed and it was an unpardonable sin, that sin of which the scriptures said we must not pray for. Sometimes anyone who was not in a proper covenant with God was considered to be a witch. Witches are known to change into rabbits, cats, other familiar animals. Halloween costumes are a surviving remnant of the belief that transformed witches would be abroad before All Hallow’s Eve. Some of the Indian Powows [id est, pries-magicians] in this country during the 17th century, having received the Gospel and given good evidence of a true conversion to God in Christ, had with much sorrow of heart declared how they had, whilst in their Heathenism, by the hands of Evil Angels murdered their neighbours. A Nagual is a human being, a Shaman, who has acquired the power to shapeshift. Some Nagual have vampire qualities, changing into bats or owls to drain blood; in other cases the nagual is a respected and feared member of the community. In some places nagual are said to attack Indians who have too much contact with mestizo or Anglo populations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
There are myriad instances of witchcraft both in history and in the Bible, but some of the demonologists personal experiences are remarkable enough to make us wish they had given a more detailed account of the. In referring to Balaam, the biblical conjurer of familiar spirits, one of them said, “we have seen and know such wizards among the Heathen in our own land.” If I meant anything, it was that a ghost story would have a great pull over other ghost stories if one could see the person it happened to. One does get rather provoked at never coming across him or her. In April, nearly fifteen years after the Winchester Mansion opened for tour, it was a clear spring day, with no fog or half-lights about, and it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon—not very ghost-like circumstances, you will admit. I had come home early from my club—it was a sort of holiday time with me just then for a few weeks—intending to get some letters written which had been on my mind for some days, and I had sauntered into the library of the mansion, a pleasant, fair-sized room lined with books, on the first floor. Before setting to work I sat down for a moment or two in an easy-chair by the fire, for it was still cool enough weather to make a fire desirable, and began thinking over my letters. No thought, no shadow of a thought of Mrs. Winchester was present with me, of that I am perfectly certain. The door was on the same side of the room as the fireplace; as I sat there, half facing the fire, I also half faced the door. I had not shut it properly on coming in, I had only closed it without turning the handle, and I did not feel surprised when it slowly and noiselessly swung open, till it stood right out into the room, concealing the actual doorway from my view. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
If you think of the door as just hen acting like a screen to the doorway, you will perhaps understand the position better. From where I say I could not have seen anyone entering the room ill he or she had got beyond the door itself. I glanced up, half expecting to see someone come in, but there was no one; the door had swung open of itself. For the moment I sat on, with only the vague thought passing through my mind, “I must shut I before I begin to write.” However, suddenly I found my eyes fixing themselves on the carpet; something had come within their range of vision, compelling their attention in a mechanical sort of way. What was it? I rubbed my eyes and the wavy something that kept gliding, rippling in, gradually assumed a more substantial appearance. It was—yes, I suddenly became convinced of it, it was rippled of soft silken stuff, creeping in as if in some mysterious way unfolded or unrolled, not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly, like little wavelets on the sea-shore. And I sat there and gazed. I sat there still, as if bewitched, or under some irresistible influence, I cannot tell, but so it was. And it—came always rippling in, till at last it began to rise as it sill came on, and I saw that a figure, a tall graceful woman’s figure, was slowly advancing, backwards of course, into the room, and that the waves of pale silk—a very delicate shade of pearly grey I think it must have been—were in fact the lower portion of a long court-train, the upper part of which hung in deep folds from the lady’s waist. She moved in—I cannot describe the motion, it was not like ordinary walking or stepping backwards—till the whole of her figure and the clear profile of her face and head were distinctly visible, and when at last she stopped and stood there full in my view just, but only just beyond the door, I saw—it came upon me like a flash, that she was no stranger o me, this mysterious visitant! #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
I recognized, unchanged I seemed to me since the day, twenty-five years ago, when I had last seen her, the beautiful features of Mrs. Winchester. I should not have said unchanged. There was one great change in the sweet face. You remember my telling you that one of Mrs. Winchester’s greatest charms was her bright sunny happiness—she never seemed gloomy or depressed or dissatisfied, seldom even pensive. However, in this respect the face I sat there gazing at was utterly unlike Mrs. Winchester’s. Its expression, as she—or “it”—stood there looking, not towards me, but out beyond, as if at someone or something outside the doorway, was of the profoundest sadness. Anything so sad I have never seen in a human face, and I trust I never may. However, I sat on, as motionless almost as she, gazing at her fixedly, with no desire, no power perhaps, to move or approach more nearly to the phantom. I was not in the least frightened. I knew it was a phantom, but I felt paralyzed and as if I myself had somehow got outside of ordinary conditions. And there I sat—staring at Mrs. Winchester, and there she stood, gazing before her with that terrible, unspeakable sadness in her face, which, even though I felt no fear, seemed to freeze me with a kind of unutterable pity. I do not know how long I had sat thus, or how long I might have continued to sit there, almost as if in a trance, when suddenly I heard the front-door bell ring. It seemed to awaken me. I started up and glanced round, half-expecting that I should find the vision dispelled. But no; she was still there, and I sank back into my seat just as I heard my brother coming quickly upstairs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
He came towards the library, and seeing the door wide open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of Mrs. Winchester in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist—only, do not misunderstand me, the figure of Mrs. Winchester till that moment had had nothing unsubstantial about it. She had looked to me, as she stood there, literally and exactly like a living woman—the shade of her dress, the colour of her hair, the few ornaments she wore, all were as defined and clear as a real person, or perhaps became so again as soon as my brother was well within the room. He came forward, addressing me by name, but I answered him in a whisper, begging him to be silent and to sit down on the seat opposite me for a moment or two. He did so, though he was taken aback by my strange manner, for I still kept my eyes fixed on the door. I had a queer consciousness that if I looked away it would fade, and I waned to keep cool and see what would happen. I asked George in a low voice if he saw nothing, but though he mechanically followed the direction of my eyes, he shook his head in bewilderment. And for a moment or two he remained thus. Then I began to notice that the figure was growing less clear, as if it were receding, yet without growing smaller to the sight; it grew fainter and vaguer, the colours grew hazy. I rubbed my eyes once or twice with a half idea that my long watching was making them misty, but it was not so. My eyes were not at fault—slowly but surely Sarah Winchester, or her ghost, melted away, ill all trace of her was gone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
I saw again the familiar pattern of the carpet where she had stood and the objects of the room that had been hidden by her draperies—all again in the most commonplace way: but she was gone, quite gone. Then George, seeing me relax my intense gaze, began to question me. I told him exactly what I have told you. He answered, as every common-sensible person of course would, that it was strange, but that such things did happen sometimes, and were classed by the wise under the head of “optical delusions.” I was not well, perhaps, he suggested. Been overworking? Had I not better see a doctor? However, I shook my head. I was quite well, and I said so. And perhaps he was right, it might be an optical delusion only. I had never had any experience of such things. “Poor” Mrs. Winchester I cannot help calling her. I heard of her indirectly, and probably, but for the sadness of her story, I should never have heard it at all. It was a friend of her husband’s family who had mentioned the circumstances in the hearing of a friend of mine, and one day something brought round the conversation to old times, and he startled me by suddenly enquiring if I remembered Sarah Winchester. I said, of course, I did. Did he know anything of her? And then he told me. She was dead—she had died some months after a long and trying illness, the result of a terrible accident. Something happened one evening when dressed for some grand entertainment or other, and though her injuries did not seem likely to be fatal at the time, she had never recovered the shock. “She was so pretty,” my friend said, “and one of the saddest parts of it is she could have not been any older than twenty when she passed away in 1922. She was such a sweet and bright lady.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
We all thought the she had finished construction of her mansion and moved up north to build another one. I did not tell him my story, for I did not want it chattered about, but a strange sort of shiver ran through me at his words. Not everyone was in agreement that the specters in the Winchester mansion had all been angry spirits or a delusion of the Devil. It having been represented to us that a most horrible witchcraft or possession of Devils hath invested several towns in Our Province of California under your government, and that divers persons have been convicted of witchcraft, like the Prison’s of the River, in Sacramento, California; some whereof have confessed their guilt, but others being of a known and good reputation these proceedings had caused a great dissatisfaction among our good subjects, for which reason you have put a stop thereunto until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore approving of your care and circumspection herein have thought fit to signify Our Will and Pleasure, as We do hereby will and require you to give all necessary directions that in all proceedings against persons accused for witchcraft or being possessed by the Devil the greatest moderation and all due circumspection be used, so far as the same may be without impediment to the ordinary course of justice within Our said Province. And so We bid your very heartily farewell. Given at the Winchester Mansion the 15th day of April, 1947, in the fifth year of Our Reign. By Her Majesty’s Command. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Although the topic of witchcraft was now explosively controversial in California, nobody was to deny that people practiced it, and there was still some interest in investigating it. There are therefore references to it in many of the sermons in the 19th century. However, after the Winchester mansion was opened for tour, the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Winchester was thought to be paranormal and a circular letter was sent by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to investigate the collection of more instances of “remarkable providences” (these would include unusual natural phenomena as well as the preternatural). Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings in the Winchester mansion, on stones in the basement on the walls in the dressing room, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings in forbidden areas of the mansion which interpret to the mystical the inspired secrets of Mrs. Winchester, in the cryptic emblems of her old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by this secret society, there were found indications of a doctrine which was everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. It is likewise to be understood, those who are desirous to raise any souls of the dead, ought to select those places wherein these kind of souls are most known to be conversant; or by some alliance alluring the souls into their forsaken bodies, or by some kind of affection in times impressed in them in their life, drawing the souls to certain places, things, or persons; or by the forcible nature of some place fitted and prepared to purge or punish these souls: which places for the most part are to be known by he appearance of visions, nightly incursions, and apparitions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Mrs. Winchester lists convincing evidence that her experience of witchcraft extended well beyond what she had committed to writing: I know a young man who had gone so far as to get ready a Covenant with Satan, written all of it in his own blood. However, before the signing of it, the sinful, I was made the happy instrument of his deliverance. As soon was this man was left alone in the mansion, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud and turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared closed again. Hence it is that the souls of the dead are not to be called up without blood or by the application of some part of their relict body. In the raising therefore of these shadows, we are to perfume with new blood the bones of the dead, and with flesh, eggs, milk, honey, and oil, which furnish the soul with a medium apt to receive its body. Gosh, it must be terrible to know you witnesses something, but that you will never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
I know a woman whose brother was tortured with a cruel, pricking, incurable pain in the crown of his head, which continued until there was found with her a puppet in wax, resembling him, with a pin pricked into the head of it, which being take out her recovered immediately. He goes on about demons. A demon killed his wife, he says, and just expects me to believe it. However, what he looks like to me is someone who let grief turn him into a monster. Whatever happened to his wife, it does not excuse what he had done. He attacks, kills, then springs away before anyone can react. Wicked sorceries have been practised in the land, and, in the late inexplicable storms from the invisible World thereby brought upon us, we were left by the just hand of Heaven unto those errors whereby great hardships were brough upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred which we have all cause to bewail with much confusion of face before the Lord. We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness and Prince of the Air, but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any, whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this People of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood, which sin the Lord saith in scripture He would not pardon (2 Kings 24.4), that we suppose, in regard of His temporal judgments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
I know a person who, missing anything, would use to sit down and muter a certain charm, and then immediately by an invisible hand ben directly led unto the place where the thing was to be found. turquoise carvings placed in Native American graves to attract good spirits and guard the grave. Also, turquoise tied onto a bow was supposed to make you shoot more accurately. The body of saints often times cannot be found when their graves are dug up because their bones were frequently interred in the cornerstones of cathedrals, so their spirits would guard the holy location. Unwilling sacrifices would be more likely to become angry spirits instead of guarding. Canaanites sacrificed infants and put them in the foundations of houses and temples. “At the cost of his first-born shall he se up its gates,” reports Joshua 6.26. Bones were discovered in the basement of the original farm house that was engulfed as part of this estate during the expansion. Sightings of Hell Hounds date back to 1888. Some reports say the creatures are threatening. The Victorian parklike grounds seem to breed sightings of big wolf creatures or beast at night. Since the legends have been uncovered, many people have reported seeing a big black wolf and two men walking around the Winchester mansion at night, even when it is closed. Four kids and a police officer allegedly disappeared after climbing the gate to get a closer look one night. Nearly 134 years of sightings. These people are probably sadly deluded and mistaken, their minds are more likely disquieted and distressed, and we do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living suffers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I know a woman who upon uttering some words over very painful hurts and sores did use instantly to cure them, unto the amazement of the spectators. Now, thought I, if this wretch can effectually employ Devils to cure hurts, why may not she to cause them also, which is the worst that the witches do? The matter being so dark and perplexed as that there is no present appearance that all God’s servants should be altogether of one mind in all circumstances touching the same and believing the Devil’s accusations. These practices and principles have been the beginner and procurer of the sores afflictions, not to Llanda Villa only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them. It should be noted in passing that Llanda Villa’s attorneys have concluded that these peoples visions and afflictions are due to illness caused by demonic possession. No specters evidence may be hereafter accounted valid or sufficient to take away the life or good name of any person or persons within this province. God hath a controversy with us about what was done in the time of the witchcraft. I fear that innocent blood hath been shed, and that many have had their hands defiled therewith. Public acknowledgement of guilt, and humiliation for it, and the more particularly and personally it is done by all that have been actors, the more pleasing it will be to God and more effectual to turn away his judgments from the land, and to prevent his wrath from falling upon the persons and families of such as have been most concerned. Moreover, if it be true, as I have been often informed, that families of such as were condemned for supposed witchcraft have been ruined by taking away and making havoc of their estates and leaving them nothing for their relief, I believe the whole country of lies under a curse to this day, and will do till some effectual course be taken by our honored governor and Supreme Court to make them some amends and reparations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Get in the Halloween spirit and celebrate the first weekend of October 2021 at the Winchester Mystery House! Our All Hallows’ Eve tickets are selling fast so be sure to grab them while you can 👻
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Must You Wait for the Heart to Change First?
Many people believe that a neurotic or bad or unhappy child must have parents who have produced his negative state, while on the contrary the happy and healthy child has a correspondingly happy and healthy environment. In fact parents have taken the whole of the blame for the unhealthy development of a child on themselves and equally so the praise for the happy outcome of childhood. All data show that they should have not done so. Here is a good example: A psychoanalyst may see a very neurotic, distorted person with a terrible child and say, “It is obvious that the childhood experiences have produced this unhappy outcome.” If one would only ask oneself, however, how many people one had seen who came from the same type of family constellation and turned out to be remarkable happy and healthy people, one would begin to have doubts about the simple connection between childhood experiences and the mental health or illness of a person. The first factor which accounts for this theoretical disappointment must lie in the analyst’s ignoring the differences in genetic dispositions. Take a simple example: One can see even among newborn infants a difference in degree of aggressiveness or timidity. If the aggressive child has an aggressive mother, this mother will do one little harm or perhaps even much good. It will learn to fight with her and not be frightened of her aggressiveness. If a timid child is confronted with the same mother, it will be intimidated by the mother’s aggressiveness, it will tend to become a frightened, submissive and later on perhaps a neurotic person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Indeed, we touch here upon the old and much discussed problem of “nature versus nurture” or genetic disposition versus environment. The discussion of this problem has by no means yet led to conclusive results. From my own experience I have come to the conclusion that genetic dispositions play a much greater role in the formation of a specific character than most analysts credit it with doing. I believe that one aim of the analyst should be to reconstruct a picture of the character of the child when it was born in order to study which of the traits one finds in the analysand are part of the original nature and which are acquired through influential circumstances; furthermore, which of the acquired qualities conflict with the genetic ones and which tend to reinforce them. What we find very often is that by the wish of the parents (personally an as representatives of society) the child is forced to repress or to weaken one’s original dispositions and to replace them by those traits which society wants one to develop. At this point we find the roots of neurotic developments; the person develops a sense of false identity. While genuine identity rests upon the awareness of one’s suchness in terms of the person one is born as, pseudo-identity rests upon the personality which society has imposed upon us. Hence a person is in constant need of approval in order to keep one’s balance. Genuine identity does not need such approval because the person’s picture of oneself is identical with one’s authentic personality structure. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
If throughout childhood, a child were convinced that nobody would ever care for one unless one wanted something from them, that there was no sympathy or love which was no the payment for services or a bribe to preform, a person may go through life without ever having experienced that somebody cares or is interested and does not want anything in return. However, when it happens that such a person experiences another person’s having a real interest without wanting anything, this might drastically change such character traits as suspicion, fear, the feelings of being unlovable, et cetera. Furthermore, the relationship between parents and children is usually seen as a one-way street, namely the effect parents have upon children. However, what is often ignored is that this influence is by no means one-sided. A parent may have a natural dislike for a child and even for a newborn baby, not only for reasons which are often discussed—that it is an unwanted child or that that the parent is destructive, sadistic, et cetera—but for the reason that child and parent just are not compatible by their very natures, and that in this respect the relationship is no different from that between grown-up people. The parents may just have a dislike for the kind of child one produced and the child may feel this dislike for the kind of parents one has and being the weaker, one is punished for one’s dislike by all kinds of more or less subtle sanctions. The child—and equally the mother—is forced into a situation where the mother has to take care of the child and the child has to accept the mother in spite of the fact that they heartily dislike each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The child cannot articulate that it does not like the mother; the mother would feel guilty if she admitted to herself that she did not like a child she gave birth to, and so both behave under a special kind of pressure and punish each other for being forced into an unwanted intimacy. The mother pretends to love the child and subtly punishes it for being forced to do so, the child pretends in some way or another to love the mother because one’s life depends totally on her. In such a situation a great deal of dishonesty develops which the children often express in their own indirect ways of rebellion and which the mothers usually negate because they feel that nothing could be more shameful than not to like one’s own children. Only one who believes is obedient, and only one who is obedient believes. Jesus says: “First obey, perform the external work, renounce your attachments, give up the obstacles which separate you from the will of God.” Do not say that you have not got faith. You will not have it so long as persist in disobedience and refuse to take the first step. People generally assume that our beliefs and attitudes determine our actions. So if we want to change the way people act, their hearts and minds had better be changed. This assumption lies behind most of our teaching, preaching, counseling, and child rearing. And to some extent it is true: behaviour follows attitudes. However, if social psychology has taught us anything during the last thirty year, it is that the reverse is also true: we are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Evil acts shape the self. People induced to harm an innocent victim typically come to disparage their victim. Those induced to speak or write statements about which they have misgivings will often come to accept their little lies. Saying becomes believing. More action affects the actor, too. Children who resist a temptation tend to internalize their conscientious behaviour. Helping someone typically increases liking for the person helped. Those who teach a moral norm to others subsequently follow the moral code better themselves. Generalizing the principle, it would seem that one antidote for the corrupting effects of evil action is repentant action. Act as if you love your neighbour—without worrying whether you really do—and before long you will like the person more. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Prior to desegregation in the United States of America it was often said that you cannot legislate racial attitudes—you must wait for the heart to change first. However, after the initiation of desegregation European American racial attitudes became noticeably less prejudiced. Moreover, as different regions of the country have come to act more alike, they have also come to think more alike. Political socialization techniques have effectively employed the principle. For instance, many people seem to be in support of undocumented people coming into America, even though it is a crime, but are enforcing more laws and restrictions on legal Americans. Many Americans have expressed discomfort at the contradiction of demanding that people follow the law, and their support for undocumented immigration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Prevented from say what they really believe, they try to establish their psychic equilibrium by consciously making themselves believe what they said, which is essentially “Most people should have to follow the law, but I support crime in certain circumstances.” But what happens when they start to rationalize illegal actions of their own, will that lead to lawlessness on a wide scale? Many modern therapy techniques make a more constructive use of action. Behavior therapy and rational-emotive therapy and rational-emotive therapy both prompt their clients to rehearse and practice more productive behaviour. We can all learn a practical lesson here. Like Moses, Jonah, and other biblical heroes, we do not feel like doing what we know we ought. The remedy is to get up and act anyway—to put our fingers on the keyboard and force ourselves to begin that essay or letter, to go to the phone and dial that number, to confront or hare with that person, to turn off the TV and begin studying for that exam. When we do so, we often find that our forced behaviour begins to gain momentum as a real interest in our subject takes hold. Our feelings are hard to control, but we can control our behaviour and by doing so indirectly influence our feelings. To be sure, the attitudes-follow-behaviour principle is more potent in some situations than others—especially in those where people feel some choice and responsibility for their behaviour rather than attributing it to coercion. Nevertheless, it is now a fundamental rule of social psychology that behaviour and attitude generate one another in an endless spiral, like chicken and egg. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This principle affirms the biblical understanding of action and faith, or an obedience and belief. Depending on where we break into this spiraling chain, we will see faith as a source of action or as a consequence. Action and faith, like action and attitude, feed one another. Much as conventional wisdom has insisted that our attitudes determine our behaviour, Christian thinking has usually emphasized faith as the source of action. Faith, we believe, is the beginning rather than the end of religious development. The experience of being “called” demonstrates how faith can precede action in the lives of the faithful. Elijah is overwhelmed by the Holy as he huddles in a cave. Paul is touched by the Almighty on the Damascus Road. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos are likewise invaded by the Word, which then explodes in their active response to the call. In each case, an encounter with God provoked a new state of consciousness, which was then acted upon. This dynamic potential of faith is already a central tenet of Christian thought. For the sake of balance, we should also appreciate the complementary proposition: faith is a consequence of action. Throughout the Old and New Testaments we are told that full knowledge of God comes through actively doing the Word. Faith is nurtured by obedience. We come to know truth by reason and quiet reflection. This view, translated into Christian terms, equates faith with cerebral activity—orthodox doctrinal propositions. The contrasting biblical view assumes that reality is known through obedient commitment. “The Lord touched their eyes, saying ‘It shall be done to you according to your faith,’” Matthew 9.29. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If an individual wants to change one’s life, that change must be conceived on the inside. Once that new and improved image shows up, the God will easily develop I on the outside. Living your dream is that simple. Anyone can enjoy a happier and healthier lifestyle. However, the change will not happen immediately and it will not be easy. However, for any improve me, the inception of your vision must occur within your heart and mind first, then it will manifest in your life. “Praise be to the name of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons; He sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to he discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thanks and praise you, O God of my fathers; you have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king,” reports Daniel 2.20-23. When we close our eyes, we should be big dreamers, an see our whole family serving God, and rising to new levels of effectiveness. One should see themselves achieving more success next year, and their family healthy and happy. You might even see yourself getting better looking. Believe that you will get a promotion at work. Know that you will pay off that house. Understand God is using you in a better way. Trust that you are stronger, healthier, and living a life full of God’s grace. Walk by faith and not by sight. When you look into the future, see your children happy and successful and marrying excellent people. Take a few moments everyday and pray for your dreams to come true. Envision yourself there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Entropy by its very character assures us that though it may be the universal rule in the Nature we know, it cannot be universal absolute. If a person says, “Humpty Dumpty is falling,” you see at once that this is not a complete story. The bit you have been told implies both a later chapter in which Humpty Dumpty will have reached the ground, and an earlier chapter in which he was still stead on the wall. A nature which is “running down” cannot be the whole story. A clock cannot run down unless it has been wound up. Humpty Dumpty cannot fall off a wall which never existed. If a Nature which disintegrates order were the whole of reality, where would she find any order to disintegrate? Thus on any view there must have been a time when processes the reverse of those we now see were going on: a time of winding up. The Christian claim is that those days are not gone for ever. Humpty Dumpty is going to be replaced on the wall—at least in the sense that what has died is going to recover life, probably in the sense that the inorganic Universe is going to be re-ordered. Either Humpty Dumpty will never reach the ground (being caught in mid-fall by the everlasting arms) or else when he reaches it he will be putt together again and replaced on a new and better wall. Admitted, science discerns no “king’s horses and men” who can “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” However, you would not expect her to. She is based on observation: and all our observations are observations of Humpty Dumpty in mid-air. They do not reach either the wall above or the ground below—much less he King with the horses and men hastening towards the spot. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The Transfiguration or “Metamorphosis” of Jesus is also, no doubt, an anticipatory glimpse of something to come. He is seen conversing with two of the ancient dead. The change which His own human form had undergone is described as one to luminosity, to “shining whiteness.” A similar whiteness characterizes His appearance a he beginning of the book of Revelation. One rather curious detail is that this shining or whiteness affected His clothes as much as His body. St. Mark indeed mentions the clothes more explicitly than the face, and adds, with his inimitable naivety, that “no laundry could do anything like it.” Taken by itself this episode bears all the marks of a “vision”: that is, of an experience which, though it may be divinely sent and may reveal great truth, yet is not, objectively speaking, the experience it seems to be. However, if the theory of “vision” (or holy hallucination) will not cover the Resurrection appearances, it would be only a multiplying of hypotheses to introduce it here. We do not know to what phase or feature of the New Creation this episode points. It may reveal some special glorifying of Christ’s manhood at some phase of its history (since history it apparently has) or it may reveal the glory which that manhood always has in its New Creation: it may even reveal a glory which all risen humans will inherit. We do not know. It must indeed be emphasized throughout that we know and can know very little about the New Nature. The task of the imagination here is not to forecast it but simply, by brooding on many possibilities, to make room for a more complete and circumspect agnosticism. It is useful to remember that even now sense responsive to a different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some say obey us as our cortex now does. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It is useful not because we can trust these fancies to give us an absolute truths about the New Creation but because they teach us not to limit, in our rashness, the vigour and variety of he new crops which this old field might produce. We are therefore compelled to believe that nearly all we are told about the New Creation is metaphorical. However, not quite all. That is just where the story of Resurrection suddenly jerks us back like a tether. The local appearances, the eating, the touching, the claim to be corporeal, us be either reality or sheer illusion. The New Nature is, in the most troublesome way, interlocked at some points with the Old. Because of its novelty we have to think of it, for the most part, metaphorically: but because of the partial interlocking, some facts about it come through into our present experience in all their literal facthood—just as some facts about an organism are inorganic facts, and some facts about a solid body are facts of linear geometry. Even apar from that, the mere idea of a New Nature, a Nature beyond Nature, a systematic and diversified reality which is “supernatural” in relation to the World of our five present senses but “natural” from its own point of view, is profoundly shocking to a certain philosophical preconception from which we all suffer. I think Kant is at the root of it. It may be expressed by saying that we are prepared to believe either in a reality with one floor or in a reality with two floors, but not in a reality like a skyscraper with several floors. We are prepared, on the one hand, for the sort of reality that Naturalists believe in. That is a one-floor reality: this present Nature is all that there is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Say no to self and mean it, or one will never find oneself a free human—that is what Jesus told His Disciples, that is how Matthew recorded it (16.24), and that is what He is telling us, My dear friend. Until that sweet time comes, count oneself a prisoner, under house arrest, in one’s own body. Well, one feels as if one owns one’s own self, are one’s own best friend, lust for tacky stuff to decorate one’s own domain, peep through the arras at others more fortunate than oneself. One feels one is something of a dervish whirling in a circle until one turns to butter, or a Sybarite seeking soft sheets for oneself instead of the rock-hard life of Jesus Christ. Paul wrote much the same thing to the Philippians (2.21). Maybe one feels one is one of those thinkers who spend their time thinking up and putting together gadgets. They will work for a time, but then they will break down. Which is another way of saying, I think no project is likely to be successful unless it has its source somewhere in Jesus Christ. Here are some words of advice that one could never logick one’s way to. Give up everything, and one will find everything. Leave greed behind, and one will find rest. With this sort of attitude and his sort of resolve, one will understand all things. Father, because of You, I will dare to dream big dreams. With faith and confidence in You, I know what I can accomplish the goals that You have placed within my heart. The basis of higher healing work is the realization of humans as Mind. However, the latter is a dimensionless unindividuated unconditioned entity. It is not my individual mind. The field of Mind is a common one where as the field of consciousness is divided up into individual and separate holdings. This is a difference with vast implications, for whoever can cross from the second field to the first, crosses at the same time from an absurdly limited World into a supremely vital one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Consequently, genuine and permanent healing is carried on without one’s conscious association and can be effected by dropping the ego-mind and with it all egoistic desires. Hence the first effort should be to ignore the disease and gain the realization. Only after the latter has been won should the thoughts be allowed to descend again to the disease, with the serene trust that the bodily condition may safely be left in the hands of the World-Mind for final disposal as It decides. There should not be the slightest attempt to dictate a cure to the higher power nor the slightest attempt to introduce personal will into treatment. Such attempts will only defeat their purpose. The issues will partly be decided on the balance of the Universal Law and evolutionary factors concerned in the individual case. And yet there are cults which do not find it at all incongruous to suggest to the Infinite Mind what should thus be One surrender is truly made, the desires of the self go with it and pace reigns in the inner life whether illness still reigns in the external life or not. Thus there is a false easy yielding of the will which deceives no higher power than the personal self, and there is an honest yielding which may really invoke the divine grace. It is a mistake, however, to turn the higher self into a mere convenience to be used chiefly for obtaining healing or getting guidance, for healing the sickness of the physical body, or guiding the activities of the physical ego. It should be sought for its own sake, and these other things should be sought only occasionally or incidentally, as and when needed. They should not be made habitual. In one’s periodic meditations, for instance, the aspirant should seek the divine source of one’s being because it is right, necessary, and good for one to do so and one to do so and one should forget every other desire. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Only after one has done that and found the source, and only on one’s backward journey to the day’s activities, may one remember these lesser desires and utilize the serenity and power thus gained for attending to them. Your assertion that Jesus primarily wished to free humans of disease and viruses, or to teach them how to become so, is untenable. Whoever has entered into the consciousness of one’s divine soul—which Jesus had in such fullness—has one’s whole scale of values turned over. It is then that one sees that the physical is ephemeral by nature, whereas the reality whence it is derived is eternal by nature; that what happens inside a person’s heart and head is fundamentally more important than what happens inside one’s body; and that the divine consciousness may and can be enjoyed even though the fleshly tenement is sick. The sufferer should use whatever physical medical means are available—both orthodox and unorthodox ones. At the same time one should practise daily prayer. However, one should not directly ask for the physical healing for its own sake. One should ask first for spiritual qualities and then only for the physical healing with the expressed intention of utilizing one’s opportunity of bodily incarnation to improve oneself spiritually. Healing is but a mere incident in the work of a self-actualized person. Such a one will always keep as one’s foremost purpose the opening of the spiritual heart of humans. It is from the first moment of life that one must learn to deserve to live; and since birth one shares the rights of citizens, the moment of our own birth should be the beginning of the exercise of our duties. If there are laws for those of mature age, there should also be some for the very young which teach them to obey others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
And since each human’s reason cannot be allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s duties, a fortiori the education of children cannot be abandoned to the light and prejudices of their fathers, since it is of even more importance to the state than it is to their fathers. For according to the natural course of things, the death of the father often strips one of the last fruits of this education, but sooner or latter the country feels its effects. The state remains; the family dissolves. Now if the public authority, in taking the fathers’ place and charging itself with this important function, acquires their rights by fulfilling their duties, the fathers have that much less reason to complain, because strictly speaking, in this regard, they are merely changing a name, and will have in common, under the name “citizens,” the same authority over their children they exercised separately under the name of “fathers,” and will be obeyed no less well when they speak in the same of the law than they were when they spoke in the name of nature. Public education under the rules prescribed by the government and under the magistrates put in place by the sovereign, is therefore one of the fundamental maxims of popular or legitimate government. If children are raised in common and in the bosom of equality, if they are instructed to respect above all things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects that constantly speak to them of the tender mother who nourishes them, of the love she bears for them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and in turn of the debt they owe her, doubtlessly they thus will learn to cherish one another as brothers, never to want anything but what the society wants, never to substitute the actions of humans and of citizens for the sterile and vain babblings of sophists, and to become one day defenders and the fathers of the country whose children they will have been for so long. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I will not discuss the magistrates destined to preside over his education, which certainly is the state’s most important business. Clearly, if such marks of public confidence were lightly granted, if this sublime function were not, for those who had honorable and sweet repose of their old age and the high point of all their honors, the entire understanding would be useless and the education unsuccessful. For whatever the lesson is unsupported by authority, or the precept by example, instruction remains fruitless, and virtue itself loses its influence in the mouth of one who does not practice it. However, let the illustrious warriors bent under the weight of their laurels preach courage; let upright magistrates, whitened in the wearing of purple and in service at the tribunals, teach justice. Both of these groups will thus train virtuous successors and will transmit from age to age to the generations that follow the experience and talents of leaders, the courage and virtue of citizens and the emulation common to all of living and dying for one’s country. I know of but three peoples who in an earlier era practiced public education, namely, the Cretans, the Lacedemonians, and the ancient Persians. Among all three it was the greatest success and brought about marvels among the latter two. Since the time the World was divided into nations too large to be governed well, this method has not been practicable. And other reasons the reader can easily see have also prevented it from being tried by any modern people. It is quite remarkable that the Romans were able to do without it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, Rome was for five hundred years a continual miracle that the World cannot hope to see again. The virtue of the Romans, engendered by the horror of tyranny and the crimes of tyrants and by an inborn love of country, made all their homes into as many schools for citizens. And the unlimited power of fathers over their children placed to much severity in private enforcement that the father, more feared than the magistrates, was the censor of mores and the avenger of laws in one’s domestical tribunal. In this way an attentive and well-intentioned government, constantly valiant to maintain or restore love of country and good mores among the people, anticipates far in advance the evils that sooner or later result from citizens’ indifference to the fate of the republic, and restricts within narrow limits that personal interests which so isolates private individuals that the state is weakened by their power and has nothing to hope for from their good will. Anywhere the populace loves it country, respects its laws and lives simply, little else remains to do to make it happy. And in public administration, where fortune plays less of a role than it does in the lot of private individuals, wisdom is so close to happiness that these two objects are confounded. Waters, you are the ones who brings us the life force. Please help us to find nourishment so that we may look upon great joy. Please let us share in the most delicious sap that you have, as if you were loving mothers. Please let us go straight to the house of the one for whom your waters give us life and give us birth. For our well-being please let God be an assistant to us, the waters be for us to drink. Please le hem cause well-being and health to flow over us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Mistresses of all the things that are chosen, rulers over all peoples, the waters are the ones I beg for a cure. God has told me that within the waters are all cures and Jesus Christ who is salutary to all. Water, please yield your cure as an armour for my body, so that I may see the sun for a long time. Waters, carry for away all of this that has gone bad in me, either what I have done in malicious deceit or whatever lie I have sworn to. I have sought the waters today; we have joined with their sap. O Jesus Christ full of moisture, come and flood me with splendour. O God, we beseech Thee, please save! O please save! O God! like sheep we all have gone astray; from out Thy book wipe not our nae away. Please save! O save! O God! sustain the sheep for slaughter;–see these deal with wrathfully and slain for Thee. Save! O save! O God! Thy sheep! the sheep whom Thou didts end in pasture; Thy creation and Thy friend. Save! O save! O God! they lift their eyes to Thee, long sought; please let those who rise against Thee count as naught. Save! O save! O God! they pour out water, worshipping—let them be drawing from salvation’s spring. Save! O save! O God! to Zion saviours send at length, endowed of Thee, and saved by Thy name’s strength. Save! O save! O God! in garb of vengeance clad about, in mighty wrath cast all deceivers out. Save! O save! O God! and Thou wilt surely not forget her, by love-tokens bought, that hopeth yet. Save! O save! O God! they seeking Thee with willow bough, regard their crying from Thine Heaven now. Save! O save! O God! as with a crown bless Thou the year; yea, Lord, my singing, I beseech Thee, hear. Save! O save! I beseech Thee, O God, save! O save, I beseech Thee. Thou art our Father. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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The Devil Loveth No Salt in His Meat!
Every night in the year, four of us sat in the parlous of the Winchester Mansion. This particular night, there was a thin, bright moonshine: it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. They wished, and declared their wish, that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed. They prayed that God would discover the witchcraft were among us. They forgave their accusers. The fervency of the spirits were very affecting and drew tears from many. Affecting and melting to the hearts of some considerable spectators. They prayed earnestly for pardon for all other sin and for an interest in the precious blood of our dear Redeemer, and seemed to be very sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances. One of the ghouls said, “I have been put to death, and my grandfather suffered, and all his estate seized because of my own vile and wretched heart, confessed several things contrary to my conscience and knowledge, though to the wounding of my own soul—the Lord pardon me for it. But oh! the terrors of a wounded conscience, who can bear? Blessed be the Lord; He would not let me go in my sins, but in mercy I hope so my soul would not suffer me to keep it in any longer, but I was forced to confess the truth. Gunshots in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head. I was sought after by a sorcerer, which resulted in fatal mishaps for those sorcerers because they caught me in the wrong mood, and I turned into a lethal weapon. Dear Mrs. Winchester, let me beg your prayers to the Lord on my behalf, and please send us a joyful and happy meeting in Heaven.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Mrs. Winchester replied, “But the Lord He know it is, if it be possible, that no more innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not but your honours do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and shall not be guilty of innocent blood for the World.” A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student and the other ghouls. “My God! she cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin?” Nothing could be explained any further because we realized that we had long since ceased to pay attention to anything said by the suspect. Our minds and hearts were so filled with the hideous torments of the afflicted and the frightful tales of the confessors that we were quite unable to absorb anything else. The student was violent, and it was said that she had beaten to death a former teacher and other students in the classroom before she and her accomplices were shot dead by a Winchester model 1866. They were much addicted to sorcery in the said town, and there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as well as any astrologer. Time had little changed this small town. It stood then, as now, upon a crossroad, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six thousand cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Resurrection Man was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs found on the estate, the paths worn by the feet of legions of spirits and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in Earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-Iit, terror-haunted resurrection that often happened at the Winchester Mansion, which was fully of uneasy ghosts. It was pitch dark; and we had just raised a few souls from the dead. Their bodies awaited them in the basement. Here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through the resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the basement the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and reillumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping pipes, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours. However, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for taking possession of one of these resurrected bodies. A creeping chill began to possess my soul. It grew upon my mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen one of the dead bodies, and in fear of their unholy burden wolves were outside the mansion howling. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The curse of evil had come into one of the bodies, and the evil malediction spread into his parts with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. He then rose to his feet, proclaiming he was the Devil and that he would take these other resurrected bodies with him to the underworld and speak with the dead. Mrs. Winchester said, “I rebuke you, Satan!” The Devil laughed and said he was not at all afraid of us. “You insult me with these testimonies as if you were Divine Oracles!” he said. Then departed in a black cloud of smoke with the resurrected bodies. How often I have read in books written by Jesuits that Martin Luther was a wizard, and that he did himself confess that he had familiarity with Satan! The Holy Son of God himself was reputed a magician, and one that had familiarity with the greatest of Devils. The blaspheming Pharisees said, “He casts out the Devils through the Prince of Devils,” reports Matthew 9.34. There is then not the best saint on Earth, man or woman, that can assure themselves that the Devil shall not cast such an imputation upon them. At the time when Luther died all the possessed people in the Netherlands were quiet. The Devils in them said the reason was because Luther had been a great friend of theirs, and they owed him that respect as to go far as Germany to attend his funeral. But the Father of Lies is never to be believed. He will utter twenty great truths to make way for one lie; he will accuse twenty people of witchcraft if he can but thereby bring one innocent person into trouble. However, it is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned. The Devil makes his witched to dream strange things of themselves and others which are not so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who invented the Pythagorean theorem, a^2+ b^2 = c^2, also lead seances in approximately 540 BC, using something like a Quija board. Grim reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees one’s surroundings, and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. If it is by virtue of some contract with the Devil that witches have the power to do such things, it is hard to conceive how they can be bid to do them without being too much concerned in that Hellish covenant. We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. The Devil have of late accused some eminent persons. It is an awful thing which the Lord had done [id est, permitted] to convince some among us of their error. To take away the life of anyone merely because a specter or Devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them will bring the guilt of innocent blood on the land where such a thing shall be done. What does such an evidence amount unto more than this: either such an one did afflict such an one, or the Devil in one’s likeness, or one’s eyes were bewitched. The natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-like figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth. Black dogs are also buried in the foundations of churches to guard and protect the gates between here and the afterlife. What will be the issue of these troubles God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our lands. It is possible that bewitched and possessed person are afflicted by the Devil, but without agency of witches. Yes, there are witches, and there have been since the beginning of the World. Their craft is performed with the Devil’s assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
During one evening at the mansion, Mrs. Winchester invited the maid in for a séance. She chanted, “By the virtue of the holy resurrection and the torments of the damned, I conjure and exorcise thee, spirit of Malphas, thirty-ninth Spirit, to answer my liege demands, being obedient unto these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment and distress. Arise, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.” A black man appeared, I do not think he was human. His skin was black as midnight and I could not see his eyes, teeth, or any other features. He was just black and in the shape of a man. He offered her a book to sign. The book was supposed to contain witches’ pacts, and he told her that is she touched it, it would cure her of the hauntings. In all, Mrs. Winchester was tempted from three boos. The third she demanded that they let her read before she think of signing it. The man refused. In general the book seemed a journal of the chief things acted or designed a their great witch-meetings, not without some circumstances that carried an odd resemblance of the Koran. It has in it the methods to be used in seducing of people unto the service of the Devil, and the names of them that had been seduced, with terms which they were to serve. It particularly surprised some in the room, on the even of May 13, 1888, to overhear her, in the book then opened unto her, spelling a word that was in Latin. The letters she recited was “Quadragesima.” Mrs. Winchester conversed at length with the spirit(s) who visited her, and the voices were “big, low, thick,” as they had been reported to be in European witchcraft accounts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We saw flames arise from the cauldron on the table, and the room smelled of brimstone. The spirit of a bird appears. It attacked the maid and the next morning, she was found tied to the tree top. She was excessively sore when we brought her down from the tree. There were blisters raised upon her. To cure the soreness which last night’s fiery trail gave to her, we were forces sometimes to apply oil commonly used for the cure of scads. And yet (like other witch-wounds) in a day or two all would be well again. Only the marks of some wounds thus given her, she will probably carry to her grave. I may add that once they thrust an hot iron down her throat, which though it were to us invisible, yet we saw he skin fetched off her tongue and lips. Indeed, her sufferings were so severe that Mrs. Winchester thought the rapid healing of her wounds was part of a design to keep her in continual torment. She was, Mrs. Winchester wrote, “wounded with a thousand pains all over, and cured immediately that the pains of these wounds might be repeated.” One of the maid’s symptom occurred when her hallucinations were peopled by specters bring her a little cup that had a whitish liquor in it (unto us wholly invisible), which they would pour down her throat, holding her jaws wide open, in spite of all [her] shriekings and strivings. We saw her swallow this poison, though we saw not the poison, and immediately she would swell prodigiously and be just like one poisoned with a dose of rats-bane [arsenic trioxide]. After these potions she was capable ordinarily to beg of us that we would he her to some salad-oil, upon the taking whereof the swelling would in a little while abate. Sometimes our laying our hands on the mouth of the maid, when she perceived the specters forcing their poisons into her mouth, did keep her from taking of them in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The maid, Agnus, was unable to hear prayer or religious instruction directly. However, not only did she hear the spectral Christmas dance, but several times Agnus had her arms cruelly scratched and pins thrust into her flesh by Fiends while they were molesting her. Several persons did sometimes actually lay their hands upon these Fiend. The wretches were palpable while they were not visible, and several of our people though they saw nothing, yet felt a substance that seemed like a dog. And though they were not fanciful they died away [id est, fainted] at the fright. And at this time, Mrs. Winchester believed much of this unchristian practice was the result of someone delivering curses. A curse delivered by a woman, Margaret Rhodes Crocker, known to have dabbled in witchcraft, although again it is not absolutely certain that she practiced malefic witchcraft. It was upon the Lord’s Day, the 8th of September, in the year 1889, that Margaret Crocker, after some hours of previous disturbance in the Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, fell into odd fits, which caused her friends to carry her home, where her fits in a few hours grew into a figure that satisfied the spectators of their being preternatural. Some of the neighbours were forward enough to suspect the rise of this mischief in an house hard-by, where lived a miserable woman who had been formerly imprisoned on the suspicion of witchcraft, and who had frequently cured very painful hurts by muttering over them certain charms, which I shall not endanger the poisoning of my reader by repeating. This woman had, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searless, the evening before Margret fell into her calamities, very bitterly treated her and threatened her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the hazard of hurting a poor woman that might be innocent, notwithstanding surmises that might have been more strongly grounded than those, caused the pious people in the vicinity to try whether incessant supplication to God alone might not procure a quicker and safer ease to the afflicted than hasty prosecution of any supposed criminal. Mary Francis was assaulted by eight cruel specters, whereof she imagined that she knew three or four, but the rest came still with their faces covered, so that she could never have a distinguishing view of the countenance of those who she thought she knew. She was very careful of my reiterated charges to forbear blazing the names, lest any good person should come to suffer any blast of reputation through the cunning malice of the great Accuser. Nevertheless, she having since privately named them to myself, I will venture to say this of them, that they are a sort of wretches who for these many years have gone under as violent presumptions of witchcraft as perhaps any creatures yet living upon Earth, although I am far from thinking that the visions of this young woman were evidence enough to prove them so. Margaret Crocker’s hallucinations were somewhat varied. She saw not only spectral witches and the “Black Man….their master” who was often seen in abandoned mansions, where he resisted new residents, but also a “White Spirit” who she took to be an Angel. Such a figure had also been seen at the Winchester and in several Oakland witchcraft cases, such as at the Ellen Kenna Mansion, Emma Bray’s Mansion, and at Alexander Dunsmuir’s mansion. The white spirit comforted and advised Margaret during her attack. Among other things, the Angel told her that Oliver Winchester was her spiritual father. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The Angel had always maintained the Devils might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Mrs. Winchester cried for the Lord, as for the deliverance of these women from the malice of Hell, for the deliverance of the powers of Hell has now seized upon all of them. And that the whole plot of the Devil to reproach her poor maid, Angus, be defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ. During a séance Mrs. Winchester was told that one of the several beings that was haunting her and these other grand estates was a Rakshasa. A being reincarnated from evil human beings. They are a type of demon. Rakshasa have the power to change their shape at will and appear as animals, as monsters, or in the case of female demons, as beautiful women. They also have magical powers, including invisibility. They are cannibalistic, and particularly target anything religious or holy. In addition to human flesh they, they will eat spoiled food. Their finger nails are poisonous. They are most powerful in the evening, particularly during the dark person of a new moon, but are dispelled by the rising sun. They especially detest sacrifices and prayer. Most powerful among them is their kind, the 10-headed Ravana. Many believe him to be Satan. Margaret had the common inability of afflicted persons to hear religious words, especially, in her case, the words of prayer. She had a full catalog of physical symptoms. She would be strangely distorted in her joins an thrown into such extravagant convulsions as were astonishing unto the spectators in general. She would be cruelly pinched with invisible hands very often in a day, and the black and blue marks of the pinches became immediately visible unto the standers by. She was also afflicted with pins, both real ones found about her person and spectral ones. The psychosomatic skin lesions would in a few minutes ordinarily be cured. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As with Mary Frances, her specters burnt her with spectral brimstone, and she would be so bitterly scorched with the unseen sulphur thrown upon her that very sensible blisters would be raised upon her skin. Like Angus, Margaret was forced to swallow spectral poison. She would sometimes have her jaws forcibly pulled open, whereupon something invisible would be poured down her throat. We all saw her swallow, and yet we all saw her try as she could that she might not swallow. She would cry out “as of scalding brimstone poured into her” and would be so monstrously inflamed that it would have broken a heart of stone to have seen her agonies. The spectators would testify also that the Crocker Mansion often reeked “so hot of brimstone that we were scarce able to endure it.” And one of the occasion “the standers by plainly saw something of that odd liquor itself on the outside of her neck.” There was a spectral powder thrown into her eyes, and “one time some of this powder was fallen actually visible upon her cheek, from whence the people in the room wiped it with their handkerchiefs.” Mrs. Winchester was also afflicted by spirits. “We once thought we perceived something stir upon her pillow at a little distance from her, whereupon one present [the Butler Clayton] laying his hand there, he to his horror apprehended that he felt, though none could see it, a living creature not altogether unlike a vampire bat, which nimbly escaped from him. And there were diverse other persons who were thrown into a great consternation by feeling, as they judged, at others times the same invisible animal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, the most starling phenomenon in Mrs. Winchester’s case was levitation. “Once,” said Clayton, “her tormentors puled her up to the ceiling of the chamber and held her there before a very numerous company of spectators, who found it as much as they could all do to pull her down again.” Clayton obtained signed confirmations of this and other instances of levitation: “I do testify that I have seen Mrs. Winchester in her hauntings from the invisible World lifted up from her bed, wholly by an invisible force, a great way towards the top of the room where she lay. In her being so lifted she had no assistance from any use of her own arms or hands or any other part of her body, not so much as her heels touching her bed or resting on any support whatsoever. And I have seen her thus lifted when not only a strong person hath thrown his whole weight across her to pull her down, but several other persons have endeavoured with all their might to hinger her from being so raised up, which I suppose that several others will testify as well as myself when called unto it. Witness my hand,” Clayton Straus. “We can also testify that we have several times seen Mrs. Winchester so lifted up from her bed as that she had no use of her own limbs to help her up, but it was the declared apprehension of us, as well as others that saw it, impossible for any hands but some of the invisible World to life her.” Henry Brown, Frank Drew, Phillip Goodwin. “We whose names are underwritten do testify that one evening when we were in the chamber where Mrs. Winchester then lay in her haunting, we observed her to be by an invisible force lifted up from the bed whereon she lay, so as to touch the garret floor, while yet neither her feet nor any other parent of her body rested either on the bed or any other support, but were also by the same force lifted up from all that was under her, and all this for a considerable while. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
“We judged it several minutes, and it was as much as several of us could do with all our strength to pull her down. All which happened when there was not only we two in the chamber, but we supposed ten or a dozen more whose names we have forgotten.” W. R. Leigh and Spenser T. Olin. These accounts could not be the power of suggestion because these people were not just bystanders. They believed that they witnessed levitation, and they were engaging in violent physical activity, trying to bring her body back to the bed. Such activity would, ordinarily, break the power of suggestion. And levitation has been so frequently reported, from so many times and places (from the 5th century to the 21st century), that one cannot be at all sure there is a satisfactory explanation for it, particularly since so many witnesses insisted that no part of Mrs. Winchester’s body was touching the bed. However, whatever the explanation for these symptoms, Mrs. Winchester and her estate are truly a mystery. However, it is also noted the other prominent Queen Anne Victorian Mansions and other built during the Victorian times experienced afflictions. Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. Although some people and some estates were more haunted than others, the Bay Area, during Victorian Times, had its full share of obscurity. All publications on witchcraft and supernatural events have been forbidden by these prominent families at the time. Their desire was to quail tempers, and use wisdom to relax fear, while upholding their honour, integrity, and reverence for the Victorian era. “All things are possible to one that believeth,” reports Mark 9.23. Who that beareth it upon one shall not dread one’s enemies, to be overcome, nor with no manner of poison be hurt, nor in no need misfortune, nor with no thunder one shall be smitten nor lightning, no in no fire be burnt suddenly, nor in no water be drowned. Nor one shall not die without shrift, nor with thieves to be take. Also one shall have no wrong neither of Lord or Lady. This be in the names of God and Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House will be going dark this weekend for All Hallows’ Eve, but we will be back to haunt you Thursday, September 30th! Purchase your tickets for next weekend early and let the ghoul times roll 👻
See link in bio for ticket info 🎟 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 