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You are Giving Away Your Soul—The Blood is Life!
This morning I saw a star twinkling just over the nine-story tower—the first since the beginning of May. My son, when he was examined, because he would not confess that he was guilt when he was innocent, they tied him neck and heels till the blood gushed out at his nose, and would have kept him so twenty-four hours if one more merciful than the rest had not taken pity on him and caused him to be unbound. These actions are very like the Popish cruelties. A man’s outer case generally gives some indication of the soul within. He has told me several times that the thought of death was a pleasant one to him, which is a sad thing for a young man to say; he cannot be much more than thirty. Some great sorrow must have taken him and blighted his whole life. Why of course, they were in effect saying, the Devil can impersonate the innocent, just as we have said all along. God might permit Satan to impersonate the virtuous. But surely, he would not permit discord in the Winchester mansion? I should have thought Mrs. Winchester’s staff would have been above such vulgar delusions. All this disquisition upon superstition leads me up to the fact that my son saw a ghost last night—or at least, says that he did, which of course is the same thing. Indeed the fellow is honestly frightened, and I had to give him some chloral and bromide of potassium this morning to stead him down. He has been hired as a ranch had to work at the estate. When grounds keepers found a mutilated cow, some of the other men thought he had been possessed by the devil, and torture him to confess. I was obliged to pacify him by keeping as grave a countenance as possible during his story, which he certainly narrated in a very straightforward and matter-of fact way. No one wanted Mrs. Winchester to believe the curse was real and the hauntings had started again. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
“I was on the balcony,” he said, “about four bells in the middle watch, just when the night was at its darkest. There was a bit of a moon, but the clouds were blowing across it so that you could not see far from the mansion. John Brunton, the foreman, came after from the tool shed and reported a strange noise on the estate. I came down and went forward and we both heard I, sometimes like a bairn crying and sometimes like a wench in pain. I have been seventeen years to the country and I never heard an animal, old or young, make a sound like that. As we were standing on the rear porch the moon came out from behind the cloud, and we both saw a sort of black figure moving across the farm in the same direction that we had heard the cries. We lost sight of it for a while, but it came back insight, and we could just make it out like a shadow amongst the trees. I sent a hand art for the rifles, and Brunton and I went down to the fruit orchard, thinking it might be a bear. When we got near the trees I lost sight of Brunton, but I pushed on in the direction where I could still hear the cries. I followed them for a mile or may more, and then running round a well I came right on to the top of it standing and waiting for me seemingly. I do not know what it was. It was not a bear any way. It was tall and black and straight. This black dog, or the devil in such a likeness, running all along down the body of the mansion with great swiftness, and incredible haste, he passed between two people, wrung the necks of them both. I made my way for the mansion as hard as I could run, and precious glad I was to find myself inside. I signed articles to do my duty by the estate, and on the estate I will say, but you will not catch me on the grounds after sundown.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
That is his story given as far as I can in his own words. I do not know what happened there. I fancy what he saw must in spite of his denial, have been a young bear erect upon its hind legs, and attitude which they often assume when alarmed. In the uncertain light this would bear a resemblance to a human figure, especially to a man whose nerves were already somewhat shaken. Whatever it may have been, the occurrence is unfortunate, for it has produced a most unpleasant effect upon the crew. Their looks are more sullen than before and their discontent more open. The double grievance made more dreadful when a barn of dead bodies was found on the edge of the estate. Written in blood, “Keep building,” and a huge bloody hand print was discovered on the wall. Some say it was the Devil’s handprint. In the old days in the New World, people used to say “I put my hand and seal” on a document when signing it. In the Old World this was literal in some cases. The emperor of Japan in ancient in ancient days “signed” important documents by dipping his hand in blood and putting a full bloody handprint on the page. In the history of pacts with the Devil, people were supposed to sign their names in blood. I have seen a couple of alleged pacts from earlier centuries. Blood undoubtedly stressed the seriousness of the signing. The Devil may sometimes have a permission to represent an innocent person as tormenting such as are under diabolical harassments, but that such things are rare and extraordinary. You were giving away your soul. The Blood is life. Afflicted persons were subject to diabolical torments; making evidence of such torments was accepting the word of the Devil; worse, accepting such evidence was holding commerce with the Devil, and therefore in itself a kind of witchcraft. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The afflicted persons do tell who are witches, of which, some they know and some they do not. Secondly, they tell who did torment such a person, though they know not the person. Thirdly, they are tormented themselves by he looks of the persons that are present, and recovered again by the touching of them, they recover, or do not fall into torment. Fifthly, they can tell when a person is coming before they see them, and what clothes they have [on], and some, what they have done for several years past, which nobody else ever accused them with nor do not yet think them guilty of. Sixthly, the dead out of their graves do appear unto them and tell them that they have been murdered, and require them to see them to be revenged on the murderers, which they name to them, some of which persons are well known to have died their natural deaths, and been publicly buried in the sight of all humans. Now if these things be so, I thus affirm: First, that whatsoever is done by them that is supernatural is either divine or diabolical. Secondly, that nothing is or can be divine but what has God’s stamp upon it, to which he refers for trial (Isaiah viii. 19,20): If they speak not according to these, there is no light in them. Thirdly, and by that rule none of these actions of theirs have any warrant in God’s Word, but are condemned wholly. First, it is utterly unlawful to inquire of the dead or to be informed by them (Isaiah viii. 19). It was an act of the Witch of Endor to raise the dead, and of a reprobate Saul to inquire of him (1 Samuel xxviii.8, 11-14; Deuteronomy viii. ii). Secondly, it is a like evil to seek to them that have familiar spirits (Leviticus xix.31). It was the sin of Saul in the forementioned place (1 Samuel xxviii.8) and of wicked Manasses (2 Kings xxi.6). #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Thirdly, no more is it likely that their racking and tormenting should be done by God or good angels, but by the Devil, whose manners has ever been to be so employed. Witness his dealing with the poor child (Mark v.2-5) besides what he did to Job (Jon ii.7) and all the lies he told against him to the very face of God. Fourthly, the same may be rationally said of all the rest. Who should tell them things that they do not see but the Devil, especially when some things that they tell are false and mistaken? May we believe the confessed witches that do accuse anyone? Can the fruit be better than the tree? If the root of all their knowledge be the Devil, what must their testimony be? Their testimony may be legal against themselves, because they know what themselves do. However, their words should not be taken against those who denied the charges and whose previous behaviour had been blameless. The fits to which the afflicted and of come of the confessors were subject to, they were the Devil’s way of force them to accuse the innocent. We see by woeful and undeniable experience, both in the afflicted persons and the confessors, some of them, that the Devil torments them at his pleasure to force them to accuse others. The accusations of the apparently innocent makes some people think that both the afflicted and the confessors are liars. However, perhaps the sufferings are pitiable and genuine. It is possible that the Devil is lying through them. And no matter who is lying, the effect of the lie is still the same. For if they counterfeit, the wickedness is the greater in them and the less in the Devil; but if they be compelled to it by the Devil against their wills, then the sin is the Devil’s and the suffering is theirs. However, if their testimonies be allowed of, to make persons guilty by, the lives of innocent persons are alike in danger by them, which is the solemn consideration that does disquiet the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Devils have a natural power which makes them capable of exhibiting what shape they please I suppose nobody doubts, and I have no absolute promise of God that they shall not exhibit mine. It is the opinion generally of all Protestant writers that the Devil may thus abuse the innocent. My son told me of another experience he had while working at the Winchester mansion. “I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot toward the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and nighttime.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some black wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite black, and looked more like foxes or sheep dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they pay attention to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up. I swore there was something there. I could feel it, hovering over me. It is watching, it is waiting, I think it is even mocking me.” Apart from this absurd outbreak of superstition, things are looking rather more cheerful. Mrs. Winchester loved the new year; she loved the idea of a fresh start for everyone. She always made a resolution, one a year, and unlike most people, she kept hers. Every year she tried to talk her staff into making one, but some of them never saw the point. The estate was undergoing heavy construction. Some workers reported seeing a ghost woman in nineteenth-century dress. That is not what was strange. What was strange is the fact that it was there was a thunder storm, but no rain was falling on a section of the mansion were the roof was still being added to the nine-story tower. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Mrs. Winchester wanted the tower because she said that she could get visions of the spirit World more clearly there. I always got a wee bit creeped out in the tower because the crucifix on the wall would turn upside down when anyone went near it. The Devil is said to appear there twice a year, on the vernal equinox and Halloween. The tower marks the grace of one of his children, born of a human witch and dead after a few days. I am learning about the hauntings at the Winchester mansion. Everyone has heard about them, but they all have different stories. In the World of spirits there is always a very great number of them, but there is no fixed time for their stay on Earth; for some are translated to Heaven and others confined to Hell soon after their arrival; whilst some stay on Earth days, weeks, maybe even centuries. Gerald Pomper thinks that my son devoted himself to construction of the Winchester simply for the reason that it is the most dangerous occupation which he could select, and that he courts death in every possible manner. He mentioned several instances of this, one of which is rather curious, if true. It seems that on one occasion he did not put in an appearance on the estate, and a substitute had to be selected in his place. That was at the time the tower was near completion. When he turned up again next spring he had a puckered wound in the side of his neck which he used to endeavour to conceal with his cravat. Whether the mate’s inference is true or not, it was certainly a strange coincidence. Of course, Johann Weikhard von Valvasor recorded the first written documented on vampires. Jure Grando Alilovic (1579-1656) was a villager from the region of Istria (in modern-day Croatia) who may have been the first real person described as a vampire in historical records. He was referred to as a strigoi, a local word for something resembling a vampire and a warlock. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Jure Grando lived in Kringa, a small town in the interior of the Istrian peninsula near Tinjan. He died in 1656 due to illness but according to legend, returned from the grave at night as a vampire and terrorized his village until his decapitation in 1672. The legend tells that, for 16 years after his death, Jure would arise from his grave by night and terrorize the village. The village priest, Giorgio, who had buried Jure sixteen years previously discovered that at night somebody would knock on the doors around the village, and on whichever door he knocked, someone from that house would die. This is why Mrs. Winchester boarded up the East Wing of her mansion. During one of her seances, she said Jure communicated with her. No telling? When you contact the spirit World, there is no telling what will come through. Some of the spirit in the mansion may be hundred of years old. Mrs. Winchester owned an original copy of Die Ehre deB Herzogthuma Crain, which she kept locked away in a safe. Vampires are said to infest come parts of this country. These Vampires are supposed to be the bodies of deceased persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the graves, in the night-time, suck the blood of many of the living, and thereby destroy them. Petar Blagojevic was also accused of being a Vampire, and was alleged to have killed several people after his death. When the body was exhumed, it was undecomposed, the hair and beard were grown, there was new skin and nail, and blood could be seen in the mouth. When people grew outraged and staked his body through the heart, a completely fresh amount of blood flowed through the ears and moth of the corpse. Finally, the body was burned. The wind is veering round the mansion in an easterly direction, but it is still very slight. As far as the eye can reach, there is a shadow. The butler was staring out up the stairs with an expression in which horror, surprise, something approaching to fear were contending for the mastery. In spite of the cold, great drops of perspiration were coursing down his forehead and he was evidently fearfully exited. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
His limbs twitched like those of a man upon the verge of an epileptic fit, and the lines about his mother were drawn hard. “Look!” he grasped, seizing me by the seizing me by the wrist, but still keeping eyes upon the window, and moving his head in a horizontal direction, as if following some object which was moving across the field of vision. “Look! There, man, there! Between the palm trees! Now coming out from behind the far one! You see her, you must see her! There still! Flying from me, by God, flying from me—and gone!” His face was so livid that I expected him to become unconscious, so lost no time leading him down the stairs, and stretching him out upon one of the sofas in the parlour. I then poured him out some brandy which I held to his lips, and which had a wonderful effect upon him, bringing the blood back into his white face and steading his poor shaking limbs. He raised himself up upon his elbow, and looking round to see that we were alone, be beckoned me to come and sit beside him. “You are it, did you not?” he asked, still in the same subdued awesome tone so foreign to the nature of the man. “No, I saw nothing.” They have made up their minds that there is a curse upon the mansion, and nothing will ever persuade them to the contrary. The next night, there was a glorious sunset, which made the great fields look like a lake of blood. I have never seen a finer and at the same time more ghastly effect. Wind is veering round. There was a cry, sharp and shrill, upon the silent air of the night, beginning, as it seemed to me, at a note as such a prima donna never reached, and mounting from that ever higher and higher until it culminated in a long wail of agony, which might have been the last cry of a lost soul. The ghastly scream is still ringing in my ears. Grief, unutterable grief, seemed to be expressed in it and a great longing, and yet through it all there was an occasional wild not of exultation. It seemed to come from close beside me, and yet as I glared into the darkness, I could make out nothing. I waited some little time, but without hearing any repetition of the sound, so I came below, more shaken that I have ever been in my life before. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Odd things have happened here. Four kids in three years, from 1887-1890, vanished without a trace. Other people see things. No one will talk about. The butler was certain that something had come up through the “door to nowhere” five years ago, and was about to again. Some kind of hellspawn. The Devil may impudently impose his communion upon some that care not for his company. However, if the communion on the person’s part be proved, then the business be done. Specter evidence may be grounds for investigation, and may strength other presumptions, but it is not evidence on which to convict. The mansion could be a dangerous place, even at its best—a treacherous, dangerous place. The butler was staring at something. By the sudden intensity of his attitude, I felt that he saw some. I crept up behind him. He certainly was looking at something with an eager questioning gaze, at what seemed to be a wreath of smoke. It was a dim nebulous body devoid of shape, sometimes more, sometimes less apparent, as the light fell on it. The moon was dimmed in its brilliancy at the moment by a canopy of thinnest cloud, like the coating of an anemone. He held out his hand as if to clasp it, and so ran into the darkness with outstretched arms. That came from somewhere. Was it a demon? It took the shape of a man, and eventually of the man of whom we were in search of. He was lying face downwards upon the floor, frozen. Many little crystals of ice and feathers of snow had drifted on to him as he lay, and sparkled upon his dark seaman’s jacket. As we came up some wandering puff of wind caught these tiny flakes in its vortex, and they whirled up into the air, partially descended again, and then, caught once more in the current, sped rapidly away in the direction of the east wing. To my eyes it seemed but a snow-drift, but the butler averred that it started up in the shape of a woman, stooped over the corpse and kissed it, and then hurried away across the floor. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
It was the former cook Bill Thompson, who has gone missing in 1886. Sure he had met with no painful end, for there was a bright smile upon his blue pinched features, and his hands were still outstretched as though grasping at the strange visitor which had summoned him away into the dim World that lies beyond the grave. Surely this same apparition would also lead the butler into the eternal darkness. The smoke went into his mouth and he started to jerk, and speaking in tongues. That awful hellspawn had possessed him, and with his body dying and something inside of him, the butler staggered over to the sulfur stinking wall, sat down and died. Then he faded away and was gone. There he shall lie, with his secret and his sorrows and his mysteries all still buried in his breast, until that great day when the Winchester Mansion shall give up its dead, and Clarence Earl Gideon, known as “the butler,” come out from among the shadows with a smile upon his face, and his stiffened arms outstretched in greeting. I pray that his lot may be a happier one in that life than it has been in this. As for my son, I have not seen him in several years. In 1904, at the palace late at night, men who were pure of spirit, had thought they say a strange demoniac form taking the place of my son, John Wesley Thompson Faulkner. One man said that Mrs. Winchester suddenly rose from her throne and walked about, and immediately John’s head vanished, while the rest of hos body seemed to ebb and flow: whereat the beholder stood aghast and fearful, wondering if his eyes were deceiving him. However, he perceived the vanishing head filling out and joining the body again as strangely as it has left it. Another said he stood beside Mrs. Winchester as she sat, and all of the sudden the face changed into a shapeless mass of flesh, with neither eyebrows nor eyes in their proper places, nor any other distinguishing feature; and after a time the natural appearance of his countenance returned. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
I write these instances not as one who saw many of them myself, but heard them from people who were sure they had seen these strange occurrences at the time. They also say that the cook, Bill Thompson, very dear to God, at the instance of dinner time, went to beg forgiveness that some of the guess had been offended beyond endurance by a dish he made. And when he arrived at the dining room, he forthwith secured an audience with Mrs. Winchester; but just as he was about to enter his apartment, he stopped short as his feet were on the threshold, and suddenly stepped backward. Whereupon the maid who escorted him, and others who were present, importuned him to go ahead. However, he answered not a word; and like a man who has had a stroke staggered back to his lodging. And when some followed to ask why he acted thus, they say he distinctly declared he saw the King of the Devils sitting on the throne in the palace, and he did not care to meet or ask any favour of him. I shall not continue my journal. Our road home lies plain and clear before us, and the great Winchester palace will soon be but a remembrance of the past to me. It will be some time before I get over the shock produced by recent events. When I began this record of my visit, I little thought of how I should be compelled to finish it. I am writing these final words in the lonely chamber, still starting at times and fancying I hear the quick nervous step of the dead man upon the floor above me. I entered his chambers tonight as was my duty, to make a list of his effects in order that they might be entered in the official log. All was as it has been upon my previous visit, save that the picture which I have described as having hung at the end of his bed had been cut out of its frame, as with a knife, and was gone. With this last link in a strange chain of evidence I close my diary of the Winchester mansion. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Note by William Clark Falkner, Col. CSA: “I have read over the strange evens connected with the mystery, as narrated in the journal of my son. That everything occurred exactly as he describes it I have the fullest confidence, and, indeed, the most absolute certainty, for I know him to be a strong-nerved and unimaginative man, with the strictest regard for veracity. Still, the story is, on the face of it, so vague and so improbable, that I was long opposed to its publication. Within the last few days, however, I have had independent testimony upon the subject which throws a new light upon it. I had run down to Edinburgh to attend a meeting of the British Medical Association, when I came across Aleister Crowley, an old college chum of my son’s, now involved with the esoteric Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where he was trained in ceremonial magic by Samuel Liddell MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennet. Aleister told me that he had been contacted by a supernatural entity named Aiwass, who confirmed that that Witch Trials were started by people who wanted to break up convents and get their magic potions, spells, talismans, and secrets, while also getting the church in an uproar. Upon my telling him of this experience of my son’s, he declared to me that he was familiar with the man, and proceeded, to my no small surprise, to give me a description of him, which tallied remarkably well with that given in the journal, expect that he depicted him as a younger man. According to his account, the cook and butler and my son had all been in love with the same woman. However, the cook was engaged to the young lady of singular beauty residing upon Sierra. During their absence at the Winchester mansion, his betrothed had died under circumstances of peculiar horror. She became a Chenoo, a winter spirit with a heart of ice, created from a human, which wants to kill those it loves. In the period of transformation, the person who is becoming a Chenoo eats snow and refuses other food. One will be ill-tempered and angry. After the transformation, the Chenoo will attack and kill other members of the tribe.” There are many mysteries surrounding the Winchester Mansion. Have a visit and tell me a little story. Winchester Mystery House–a 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
In the 1800s, so many deer and cattle within the mansion’s proximity were found dead that staff members were accused of being werewolves. Today, staff and visitors have reported banging sounds, footprints, seeing white mists, and feeling someone breathe on them. They also report tormented ghosts wandering through the mansion at night. Even if you do not believe ghost stories, you might still get goosebumps passing by, do not chalk those taps on your shoulder and whispers in your ear as all up to imagination.
During mansion renovations in the early 1900s, workmen found a secret dungeon in the Bloody Tower with so many human skeletons, they filled three cartloads when hauled away. The basement was designed so that prisoners would fall through a trap door. These hallways won’t wander themselves 😳 Give you and your friends a fright this weekend on the Lost in The House Tour during All Hallows’ Eve at the Winchester Mystery House!
All Hallows’ Eve value night tickets are still available!
🎟️ Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
You Must Be As Rich As a Prince With a Fairy Godmother!
Social conditions of the World are not what we would like them to be; the real crux of the problem lies in what should be done about it. By now, you have probably heard a phone-in radio psychologist. On typical program, callers describe social problems from child abuse, loneliness, love affairs, phobia to financial hardships, depression, educational and more. The radio psychologist then offers reassurance, advice, or suggestions for getting help. Talk-radio psychology may seem harmless, but it raises some important questions. For instance, is it reasonable to give advice without knowing anything about a person’s background? Could the advice do harm? What good can a psychologist do in 3 minutes? In defense of themselves, radio psychologists point out that listeners may learn solutions to their problems by hearing others talk. Many of us are concerned with these same problems. However, several radio psychologists also stress that their work is educational, not therapeutic. As you can see, psychological services that rely on electronic communication may serve some useful purposes. Still the very best advice given by media psychologist, telephone counselors, or cybertherapists may be, “You should consider discussing this problem with a psychologist or counselor in your own community.” The social problems of our day are not unique. Jesus Christ was born into a World beset with serious social problems. There existed in Palestine a wide gulf between the rich and the poor. Beggars were found in all of the cities and villages. Disease was rampant. The natives of Palestine were held in bondage to the Roman overlords. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Thievery and brigandage were everywhere. The story of the Good Samarian, involving a brutal attack on a lone traveler, could have taken from numerous real happenings. The unarmed dared not venture abroad at night. Even the apostles of our Lord sometimes went about armed, as evidence in the account of Gethsemane. However, Jesus has the power to alleviate hunger. He had just fed the five thousand who seemed to desire his word and who had followed him around the Sea of Galilee to be near him. Yet the answer lay no in bread, nor in clothing, nor in houses. The answer lay deep in the hearts of humans. One who was most touched by man’s inhumanity to man, one who had time for the lowliest of the low, knew that man can rise no higher than his thought, than his philosophy of life, his understanding of its purpose, and his relationship to the Almighty. These are the things that determine the stature of man. Hence, Jesus devoted Himself to the teaching of gospel truths, to the establishment of a church with apostles and seventies to teach and to baptize. He knew that change in the individual brought about change in society, that change in the individual was brought about by a change in his spirit, and that the change in his spirit came from the acceptance of God and His commandments. “The son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do,” reports John v.19. If we open such books as Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the Italian epics, we find ourselves in a World of miracles so diverse that they can hardly be classified. Beasts turn into men and men into beasts or trees, trees talk, ships become goddesses, and a magic ring can cause tables richly spread with food to appear in solitary places. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Some people cannot stand this kind of story, others find it fun. However, the least suspicion that it was true would turn the fun into a nightmare. If such things really happened they would, I suppose, show that Nature was being invaded. However, they would show that she was being invaded by alien power. The fitness of the Christian miracles, and their difference from these mythological miracles, lies in the fact that they show invasion by a Power which is not alien. They are what might be expected to happen when she is invaded not simply by a god, but by the God of Nature: by a Power which is outside her jurisdiction not as a foreigner but as a sovereign. They proclaim that He who has come is not merely a king, but the King, her King and ours. It is this which, to my mind, ours. It is this which, to my mind, puts the Christian miracles in a different class from most other miracles. I do not think that it is the duty of a Christian apologist (as many sceptics suppose) to disapprove all stories of the miraculous which fall outside the Christian records, nor of a Christian man to disbelieve them. I am in no way committed to the assertion that God has never worked miracles through and for Pagans or never permitted created supernatural beings to do so. If, so Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dion Cassius relate, Vespasian performed two cures, and if modern doctors tell me that they could not have been performed without miracle, I have no objection. However, I claim that the Christian miracles have a much greater intrinsic probability in virtue of their organic connection with one another and with the whole structure of the religion they exhibit. If it can be shown that one particular Roman emperor—and, let us admit, a fairly good emperor as emperors go—once was empowered to do a miracle, we must of course put up with fact. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
However, it would remain a quite isolated and anomalous fact. Nothing comes of it, nothing leads up to it, it establishes no body of doctrine, explains nothing, is connected with nothing. And this, after all, is an unusually favourable instance of a non-Christian miracle. The immoral, and sometimes almost idiotic interferences attributed to gods in Pagan stories, even if they had a trace of historical evidence, could be accepted a wholly meaningless Universe. What raises infinite difficulties and solves none will be believed by a rational man only under absolute compulsion. Sometimes the credibility of the miracles is in an inverse ratio to the credibility of the religion. Thus miracles are (in late documents, I believe) recorded of the Buddha. However, what could be more absurd than the he who came to teach us that Nature is an illusion from which we must escape should occupy himself in producing effects on the Natural level—that he who comes to wake us from a nightmare should add to the nightmare? The more we respect his teaching, the less we could accept his miracles. However, in Christianity, the more we understand what God it is who is said to be present and the purpose for which He is said to have appeared, the more credible the miracles denied except by those who have abandoned some part of the Christian doctrine. The mind which asks for a non-miraculous Christianity is a mind in process of relapsing from Christianity into mere “religion.” A consideration of the Old Testament miracles is beyond the scope of this essay and would require many kinds of knowledge which I do not possess. My present view—which is tentative and liable to any amount of correction-would be that just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
This involves the belief that Myth in general is not merely misunderstood history (as Euhemerus thought) nor diabolical illusion (as some of the Fathers thought) nor priestly lying (as the philosophers of the Enlightenment thought not) but, at its best, a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other people, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology—the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical. Whether we can ever say with certainty where, in this process of crystallization, any particular Old Testament story falls, is another matter. I take it that the memoirs of David’s court come at one end of the scale and are scarcely less historical than St. Mark or Acts; and that the Book of Jonah is at the opposite end. It should be noted that on this view (a) Just as God, in becoming Man, is “emptied” of His glory, so the truth, when it comes down from the “Heaven” of myth to the “Earth” of history, undergoes a certain humiliation. Hence the New Testament is, and ought to be, more prosaic, in some ways less splendid, than the Old; just as the Old Testament is and ought to be less rich in many kinds of imaginative beauty than the Pagan mythologies. (b) Just as God is none the less God by being Man, so the Myth remains Myth even when it becomes Fact. The story of Christ demands from us, and repay, not only a religious and historical but also an imaginative response. It is directed to the child, the poet, and the savage in us as well as to the conscience and to the intellect. One of its functions is to break down dividing walls. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Some thoughts. The Devout who snatches another’s obedience will also grab one’s grace. The Devout who squirrels away some personal possessions loses one’s right to communal property. The Devout who gives oneself to one’s superior, but does it hesitantly, beguilingly—well, that is a sign that one’s own flesh has not learned to obey itself; that is to say, having gurgitated, it often has to regurgitate. Learn, therefore, to quickly submit yourself to your superior; that is to say, if you finally want to get your flesh under control. The exterior Enemy is more quickly overcome than you would first imagine, especially if your interior life has not been a total loss. A worse, more pestiferous Enemy of the soul lurks, if all were known. It is you yourself, what with your spirit and flesh in total disarray. If you want to prevail against your flesh and blood, then you have to take back full possession of yourself. Up to this very point in your personal history, you have yet to do this. And it is not so surprising. Your love for yourself exceeds all reasonable standards of quantity and quality; that is to say, there is too much of it, and you have spread it too broadly. No wonder you are afraid to resign yourself fully to the will of others! However, what is the big deal here? You who are dust and nothing but dust—you subjected yourself to Me because God asked you to, and you know what? People applauded! However, I the Lord and Tailor of the Universe—I created everything, and I did it out of nothing, if you can imagine that. What is more, I humbly subjected Myself to Humankind because you asked Me to, but what credit, what respect, did I get? I even made Myself lowest of the low, flattest of the flat, and why would I do that? So that you could use My humility as a weapon against your own pride. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The moral? It is from the Great Bernard’s homily for the Feast of the Annunciation (8): “Dustman, dust thyself! Refuse Collector, collect thyself? Proud Flesh, prostrate thyself under the feet of the passing crowd!” Some recommendations. Light a torch under yourself. Do not let pride eat away at you like a tumor. Be an obedient child, and accept the mud from the feet in front of you as your trudge with the adults on the highway of life. That would avoid the wrath of the Psalmist’s Lord (18.42)! Why do you wail about, you silly fool? That is a sentiment I plucked from the Letter of the Great James (2.20). What have you got to say, you sinful sot, against those who take you to task? You have offended God so many times, and so many times you have merited Hell. I speak with the voice of the Great Ezekiel when I say, “My eye has spared you” (20.17). I am echoing the Great Saul to the Great David in First Samuel when I say, “You soul is precious in my sight” (26.21). You should learn to recognize My love and be grateful for My little gifts. Give yourself always to True Subjection and Humility and patently bear up when the contempt you deserve is heaped upon you. Christian Science can deny the existence of ill health only at the cost of logically denying the existence of good health also. Both are differing conditions of the same thing—the body. Christian Science calls sickness a lie. Then it should likewise call its opposite a lie. However, not only does it not: it actually affirms that good health is a truth and a reality even while it denounces matter—the body—as a lie and an illusion! If, in spite of its deformed logic, Christian Science still gets healing done—as it does—this result must be attributed to the fact that infinite Life-Power does take cognizance of the body’s disease and does not deny its being there. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is not only fallacious to deny the existence of a disease but also, if the attempt s made to secure healing, insincere. The Christian Science attempt to deny existence to sickness as an error of moral mind is itself an error. It is more philosophic, first, to take it as an existent fact, but to understand that the body’s reality is only a limited and temporary one, and, second, to couple it with the other fact that there are healing forces and recuperative energies in the higher self of man which may dispel it. If right thinking alone could sustain life and support health irrespective of every other factor, then human beings could immure themselves where sunlight, air, water, and food could not reach them and still live actively. However, the only cases known to history are of few hibernating inactive self-actualized. Such theorizing is self-deceptive. Many people in the Old World, from the safe distance of the study, conveniently denied the existence of disease. Meanwhile the gods have smiled cynically as millions in the Old World have picked up cholera and passed to their doom. The mental peace obtained by denying facts like sickness may be welcome to the sufferer. However, it may also turn out to be a false peace. Although the theory of these cults is in part quite fallacious, the practice of them brings striking results at times. This is because the healing power really comes forth from the individual’s own higher self, to which the cults do—although somewhat unconsciously—direct one. One of the self-actualized paths is the creative use of imagination and thought for self-improvement, and so far as it embodies such a technique, Christian Science is a self-actualized path too. It instructs its disciples to see themselves as perfect, as the Universal Mind sees them, to concentrate on the concept of, and hold to the belief in, the divine man. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
These prayers and attitudes draw forth high resources, which may effect results where ordinary ones fail. This thinking runs somewhat as follows. The entire Universe is but an idea. Therefore the human body is also an idea. Therefore the human being, as the thinker of this idea, possesses complete power to alter, improve, and even change the body. Therefore one can abolish disease, annul sickness, restore health, and preform miraculous environmental betterments at will, provided one can suitably re-adjust and control one’s thoughts. All this sounds plausible and attractive, but there is a fallacy in it. And this is that the human being is the sole thinker of the World-Idea. One is not. One only participates in it along with the World Mind. One’s power over the body is a limited one. By one’s thoughts, one can influence its functioning and sometimes modify its mechanism. An avalanche of recent studies reveals that aerobic exercise not only promotes health and energy, but also is a remedy for mild depression and anxiety. Experiments that randomly assign some depressed or anxious people to exercise routines confirm this. So do surveys showing that Canadians and Americans are more self-confident, self-disciplined, and psychologically resilient if physically fit. Sound minds reside in sound bodies. Also, get REST—Restricted Environmental Stimulation Therapy. Happy people live active, vigorous lives, yet reserve time for renewing sleep and solitude. Americans suffer from a growing “national sleep debt,” with resulting fatigue, diminished alertness, and gloomy moods. Even a literal day of REST, or smaller, daily doses of solitude in meditation or prayer, can spiritually recharge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
There are few better remedies for unhappiness than an intimate friendship with someone who cares deeply about you. Confiding is good for soul and body. “Woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help,” observed the writer of Ecclesiastes. Research confirms that we humans have a deep “need to belong”—to connect with others in close, supportive, intimate relationships. Committed marriages, for example, are associated with health, happiness, and reduced poverty, and with better-educated, healthier, and more successful children. It was found that 40 percent of married adults but only 23 percent of those who never married (and end fewer of the divorced and separated) reported them selves “very happy.” New evidence indicates that marriage does no just ride along with social, psychological, and economic well-being; it contributes to it. So, if and when you marry, resolve to nurture your relationship, not to take your partner for granted, to display to your spouse the sort of kindness that you display to others, to affirm your partner, to play together and share together. To rejuvenate your affections, resolve in such ways to act lovingly. In study after study, actively religious people prove to be happier. In fact, 47 percent of those attending church or synagogue several times weekly said they were “very happy,” as did only 27 percent of those never attending. Those with an active faith also cope better with crises. Compared with religious inactive widows, recently widowed women who worship regularly report more joy. Among mothers of developmentally challenged children, those with a deep religious faith are less vulnerable to depression. People of faith also tend to retain or recover greater happiness after suffering divorce, unemployment, serious illness, or bereavement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
For many people, faith provides, first, a support community. The fellowship of kindred spirits, the bearing of one another’s burdens, the ties of love that bind are intrinsic to Christian communities—of which there are some 400,000 in North America. Faith also provides many people with a sense of life’s meaning and purpose. Faith satisfies the most fundamental need of all. That is the need to know that somehow we matter, that our lives mean something, count as something more than jus a momentary blip in the Universe. Faith also offers feelings of ultimate acceptance (what Christians know as the “grace” experience), a reason to focus beyond self, and a timeless perspective on life’s woes. We are mindful of the reality of suffering and the terror of death, yet sustained by a hope that in the end, the very end, all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. If the electronic cottage were to spread, people working from home instead of at the office, a chain of consequences of great importance would flow through society. Many of these consequences would please the most ardent environmentalist or techno-rebel, while at the same time opening new options for business entrepreneurship. Community impact: Work at home involving any sizeable fraction of the population could mean greater community stability—a goal that now seems beyond our reach in many high-change regions. If employees can perform some or all of their work tasks at home, they do not have to move every time they change jobs, as many are compelled to do today. They can simply plug into a different computer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
This implies less forced mobility, less stress on the individual, fewer transient human relationships, and greater participation in community life. Today when a family moves into a community, suspecting that it will be moving out again in a year or two, its members are markedly reluctant to join neighbourhood organizations, to make deep friendships, to engage in local politics, and to commit themselves to community life generally. The electronic cottage could help restore a sense of community belonging, and touch off a renaissance among voluntary organizations like churches, women’s groups, lodges, clubs, athletic and youth organizations. The electronic cottage could mean more of what sociologists, with their love of German jargon, call gemeinschaft. Environmental Impact: The transfer of work, or any part of it, into the home could not only reduce energy requirements, as suggested above, but could also lead to energy decentralization. In stead of requiring highly concentrated amounts of energy in a few high-rise offices or sprawling factory complexes, and therefore requiring highly centralized energy generation, the electronic cottage system would spread out energy demand and thus make it easier to use solar, wind, and other alternative energy technologies. Small-scale energy generation units in each home could substitute for at least some of the centralized energy now required. This implies a decline in pollution as well, for two reasons: first, the switch to renewable energy sources on a small-scale basis eliminates the need for high-polluting fuels, and second, it means smaller releases of highly concentrated pollutants that overload the environment at a few critical locations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Economic Impact: Some businesses would shrink in such a system, and others proliferate or grow. Clearly, the electronics and computer and communications industries would flourish. By contrast, the oil companies, the auto industry, and commercial real estate developers would be hurt. A whole new group of small-scale computer stores and information services would spring up; the postal service, by contrast, would shrink. Papermakers would do less well; most service industries and white-collar industries would benefit. At a deeper level, if individuals came to own their own electronic terminals and equipment, purchased perhaps on credit, they would become, in effect, independent entrepreneurs rather than classical employees—meaning, as it were, increased ownership of the “means of production” by the worker. We might also se groups of home-workers organize themselves into smaller companies to contract for their service or, for that matter, unite in cooperatives that jointly own the machines. All sorts of new relationships and organizational forms become possible. Psychological Impact: The picture of a work World that is increasingly dependent upon abstract symbols conjures up an overcerebral work environment that is alien to us and, at one level, more impersonal than at present. However, at a different level, work at home suggests a deepening of face-to-face and emotional relationships in both the home and the neighbourhood. Rather than a World of purely vicarious human relationships, with an electric screen interposed between the individual and the rest of humanity, as imagined in many science fiction stories, one can postulate a World divided into two sets of human relationships—one real, the other vicarious—with different rules and roles in each. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
No doubt we will experiment with many variations and halfway measures. Many people will work at home part-time and outside the home as well. Dispersed work centers will no doubt proliferate. Some people will work at home for months or years, then switch to an outside job, and then perhaps switch back again. Patterns of leadership and management will have to change. Small firms would undoubtedly spring up to contract for white-collar tasks from larger firms and take on specialized responsibilities for organizing, training, and managing teams of homeworkers. To maintain adequate liaison among them, perhaps such small companies will organize parties, social occasions, and other joint holidays, so that the members of a team get to know one another face-to-face, not merely through the console or keyboard. Certainly not everyone can or will (or will want to) work at home. Certainly we face a conflict over pay scales and opportunity cost. What happens to the society when an increased amount of human interaction on the job is vicarious while face-to-face, emotion-to-emotion interaction intensifies in the home? What about cities? What happens to the unemployment figures? What, in fact, do we mean by the terms “employment” and “unemployment” in such a system? It would be naïve to dismiss such question and problems. However, if there are unanswered questions and possibly painful difficulties, there are also new possibilities. The leap to a new system of production is likely to render irrelevant many of the most intractable problems of the passing era. The misery of feudal toil, for example, could not be alleviated within the system of feudal agriculture. #RandolphHarrs 14 of 20
Feudal toil was not eliminated by peasant revolts, by altruistic nobles, or by religions utopians. Toil remained miserable until it was altered entirely by the arrival of the factory system, with its own strikingly different drawbacks. In turn, the character problems of industrial society—from unemployment to grinding monotony on the job to overspecialization, to the callous treatment of the individual, to low wages—may, despite the best intentions and promises of job enlargers, trade unions, benign employers, or revolutionary workers’ parities, be wholly unresolvable within the framework of the Second Wave production system. If such problems have remained for 300 years, under both capitalist and socialist arrangements, there is cause to think they may be inherent in the mode of production. The leap to a new production system in both manufacturing and the white-collar sector, and the possible breakthrough to the electronic cottage, promise to change all the existing terms of debate, making obsolete most of the issues over which men and women today argue, struggle, and sometimes die. We cannot today know if, in fact, the electronic cottage will become the norm of the future. Nevertheless, it is worth recognizing that if as few as 10 to 20 percent of the work force as presently defined were to make this historic transfer over the next 5 to 10 years our entire economy, our cities, our ecology, our family structure, our values, and even our politics would be altered almost beyond our recognition. It is a possibility—a plausibility, perhaps—to be pondered. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is now possible to see in relationship to one another a number of Third Wave changes usually examined in isolation. We see a transformation of our energy system and our energy base into a new techno-sphere. This is occurring at the same time that we are demassifying the mass media and building an intelligent environment, thus revolutionizing the info-sphere as well. In turn, these two giant currents flow together to change the deep structure of our production system, altering the nature of work in factory and office and, ultimately, carrying us toward the transfer of work back into the home. By themselves, such massive historical shifts would easily justify the claim that we are on the edge of a new civilization. However, we are simultaneously restructuring our social life as well, from our family ties and friendships to our schools and corporations. We are about to create, alongside the Third Wave techno-sphere and info-sphere, a Third Wave socio-sphere as well. It is somewhat ironic that the contemporary concern over the patriarchal nature of suburbia is the exact opposite of the major criticisms made by popular antisuburban literature of the post-World War II period. The accusation made by critics of suburbia following the war was not that suburbs fostered a patriarchal traditional family, but rather that the husbands’ absence from the suburban home during the day led to a suburban matriarchy. This matriarchy, it was charged, was leading to a child-dominated society. The suburban way of life was said to lead to excessive, overprotective “momism.” Suburban mothers were criticized for having excessive involvement in the raising of their sons, which was leading to the raising of a generation of what was perceived as male offspring who lacked resolution and that were weak and purposeless. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These beliefs or the spineless male offspring were not fringe views. It is worth nothing that Philip Wylie’s, Generation of Vipers, which put the term “momism” into the language, had gone through twenty printings by the 1950s (Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers, Ferrar and Rinehart, New York, 1942). Popular postwar criticism, as expressed by psychiatrists and others, was that suburban life, with its daytime absence of males, led to excessive independence and isolation of women. Female-oriented suburban life was, in turn, blamed for increases in adultery, alcoholism, mental illness, and divorce. Such pop-psychology myths received wide dissemination and acceptance as factual descriptions of reality. So maybe there will be some benefits to the electronic cottage. However, the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s landmark, The Feminine Mystique (1963) turned the argument completely around. Dr. Friedan gave voice to the widespread angst of housewives, and she noted that it came not from having too much suburban free time, but from powerlessness. She agreed that suburbs helped create a female culture, but it was not a culture of dominating momism, but rather one of essential exclusion from outside-the-hone decision making. There have been discussion going back over a century as to whether suburban life was better for males or females. Actual studies done in the 1960s and 1970s tended to show that suburbia and suburban life favoured males, with husbands being more pleased with suburban living than their wives. Gans, in his famous Levittown study, found, for example, that three out of ten thousand, but six our of ten wives, preferred to live in the city “if not for their children. College-educated women with young children particular felt the restrictions of being tied to the limited local community for intellectual stimulation. Studies generally found that husbands, because they left the community for work, had wider networks of friends and colleagues, while wives were more likely to be restricted to socializing with those in the neighbourhood. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
A major study of Toronto housing by William Michelson found that women living in urban residential areas had greater satisfaction with their neighbourhoods than those in more suburban locations. Women particularly liked the access to services and public transportation that urban areas afforded. In most writings, men were reported more likely to prefer suburbs since they provided escape from urban pressures and demands. A feminist’s review of literature on the effect of housing environments on women concluded that the burdens of isolated suburban life fell particularly heavily on women. However, times change. While one still hears references to women being isolated in suburbia without access to cars, culture, or community, this picture increasingly is a cliché of another era. In a time when two-and even three-car families are the norm, and when most women, including those with young children, are in the labour force, the image of this isolated suburban homemaker seems somewhat quaintly dated. The picture of the homemaker trapped all day in her suburban home and kitchen has more ties to the 1950s than to the realities of contemporary life. Today most women have careers or jobs outside the home. Yet, the post-World War II, “modern” kitchen showed the full effects of “scientific” domestic engineering and home economics, but was still quite clearly a woman’s domain. However, this is changing in modern architecture. Kitchens are becoming more larger and masculine. Also, the preference of women for the convenience of the city over the space of the suburbs no longer applies. The data are rather overwhelming in indicating that most American women wanted detached, single-family suburban homes. The federal government’s Annual Housing Survey indicated that women equally with men share a preference for suburban over urban housing. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Large majorities of both genders prefer single-family homes. Moreover, single women heading households, similarly to married-couple householders, expressed the greatest satisfaction with living in suburban housing. Christine Cook similarly found that female single-parent householders express greater satisfaction with suburban rather than city housing. Lower rates of crime, better school for their children, and the generally more peaceful environment were the most common reasons given for preferring the suburbs. For women householders, the traditional urban advantages of access to public transit and shopping now appear to be more than offset by concerns over crime and poor-quality schools. Gender differences are becoming less and less relevant in predicting housing preferences. The Annual Housing Survey indicates both men and women now give similar reason for moving to a particular area. Unlike the suburbanites of the 1950s and 1960s, the majority of young adults now living in suburbs have grown up in suburbs rather than in central cities. This, they are most comfortable with the suburban environment in which they were raised. Also, massive changes in shopping and employment patterns over the past decades have resulted in the majority of these activities now being located in suburbs. Living in the suburbs is now the middle-class norm; it is living elsewhere that requires a specific decision. Often critics of suburban housing and lifestyles appear to be viewing suburbs through a different prism than that used by actual suburban residents. Today’s suburbanites are more concern about matters such as commuting problems, and getting more open time than they are about being trapped in their suburban houses. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Having too much independent or leisure time with nothing to do is not a prime problem of women of the 21st century. Most suburbanites, male and female, would welcome having a few days alone at home. The small plot of ground on which you were born cannot be expected to stay forever the same. Earth changes, and homes becomes different places. You took flesh from clay, but the clay did not come from just one place. To feel alive, important, and safe, know your own waters and hills, but know more. You have stars in your bones and oceans in blood. You have opposing terrain in each eye. You belong to the land and sky of your first cry, you belong to infinity. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepared manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. As Thou didst save those whom from the Torah derived the laws concerning Sabbath-burdens, who in resting and reposing thereon observed its bounds and limits, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who at Sinai were instructed in the Fourth Commandment to “Remember” and “Observe” the holiness of the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save them that were commanded to encircle Jericho seven times, who besieged and attacked it until it fell on the Sabbath, so save us now. As Thou didst save Solomon and his people n the holy Temple, who sought Thy favour with a festival of twice seven days, so save us now. As Thou didst save the exiled throngs returning to redemption, who on this festival read from Thy Torah each say, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy rejoicing hosts in the renewed glory of the second Temple, as on each of these seven days, they bore the palm-branch in the Sanctuary, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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You Do Not Have to Have a Good Heart to Have a Good Soul!
If Adam could reenter the garden of Eden and not sin, then there would be no curse on humanity. However, if Adam had not sinned, you would not be here, would you then be happy? Salvation comes at a price, but without sin, there would never have been a need. Cognitive learning involves higher mental processes, such as understanding, knowing, or anticipating. Even in relatively simple learning situations, animals and people seem to form cognitive maps (internal representations of relationships). Reach out to those in need. Happiness increases helpfulness (those who feel good do good.) However, doing good also makes one feel good. Compassionate acts help one feel better about oneself. The New Testament’s four books on Jesus’ life all record His teachings that to find life, we must be willing to lose our lives. To find meaning, we must discover something bigger than ourselves, and serve it. Living beyond self is therefore a part of Catholic wisdom. Paradoxically, personal fulfillment means abandoning ourselves and putting others first. In the Catholic tradition, ultimate satisfaction is promised to those who give up their desire for self-satisfaction. This is part of the meaning of crucifixion. The cross leads to resurrection, to new life. When we let go of ourselves, our lives become filled with grace. The lives of St. Francis of Assisi, Pope John XXIII and Mother Teresa of Calcutta radiate a grace that people of all religious traditions admire. The thing one would notice about Mother Teresa and the hundreds of sisters who form her team is that they all look so happy. Mother Teresa said, “Nothing makes you happier than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt.” In latent learning, learning remains hidden or unseen until a reward or incentive for performance is offered. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
As if to test Mother Teresa’s idea, the psychologist Bernard Rimland id an experiment. He asked 216 students to list the initials of ten people they knew best, yielding a grand list of some two thousand people. He then asked them to indicate whether each person seemed happy or not. Finally, he asked them to go over each name again, indicating if the person seemed selfish (devoted mostly to one’s own welfare) or unselfish (willing to be inconvenienced for others). The striking result: 70 percent of those judged unselfish seemed happy; 95 percent of those judged selfish seemed unhappy. What a paradox, said the surprised Mr. Rimland: “Selfish people are, by definition, those whose activities are devoted to bringing themselves happiness. Yet, at least as judged by others, these selfish people are far less likely to be happy than those whose efforts are devoted to making them happy.” Happy people also often are in a zone called “flow”—absorbed in a task that challenges them without overwhelming them. The most expensive forms of leisure (such as sitting on a yacht or reading a book in the tower of a Victorian mansion) often provide less flow experience than gardening, socializing, or craft work. Much of human learning is achieved through observation, or modeling. Observational learning is influenced by the personal characteristics of the model and the success of failure of the model’s behaviour. Studies have shown that aggression is readily learned and released by modeling. The Christian Science practitioners apparently use their formulas, their statements of being, their treatments, in the form of uttered incantations. This is much like the use of mantrams in India. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A comparative study of the history of mental healing shows how Universal and ancient are the origins of this treatment.; nor are its principles new. Mental Moral and Spirit Hygiene seeks to establish a proper way of living and thus prevent sickness. The healing art steps in where sickness already exists and a cure is sought. Another extremely fanatical attitude of which we must beware is the belief that mental healing displaces all other system and agencies for curing disease or keeping health; that its advocates may totally discard every branch of medicine and surgery, hygiene, and physical treatment. Sanity and balance call for the acceptance in its proper place of whatever Nature and man can contribute. With these preliminary warnings, we venture to predict that as the principles and practices of mental healing come to be better, namely more rationally understood, it will establish for itself a firm place in therapeutics which will have to be conceded—however grudgingly—by the most materialistic and most sceptical of medicos. We must remember that mental healing is only a single aspect of the art of healing. All the others must be brought in to make a balanced system. God as given us valuable herbs, for instance which possess remedial virtues. We should accept the gift. The error of Christian Science would appear to be that is confuses theory and wrongly applies practice. Its principles are half-right, half-wrong; its techniques are the same. The injunction to “cast thy burden on Me,” which it seems to apply, is misunderstood to advise neglecting practical means of healing troubles and leaving all to God. However, the correct way is not to neglect them but to do them while at the same time leaving results to God and being indifferent to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Even if Christian Science and New Thought sects produce healings, they are still not truly “divine.” They use some lower force—some vital force, as the Indians say. For they are all attached to the ego, which is itself a consequence of their unconscious belief in its reality. The ego has cunningly inserted itself even into these highly spiritual teachings and is still the hidden source behind both their prophets and their followers. This explains the commercialism of humanity as well as the errors which are contained in the teachings of false prophets, which lead to so many people experiencing their own mental-physical breakdown and death. The Pleasures of this World may have whatever they want now, but will they have it forever? No, only “as long as smoke will last,” if I may replay with the Psalmist (37.20). That is the fate of every Midas since time began. Know there is no recordist of past joys, no lasting list of things that brough us pleasure. “As the smoke vanishes,” sang the Psalmist in another place (68.2). Even at the high point of their lives, the wealthy have never spent a night without bitterness, boredom, nor fear. The very things that brought them delight during the day haunted them throughout the night. However, what did they expect? They went out of their way to find bad companions. Take Delectation and Delight, for example. They seemed fanciful creatures at first, what with a myriad of murmurings and mummerings, but off with the masks, and there stood Bitterness and Consternation with scented breaths and missing teeth. Oh, how brief, false, wild, base these so-called pleasures are! You would think the Pleasurers would have understood this, but apparently they did not. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Their judgment was impaired, perhaps by boozing, perhaps by bamboozling. In this regard they were no better than the dumb animals, as the Apostle Judge might have put it (v.10); they grazed their way through life, eating what they should have and also what they should not have, till they brought on themselves an early death. Two Scriptures for you, My soulful friend. “Do not trail after your concupiscences,” as Jesus son of Sirach put it (18.30), “and swerve while you can from the headlong flight of your own will. “Delight in the Lord,” if I may sing with the Psalmist (37.4), “and He will grant you the petitions of your heart.” If you want to be entertained and consoled by Me, then you can. Merely hold in contempt all Worldly things and cut off all sickly delectations. Then My blessing will be yours, to be followed by copious consolation. Withdraw yourself, therefore, from every solace known to creatures, you will find in Me no sweeter, no stronger consolation. That will not happen right away in the spiritual life, as you, My friend, already know; at least not without some spiritual sadness and fatigue. The ingrained habits of a lifetime will stand in the way, as the Great Augustine acknowledged in his Confessions (8.11). They too can be overcome, but only by a better habit, which, alas for the New Devout, will be hard to do. The Flesh will murmur and demur at first, but the fervour of he Spirit will bridle it. The Ancient Serpent that Genesis spoke of in chapter 3 and the Great Dragon of Revelation in chapter 12 will chat you up, of course, but they will only make things worse. Prayer is useful in this regard. It will make them stop, stare, then slither away. To prevent their returning anytime soon, do keep yourself occupied. “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody,” reports 1 Thessalonians 4.11-12. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
There are so many mounting pressures towards telecommuting and they will intensify as cars are seen as status symbols (and people want to keep the milage low on them so they can hold their value better), intermittent gas shortages, odd-even days, long lines at the fuel pump, and perhaps rationing disrupt and delay normal commuting, further jacking up its cost in both social and economic terms. To this we can add even more pressures tending in the same direction. Corporate and government employers will discover that shifting work into the home—or into local neighbourhood work centers as a halfway measure—can sharply reduce the huge amounts now spent for real estate. The small the central offices and manufacturing facilities become, the smaller the real estate bill, and the smaller the costs of heating, cooling, lighting, policing, and maintaining them. However, identity theft and data breaches may become more of a problem because there is no one in the home to monitor employees, who they allow into their homes and what they are doing with client’s information. A friend or family member may steal or share someone’s personal information. Or someone may approach a work at home employee and buy private information from them, even though it is illegal. However, with moral values down the drain and law enforcement being swamped and unconcerned, at times, it could lead to a nightmare. Nonetheless, as land and commercial and industrial real estate, and the associated tax load all soar, the hope of reducing and/or externalizing these opportunity costs may favour the farming-out of work. Corporate America always finds a way to come out on top. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The transfer of work and the reduction of commuting will also reduce pollution and therefore the tab for cleaning it up. The more successful environmentalists become at compelling companies to pay for their own pollution, the more incentive there will be to shift to low-polluting activities, and therefore from large-scale, centralized workplaces to smaller work centers or, better yet, into the home. Beyond this, as environmentalists and conservation-minded citizens groups battle against the destructive effects of the auto, and oppose road and highway construction, or succeed in banning cars from certain districts, they unwittingly support the transfer of work. The new effect of their efforts is to force up the already high cost and personal inconvenience of transport as against the low cost and convenience of communication. When environmentalists discover the ecological disparities between these two alternatives, and as the shift of work to the home begins to look like a real option, they will throw their weight behind this important decentralist move and help coax us into the civilization of the Third Wave. Social factors, too, support the move to the electronic cottage. The shorter the workday becomes, the longer the commuting time in relationship to it. The employee who hates to spend an hour getting to and from the job in order to spend eight hours working may very well refuse to invest the same commuting time if the hours spent on the job are cut. The higher the ratio of commuting time to working time, the more irrational frustrating, and absurd the process of shuttling back and forth. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
As resistance to commuting rises, employers will indirectly have to increase the premium paid to workers in the big, centralized work locations, as against those willing to take less pay for less travel time, inconvenience, and costs. Once again there will be greater incentive to transfer work. Finally, deep value changes are moving the same direction. Quite apart from the growth of privatism and the new allure of small-city and rural life, we are witnessing a basic shift in attitude toward the family unit. The nuclear family, the standard, socially approved family form throughout the Second Wave period is clearly in crisis. We shall explore the family of the future in much detail later. For now, we need only note the in the United States of America and Europe—wherever the transition out of the nuclear family is most advanced—there is a swelling demand for action to glue the family unit together again. And it is worth observing that one of the things that has bound families tightly together through history has been shared work. Even today one suspects that divorce rates are lower among couples who work together. The electronic cottage raises once more on a mass scale the possibility of husbands and wives, and perhaps even children, working together as a unit. And when campaigners for family life discover the possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home, we may discover he possibilities inherent in the transfer of work to the home we may see a rising demand for political measure to speed up the process—tax incentives, for example and new conceptions of workers’ rights. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Furthermore, with Social Security expected to be insolvent in 2033 and Medicare by 2026, working from home may be more appealing to people who do not want to work or have conditions that prohibit them from working. As more corporations allow people to work from home, this may increase the pool of people looking for jobs, and could help entitlement, insurance, and retirement programs recover some revenue. During the early days of the Second Wave era, the workers’ movement fought for a “Ten Hour Day,” a demand that would have been almost incomprehensible during the First Wave period. Soon we may see the rise of movements demanding that all work that can be done at home be done at home. Many workers will insist on that option as a right. And, to the degree that this relocation of work is seen as strengthening family life, their demand will receive strong support from people of many different political, religious, and cultural persuasions. The fight for the electronic cottage is part of the larger super-struggle between the Second Wave past and the Third Wave future, and it is likely to bring together not merely technologists and corporations eager to exploit the new technical possibilities but a wide range of other forces—environmentalists, labour reformers of a new style, and a broad coalition of organizations, from conservative churches to radical feminists and mainstream political groups—in support of what may well be seen as a new, more satisfactory future for the family. The electronic cottage may thus emerge as a key rallying point of the Third Wave forces of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Also, home economics bears a significant position in our education system. Not only do students need to learn how to sew, bake muffins and cakes, learn about nutritional value, and how to become conservative adults, home economics teaches students other life skills that help individuals succeed, independent of their chosen career path. Home economics helps students continually grow in the future as it emphasizes on personal development, intrapersonal skills, effective decision making and social-communicational skills deemed critical for occupational success. The various essential skills that home economics discusses includes financial planning, cooking and nutrition, safety, and overall life skills. It teaches students how to use a debit or credit card, how to open a checking and savings account, write a cheque. Students are also taught about their future, and how to effectively handle all their finances and how to avoid financial mistakes that could potentially bey very stressful in the near future. Home economics classes also educate student son interests rates, investment and takes, and how to choose good stock markets to invest money into or what would happen if you do not pay your taxes on time and so forth. It is extremely critical to be well versed in such matters to live in the World today. One of the most serious obstacles that families face today is how to eat healthily, but not spend all their savings on trying to purchase grocery items for the same. If such things are taught at an early age, there can be many problems avoided such as health defects, obesity, immorality and much more. Safety is something that seems obvious but is a very relevant topic that is taught in home economics. Students are taught about how to establish a safe environment around them. They learn about what to do in case of a fire, how to perform CPR, use a first aid kit, how to treat an open wound or prevent an injury from spreading. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Students are also taught critical, essential factors about working in the kitchen such as the most effective way of holding a knife, what material of clothing should not be worn in the kitchen, making sure the stove is always attended to and that pots should not have handles sticking outward, not to place lips on cooktop glass stoves (it cases them to shatter), what temperature the food should be cooked at and how it should be stored, how to clean up after you have finished cooking. When students are not educated about such things, there are so many possibilities of danger in and around us. God behaviour and manners are also valuable skills to learn about. Some teachers encourage students not to get tattoos nor piercings, not to grow facial hair, to be polite, speak clearly, and to respect all people. Not to hit, bite, scream, punch or kick. Students learn how to talk smart or how to give order and not sound discourteous while doing e same. They are taught to converse, sit and dress during a job interview. Many students also go on to go to college and end up sharing an apartment or a room with another person. Home economics teaches them how to adjust to living with someone else in such tight spaces. How to respect each other’s privacy and how to divine various tasks like cleaning, setting up the room and shopping. And to even leave a not if you hit someone’s car in the parking lot. Therefore, home economics teaches us basic life skills. Our World is so vast and developed todays that it is nice to receive instructions on how to go about it. For the half-century from 1920 to 1970, the popular magazine equated the suburban homes with attaining the American Dream, and that was the foundation of home economics. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
However, rather than seeing the suburban bungalow as an ideal, feminists of the era saw the wife’s involvement in a self-contained home as a patriarch-designed regression. Thus, feminists were almost always antisuburban, ending to equate the suburban home not with more freedom, but with a patriarchal desire to confine women and children to an isolated home environment. The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (However, as a contrast, today many women complain that men are not providers, unwilling to work and support their children and will not purchase the family a house or a car, sometimes they will not even buy food. It is like they expect the wife and the children to provide for the man, while he sits back, watches TV, drinks beer, hoots and howls while playing video games and inhales marijuana and eat pork rinds chicken wings with Crystal hot sauce, and Twinkies.) The suburban ideal of domestic togetherness was viewed by the feminists as a male device for keeping women in their domestic place. (Which some now wish would occur so the man can return to be a provider and having gainful employment.) However, to break traditional patterns and gender roles in the home, feminists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often advocated making housework, laundry, and cooking communal responsibilities. This, they believed, would emancipate women from the daily drudgery that confined them to the house and its responsibilities. Utopian feminists’ communities, such as the early-twentieth-century Llano del Rio in southern California, often were designed without kitchens in homes. Rather, the houses backed on a communal kitchen and eating area. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Laundry, similarly, was done in communal rather than household facilities. The goal was to provide time for other activities. Somewhat ironically, this goal was accomplished for the middle-class women by having lower-class women do the heavy washing, cooking, and cleaning. In the day and age, it apparently never occurred to the proponents of Llano Del Rio that class discrimination was being substituted for gender discrimination. Contemporary feminist writings on ideal housing continue to stress the advantages of communal housing models. This is particularly the case with those favouring neo-Marxist models. Gender inequality is seen as an inevitable consequence of single-family suburban housing being built by men for men. Feminist writers generally view spatial structure as reinforcing gender inequalities, with the cities representing masculine centers of production and the suburbs feminine centers of reproduction. Suburban single-family home designs are part of a patriarchal family structure in which, “The dominance of the single-family detached dwelling, its separation from the workplace, and its decentralized urban location are as much the products of the patriarchal organization of household production as of the capitalistic organization of wage work. Important non-Marxist feminists such as Betty Friedan have also been justly critical of a model in which women were to remain tied to the house as homemakers while men commuted to the real World of work in the city. Only by entering the paid work force and establishing careers could women be liberated from the bondage of domestic servitude. Attempts to design more women—centered housing continues to be a major concern. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Ideally, such women-centered housing would be designed to prevent isolation from public life that is seen to be integral to contemporary suburbs. Feminist designs, harkening back to the earlier communal models, emphasize the importance of facilities. However, survey research indicates most women continue to prefer private over communal kitchens and other facilities. BMW took the women’s power move a little further. They very stylish and sporty BMW Z4 roadster with retractable hard-top roof was designed all by women. Designer Juliane Blasi—the first female to design the exterior of a BMW—created a stunning look with its elongated hood, short overhangs, powerful wheel arches, and flowing creases. Even the two roll-over bars in the ruthenium-look steel complement the exterior design. Another sophisticated woman, Nadya Arnaout, designed the interior, which is smart and sophisticated—a clean and modern look. The instruments are well-positioned and easy to find; large round HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) dials make it a cinch to adjust the temperature top up or down. A push-button start lets your fire up the engine without a key—the key fob can be hidden deep in your pocket; as long as it is nearby the car will start. It is easy to change the radio as well. A tiny electronic parking brake is located behind the gear shifter, which saves space, yet blends nicely into the décor. The car also comes very a very sophisticated price tag of approximately $63,000USD. Diversity is very important, and it is a notable characteristic of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which transcends every culture, rave, nationality, and language. Cultures and peoples throughout the World gather together by because the Saviour’s invitation that all God’s children come unto Him. The Heavenly Father loves each and everyone of his children equally. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When the impeccable peace of the Overself inundates a human’s hear, one finds hat it is no negative thing. It must not be confused with sinister calm of a graveyard or with the mocking immobility of a paralytic. It is a strong, beneficial, and enduring quality which is definitely enjoyable. We actually get a momentary and much-diluted sample of it at such times as when a hated object is suddenly removed from our path, when a powerful ancient ambition is suddenly realized, or when we meet a greatly beloved person after long absence. Why? Because at such moments we are free from the infatuation with the hatred, the ambition, or the love simply because they have achieved their object and the desire-thoughts become still. The freedom passes almost in a flash, however, because some other infatuation replaces it in the heart within a few moments and thoughts begin their movement again. Whatever negative ideas and destructive feelings, whatever harassing doubts and muggy confusions one may have had before the Glimpse comes, disappear in its great joyous peace and vas buoyant certitude. It is not a merely abstract concept in the brain but a piercing experience in the heart. When these rare moments come quietly upon one, one feels oneself humbled and subdued. In these moments the air seems warm and pleasant, the Universe charged with friendliness. These moments of divine glorification exalt us like moments of hearing fine music. They come with the force of revelations for which we have been waiting. They hold us with the spell of enchantment made by a wizard’s hand. Their magical influence and mystical beauty pass all too soon, but the memory of them never does. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
The ecstasy of that state is rare, the abundant happiness it yields is unforgettable. Those who have lifted themselves up at times into the higher Mind know the paradox of the air in which it dwells. For if beneficent gentle peace is there, so too is invigourating immeasurable strength. The Glimpse comes as a benediction and as a grace. The heart should be grateful, immensely grateful for its visitation. It possesses a beauty which is not of this World, which gives joy to the heart. “In The presence is fullness of joy,” reports Psalms 16.11. It is a feeling of unearthly and unlimited peace. The World stands still, the sense of time passing and events happening is suspended. Nothing exists but this Oneness. Some are ready to enter the light and when—through the mediumship of Nature or Art, a man or a book—that happens, the experience is as enjoyable as entering an orchard of ripened apricots. The joy comes upon one out of the unknown, gently, mysteriously, and sunnily. As this wonderful feeling steals over one, there is a clear and unmistakable sense that the Overself is displacing the ego. Hitherto one has obeyed the rule of the flesh and the brain and consequently has shared their pitiful limitations. Now one becomes acutely aware that a new sovereign is taking one’s place on the throne. One feels that one has reached the very edge of another self, another World of being. In its newly discovered presence, we are relieved of cares, immune to anxieties about the future, and liberated from regrets about the past. It is not the unspeech of morbid taciturnity but a mysterious hush which falls on the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
If one is fortunate there may come to the waiting seeker a sense of uplift, and exalted mood, a feeling of support from a vast mysterious source. There is a unique bliss in this new-found freedom of the second self, a sublime peace in this dissolution of old restraints. One feels something of that sacred presence within one and around one. Its effect upon the mind is to leave a glow of benign good will to all beings. It hovers on the edge of indefinable awareness. What is the mystery of that sate when the body sis, stands, or reclines without moving, when the thoughts come to rest and the feelings enter an exquisite calm? It has been given a variety of names, for it takes a human out of this familiar common world and puts one into a most mysterious one. The ego slides from off one’s shoulders like a heavy overcoat and one feels delightfully free. At the ordinary level one has the ordinary outlook, the habitual desires; but here are times when one finds oneself at another and higher level where one is unsympathetic to both. No theological difficulties can trouble this happy state, no religious doubts can enter into it. The glimpse is like a first airplane ride. Looking down at the Earth scene far below, with its patch-like landscape dotted with black specks called houses and autos, and thinking of those millions of living creatures who live in one and drive in the other, one is overcome with humility. It is the glorious moment when Adam re-enters Eden, even though he is only a visiting guest and not a permanent dweller therein. The Glimpse operates to cast an actual spell over one. One is enchanted not merely poetically but literally. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Hours that are so far from the common ones, so timeless in their quality, make one feel like an ageless Sphinx. Time itself is suspended, and with it go the fears and worries, the unhappiness, which beset living in this World at this hour of its history. It is a feeling of being right with the Universe, with Life itself. It is as if years spent living in a dark cellar are abruptly ended by moving to a bright sunny Cresleigh Home. In this beautiful mood one becomes possessed of perfect leisure. One has all the time now that one needs. There is no need ever for hurry, strain, anxiety. For a moment or a morning, a day or a week, the confusions of life vanish. Oxygen kisses each cell awake, atoms dancing in orderly metabolism, interpenetrating. That dance of the air cycle, breathing the Universe in and out again, is what you are, is what I am. Sons and daughters of the Earth, steep yourself in the sea of matter, bathe in its fiery waters, for it is the source of your life and your youthfulness. By living in a World of pure though, you become more divine, or at leas more angelic. As Thou didst save this people, leading them as a flock on their path, and at Marah by still waters, didst ordain a statute for them, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy treasured sons in their camp in the wilderness of Sin, where they gathered a double measure of food on the sixth say, do Thou save us. As Thou didst save Thy children, who in setting the example of preparation of the Sabbath won the approval of their Shepherd who praised their deed, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who were sustained on the Sabbath by the prepare manna, the appearance of which altered not, and the fragrance thereof did not change, so save us now. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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One Feels the Presence within One of the Mysterious Entity which is One’s Soul!
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness, is in fact for most humans at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure. Emotional expressions, or outward signs of what a person is feeling, are another major element of emotion. For example, when you are intensely afraid, your hands tremble, your face contorts, and your posture becomes tense and defensive. Emotion is also revealed by marked shifts in voice tone or modulation. Such expressions are important because they communicate emotion from one person to another. Emotional feelings (a person’s private emotional experience) are a final major element of emotion. This is the part of emotion with which we are usually most familiar. Happiness—that delicious feeling of well-being and joy. What does it mean for our lives? How can we attain it? Have you noticed how your state of happiness or unhappiness colours everything else? Researchers have found that when we are in a happy mood, we see the World as friendly and nonthreatening. We make decisions easily. We recall the good times and forget the bad. Let our mood turn gloomy and soon enough we will find reasons for it: our relationships, our-self-image, and our prospects for the future suddenly seem depressing. What is more, happy people are helpful people. In experiments, those who have a mood-boosting experience become more generous and compassionate. If made to feel successful and intelligent, they are more likely to volunteer as a tutor. If they have just found some money in a phone booth, they are more likely to help someone pick up dropped papers. If they have just had a great day at work, they are more willing to loan someone money. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
So, being in a good mood triggers happy thoughts and memories and predisposes us to spread happiness to others. How, then, can we find happiness? Well, first of all, when faces with severe adversity or loss, being depressed is a normal and appropriate response. However, sometimes people react even to little problems by doubting and disparaging themselves. Their negative mood now triggers more negative thoughts: “I am no good,” “People do not like me,” “No one appreciates the work I do.” And the withdrawal and complaining that accompany such thoughts irritate others, which further worsens the unhappy person’s predicament. To break this vicious cycle of misery, psychologists often advise people to work at reversing their negative thinking. Keep a diary of daily successes, noting what you did to make them possible. Make negative self-talk more optimistic: not “I will never get this done,” but “One step at a time—I can handle it.” Or keep a gratitude journal. Those who pause each day to write down some optimistic aspects of their lives—perhaps their health, their friends, their family, their freedom, or even just their savouring the wonders of their senses—experience heightened well-being. Forcing ourselves also to act in more beneficial ways—offering a compliment, asserting ourselves—can help, too. When we act as if we are happy and confident, we may become more so. Silly as it may seem, even a smiling expression can sometimes break the cycle of misery. Try it. Make yourself smile. Can you feel the difference? The participants in dozens of recent experiments could feel the differences. When induced to make a frowning expression while electrodes were attached to their faces—“pull your brows together, please,” the researchers might instruct—the people reported feeling a little angry, and their heart rates and skin temperatures actually went up slightly (as if they really were “hot under the collar”). #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Those induced to smile felt happier and found cartoons more humorous. When we put on a happy face, our outlook seems to brighten. A famous author, on calculating the goods and evils of human life and comparing the two sums, has found that the latter greatly exceeded the former, and that, all things considered, life was a pretty poor present for humans. I am not surprised by his conclusion; he has drawn all of his arguments from the constitution of civil humans. Had he gone back as far as natural man, the judgement can be made that he would have found very different results, that he would have realized that man has scarcely any evils other than those he has given himself, and that nature would have been justified. It is not without trouble that we have managed to make ourselves so unhappy. When, on the one hand, one considers the immense labours of humans, so many sciences searched into, so many arts invented, and so many forces employed, abysses filled up, mountains razed, rocks broken, rivers made navigable, lands cleared, lakes dug, marshes drained, enormous buildings raised upon the Earth, the sea covered with ships and sailors; and when on the other hand, one searches with a little meditation for the true advantages that have resulted from all this for the happiness of the human species, one cannot help being struck by the astonishing disproportion that obtains between these things, and to deplore man’s blindness, which, to feed his foolish pride and who knows what vain sense of self-importance, makes one run ardently after all the miseries to which he is susceptible, and which beneficent nature has taken pains to keep from him. Men are wicked; a sad and continual experience dispenses us from having to prove it. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Nevertheless, man is naturally good; I believe I have demonstrated it. What therefore can have depraved him to this degree, if not the changes that have befallen his constitution, the progress he has made, and the sorts of knowledge he has acquired? Let human society be admired as much as one wants; it will be no less true for it that necessarily brings humans to hate one another to the extent that their interests are at cross-purposes with one another, to render mutually to one another apparent services and in fact do every evil imaginable to one another. What is one to think of an interaction where the reason of each private individual dictates to one maxims directly contrary to those that public reason preaches to the body of society, and where each finds one’s profit in the misfortune of another? Perhaps there is not a wealth man whose death is not secretly hope for by greedy heirs and often by his own children; not a ship at sea whose wreck would not be good news for some merchant; not a firm that a debtor of bad faith would not wish to see burn with all the papers it contains; not a people that does not rejoice at the disasters of its neighbours. Thus it is that we find our advantage in the setbacks of our fellow-humans, and that one person’s loss almost always beings about another’s prosperity. However, what is even more dangerous is that public calamities are anticipated and hoped for by a multitude of private individuals. Sone want diseases, others death, others war, others famine. I have seen ghastly men weep with the sadness at the likely prospects of a fertile year. And the great and deadly fire of London, which cost the life or the goods of so many unfortunate people, made the fortunes of perhaps more than ten thousand people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
I know that Montaigne bales the Athenian Demades for having had a worker punished, who, by selling coffins at a high price, made a great deal from the death of the citizens. However, since the reason Montaigne proposes is that everyone would have to be punished, it is evident that it confirms my own. Let us therefore penetrate, through our frivolous demonstration of good will, to what happens at the bottom of our hearts; and let us reflect on what the state of things must be where all humans are forced to caress and destroy one another, and where they are born enemies by duty and crooks by interest. If someone answers me by claiming that society is constituted in such a manner that each human gains by serving others, I will reply that this would be very well and good, provided one did not gain still more by harming them. There is no profit, however legitimate, that is not surpassed by one that can be made illegitimately, and wrong done to a neighbour is always more lucrative than services. It is therefore no longer a question of anything but finding the means of being assured of impunity. And this is what the powerful spend all their forces on, and the weak all their ruses. Savage man, when he has eaten, is at peace with all nature, and the friend of all his fellow-men. Is it sometimes a question of one’s disputing over one’s mean? One never comes to blows without having first compared the difficulty of winning with that of finding one’s sustenance elsewhere. And since pride is not involved in the fight, it is ended by a few swings of the first. The victor eats; the vanquished is on one’s way to seek one’s fortune, and everything is pacified. However, for humans in society, these are quite different affairs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is first of all a question of providing for the necessary and then for the superfluous; next come delights, and then immense riches, and then subjects, and then slaves. One has not a moment’s respite. What is more singular is that the less natural and pressing the needs, the more the passions increase and, what is worse, the power to satisfy them; so that after long periods of prosperity, after having swallowed up many treasures and ruined many humans, my hero will end by butchering everything until he is the sole master of the Universe. Such in brief is the moral portrait, if not of human life, then at least of the secret pretensions of the heart of every civilized human. Compare, without prejudices, that state of civilized humans with that of savage humans and seek, if you can, how many new doors to suffering and death (other than their wickedness, their needs and their miseries) the former has opened. If you consider the emotional turmoil that consumes us, the violent passions that exhaust and desolate us, the excessive cause the former to die of their needs, and the latter of their excesses; if you call to mind the monstrous combinations of food, their pernicious seasonings, the corrupted foodstuffs, tainted drugs, the knavery of those who sell them, the errors of those who administer them, the poison of the vessels in which they are prepared; if you pay attention to the epidemic diseases engendered by the bad air among the multitudes of humans gathered together, to the illnesses occasioned by the effeminacy of our lifestyle, by the coming and going from the inside of our houses to the open air, the use of garments put on or taken off with too little precaution, and all the cares that our excessive sensuality has turned into necessary habit, the neglect or privation of which then costs us our life or health. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Furthermore, if you take into account fires and earthquakes, which, in consuming or turning upside down whole cities, cause their inhabitants to die by the thousands; in a word, if you unite the dangers that all these causes continually gather over our heads, you will realize how dearly nature makes us pay for the scorn we have down for the scorn we have down for its lessons. I will not repeat here what I have said elsewhere about war, but I wish that informed humans would, for once, want or dare to give the public the detail of the horrors that are committed in armies by provisions and hospital suppliers. One would see that their not too secret maneuvers, on account of which the most brilliant armies by provisions and hospital suppliers. One would see that their not too secret maneuvers, on account of which the most brilliant armies dissolve into less than nothing, cause more soldiers to perish than are cut down by enemy swords. Moreover, no less surprising is the calculation of the number of humans swallowed up by the sea every years, either by hunger, or scurvy, or pirates, or fire, or shipwrecks. It is clear that we must also put to the account of established property, and consequently to that of society, the assassinations, the poisonings, the highway robberies, and even the puishments of these crimes, punishments necessary to prevent greater ills, but which, costing the lives of two or more for the murder of one man, do not fail really to double the loss to the human species. How many are the shameful ways to prevent the birth of humans or to fool nature: either by those brutal and depraved tastes which insult its most charming work, tastes that neither savages nor animals ever knew, and that have arisen in civilized counties only as the result of a corrpt imagination. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Or by those secret abortions, worthy fruits of debauchery and vicious honour; or by the exposure or the murder of a multitude of infants, victims of the misery of their parents or of the barbarous shame of their mothers; or, finally by the mutilation of those unfortunates, part of whose existence and all of the brutal jealousy of a few humans: a mutilation which, in that last case, doubly outrages nature, both by the treatment received by those who suffer it and by the use to which they are destined. [But are there not a thousand more frequent and even more dangerous cases where paternal rights overtly offend humanity? How many talents are buried and inclinations are forced by the imprudent constraint of fathers! How many men would have distinguished themselves in a suitable station who die unhappy and dishonoured in another station for which they have no taste! How many happy but unequal marriages have been broken or disturbed, and how many chaste wives dishonoured by the order of conditions always in contradiction with that of nature! How many other bizarre unions formed by interests and disavowed by love and by reason! How many even honest and virtuous couples cause themselves torment because they were ill-matched! How many young and unhappy victims of their parent’s greed plunge into vice or pass their sorrowful days in tears, and moan in indissoluble chains which the heart rejects and which gold alone has formed! Happy sometimes are those who courage and even virtue them for life before a barbarous violence force them into crime or despair. For give me, father and mother for deplorable. I regrettably worsen your sorrows; but may they serve as an eternal and terrible example to whoever dares, in the name of nature, to violate the most scared of its rights! #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
If I have spoken only of those ill-formed relationships that are the result of our civil order, is one to think that those where love and sympathy have presided are themselves exempt from drawbacks?] What would happen if I were to undertake to show the human species attacked in its very source, and even in the most holy of all bounds, where one no longer dares to listen to nature until after having consulted fortune, and where, with civil disorder confounding virtues and vices, continence becomes a criminal precaution, and the refusal to give life to one’s fellow-human an act of humanity? However, without tearing away the veil that overs so many horrors, let us content ourselves with point out the evil, for which others must supply the remedy. Let us add to all this that quantity of unwholesome trades which shorten lives or destroy one’s health, such as work in mines, various jobs involving the processing of metals, minerals, and especially lead, copper, mercury, cobalt, arsenic, realgar; those other perilous trades which everyday cost the lives of a number of workers, some of them roofers, others carpenters, others masons, other working in quarries; let us bring all of these objects together, I say, and we will be able to see in the establishment and the perfection of societies the reasons for the diminution of the species, observed by more than one philosopher. Luxury, impossible to prevent among humans who are greedy for their own conveniences and for the esteem of others, soon completes the evil that societies have begun; and on the pretext of keeping the poor alive (which it was not necessary to do), luxury impoverishes everyone else, and sooner or later depopulates the state. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Luxury is a remedy far worse than the evil it means to cure; or rather it is itself the worst of all evils in any state, however, large or small it may be, and which, in order to feed the hordes of lackeys and wretches it has produced, crushes, and ruins the labourer and the citizen—like those scorching south winds that, by covering grass and greenery with devouring insects, take sustenance away from useful animals, and bring scarcity and death to all the places where they make themselves felt. From society and the luxury it engenders, arise the liberal and mechanical arts, commerce, letters, and all those useless things that make industry flourish, enriching and running states. The reason for this decay is quite simple. It is easy to see that agriculture, by its nature, must be the least lucrative of all the arts, because, with its product being of the most indispensable use to all humans, its price must be proportion to their usefulness, and that the most necessary must finally become the most neglected. From this it is clear what must be thought of the true advantages of industry and of the real effect that results from its progress. Such are the discernible causes of all the miseries into which opulence finally brings down the most admired nations. To the degree that industry and the arts expand and flourish, the scorned farmer, burdened with taxes necessary to maintain luxury and condemned to spend one’s life between toil and hunger, abandons one’s fields to go to the cities in search of the bread one ought to be carrying there. The more the capital cities strike the stupid eyes of the people as wonderful, the more it will be necessary to groan at the sight of countrysides abandoned, fields fallow, and main roads jammed with unhappy citizens who have become beggars or thieves, destined to end their misery one day on the rack or on a dung-heap. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Thus it is that the state, enriching itself on the one hand, weakens and depopulates itself on the other; and that the most powerful monarchies, after much labour to become opulent and deserted, end by becoming the prey of poor nations which succumb to the deadly temptation to invade them, and which enrich and enfeeble themselves in their turn, until they are themselves invaded and destroyed by others. Let someone deign to explain to us for once what could have produced those hordes of barbarians which for so many centuries have overrun Europe, Asia, and Africa. Was it to the industry of their arts, the wisdom of their laws, the excellence of their civil order that they owed that prodigious population? Would our learned one be so kind as to tell us why, far from multiplying to that degree, those ferocious and brutal humans, without enlightenment, without restraint, without education, did not all kill one another at every moment to argue with one another over food or game? Let them explain to us how these wretches even had the gall to look right in the eye such capable people as we were, with such fine military discipline, such fine codes, and such wise laws, and why, finally, after society was perfected in the countries of the north, and so many pains were taken there to teach humans their mutual duties and the air of living together agreeably and peaceably, nothing more is seen to come from them like those multitudes of humans it produced formerly. I am very much afraid that something, namely the arts, sciences, and laws, have been very wisely invented by humans as a salutary plague to prevent the excessive multiplication of the species, out of fear that this World, which is destined for us, might finally become too small for its inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
What then! Must we destroy societies, annihilate thine and mine, and return to live in the forests with bears?—a conclusion in the style of my adversaries, which I prefer to anticipate, rather than leave to them the shame of drawing it. Oh you, to whom the Heavenly voice has not made itself heard, and who recognize for your species no other destination except to end this brief life in peace; you who can leave in the midst of the cities your deadly acquisitions, your troubled minds, your corrupt hearts and your unbridled desires. Since it depends on you, retake your ancient and first innocence; go into the woods to lose sight and memory of the crimes of your contemporaries, and have no fear of cheapening your species in renouncing its enlightenment in order to renounce its vices. As for men like me, whose passions have forever destroyed their original simplicity, who can no longer feed on grasses and acorn[s], nor get by without laws and chiefs; those who were honoured in their first father with supernatural lessons; those who will see, in the intention of giving human actions from the beginning a morality they would not have acquired for a long time, the reason for a precept indifferent in itself and inexplicable in any other system; those, in a word, whoa re convinced that the divine voice called the entire human race to the enlightenment and the happiness of the celestial intelligences; all those latter ones will attempt, through the exercise of virtues they oblige themselves to practice while learning to know them, to merit the eternal reward that they ought to expect for them. They will respect the sacred bonds of the societies of which they are members; they will love their fellow-men and will serve them with all their power; they will scrupulously obey the laws and the men who are their authors and their ministers. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
They will honour above all the good and wise princes who will know how to prevent, cure or palliate that pack of abuses and evils always ready to overpower us; they will animate the zeal of these worthy chiefs by showing them without fear or flattery the greatness of their task and the rigour of their duty. However, they will despise no less for it a constitution that can be maintained only with the help of so many respectable people, who are desired more often than they are obtained, and from which, despite all their care, always arise more real calamities than apparent advantages. Nevertheless, powerful forces are converging to promote the electronic cottage. The most immediately apparent is the economic trade-off between transportation and telecommunication. Most high-technology nations are now experiencing a transportation crisis, with mass transit systems strained to the breaking point, roads and highways clogged, parking spaces rare, pollution a serious problem, strikes and breakdowns almost routine, and costs skyrocketing. The escalating costs of commuting are borne by the individual workers. However, they are, of course, indirectly passed on to the employer in the form of higher wage costs, and to the consumer in higher prices. Jack Nilles and a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation have worked out both dollar and the energy savings that would flow from any substantial shift of white-collar jobs out of centralized offices. Instead of assuming the jobs would go into the homes of employees, the Nilles group used what might be termed a halfway-house model, assuming only that jobs would be dispersed into neighbourhood work centers closer to employee homes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The implications of their findings are startling. On average, Americans travel an average of 32 miles a day to and from work. The higher up the managerial scale, the longer the commute, with top executives averaging 44 miles. All told, these workers drove 12.4 million miles each year to get to work, using up nearly a half-century’s worth of hours to do so. At 2021 prices, this costs about sixty cents per mile, or a total of $15,117,610.34—an amount borne indirectly by the company and its customers. Indeed, it was found that the company was paying its downtown workers $2,879.54 a year more than the going rate in the dispersed locations—in effect, a subsidy of transportation costs. It was also providing parking spaces and other costly services made necessary by the centralized location. If we now assume a secretary was earning in the neighbourhood of $55,375.86 a year, the elimination of commuting costs could have permitted the company to hire nearly 300 additional employees or, alternatively, to add a substantial amount of profits. The key question is: When will the cos of installing and operating telecommunications equipment fall below the present cost of commuting? While gasoline and other transport costs (including the costs of mass-transit alternatives to the auto) are soaring everywhere, the price of telecommunications is shrining spectacularly. Satellites slash the cost of long-distance transmission, bringing it so near the zero mark per signal that engineers now speak of “distance-independent” communications. Computer power has multiplied exponentially and prices have dropped so dramatically that engineers and investors alike are left gasping. With fiber optics and other new breakthrough technologies in the wings, it is clear that still further cost reductions lie ahead—per unit of memory, per processing step, and per signal transmitted. At some point the curves must cross. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
However, these are not the only forces subtly moving us toward the geographical dispersal of production and, ultimately, the electronic cottage of the future. The Nilles team found that the average American urban commuter uses the gasoline equivalent of 64.6 kilowatts of energy to get back and forth to work each day. (The Los Angeles insurance employees burned 37.4 million kilowatts a year in commuting.) By contrast, it takes far less energy to move information. A typical computer terminal uses only 100 to 125 watts or less when it is in operation, and a phone line consumes only one watt or less while it is in use. Making certain assumptions about how much communications equipment would be needed, and how long it would operate, Nilles calculated that “the relative energy consumption advantage of telecommuting over commuting (id est, the ratio of commuting energy consumption to telecommuting consumption) is at least 29.1 when the private automobile is used; 11.1 when normally loaded mass transit is used; and 2.1 for 100 percent utilized mass transit systems.” Carried to their conclusion, these calculations showed that, even if as little as 12 o 14 percent of urban commuting is replaced by telecommuting, the United States of America would save approximately 75 million barrels of gasoline—and would thereby greatly reduce the need to import as much gasoline from abroad. The implications of that one fac for the U.S. balance of payments for Middle East politics might also be more than trivial. As gasoline prices and energy costs in general rise in the decades immediately ahead, both the dollar cost and energy cost of operating “smart” typewriters, telecopiers, the Internet, video calls, email, audio and video links, and computer desks will plummet, still further increasing the relative advantage of moving at least some production out of the large central workshop that dominated the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The dawning of the twentieth century saw a major social attack on the formality and excesses of the Victorian era. In architecture, this was reflected in the supplanting of the elaborate Victorian dwelling with the simpler rustic bungalow. The bungalow style stressed efficiency and simplicity. In spite of its name, the bungalow characteristically had a second floor housing a bathroom and all the bedrooms, and a full concrete-floored basement. Compared to the suburban homes of earlier decades, bungalows were generally smaller and constructed without formal features such as entrance halls or parlours. What they did have, however, was a high degree of comfort and convenience. Not unimportant for newlyweds, the bungalow was also a less expensive first home and thus had a particular appeal to young couples. From the standpoint of the housewife, suburban bungalows took far less time and energy to care for than the larger, but far less modern, homes of their mothers. The bungalows had all the technological advances of the day and included luxuries only available to the well-to-do a generation earlier. The homes were built with modern indoor, bathrooms, electric connections, gas connections for kitchen stoves, and central heating. For latter, you could have steam, hot-air, or hot-water systems. Individual wood- or coal-burning room heaters or stoves were no longer seen; they have been superseded by coal-fire central-heating systems. In some cases the furnaces were even automatic oil-fired units. The “fireplaces” in the 1920s bungalow living room was likely to be a faux fireplace with gas-fed logs. (During the 1990s gas-fired fireplaces again returned to favour.) New “scientific” labour-saving devices such as electric laundry machines, electric irons, electric vacuum cleaners, and even electric toasters all made middle-class women’s lives easier. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
No longer did you have to daily strain yourself to feed wood or coal into the kitchen stove or room heaters. No longer did you have to have a washerwoman—or yourself—do the backbreaking work of heating water on the stove and then washing the clothes by hand in huge vats. For hot water you turned on the faucet; to wash the clothes you turned on the washing machine, which was now located in the bungalow’s concrete-floored, electric-lighted, and centrally heated basement. It is all but impossible for us today to imagine jus how much time and heavy physical labour was an everyday part of housekeeping prior o the modern era. The new labour-saving electric appliances and more efficient kitchen designs of the smaller bungalow-style suburban homes of the 1920s did more than reduce heavy labour around the home. They also contributed to the ongoing social revolution in women’s equality by providing middle-class women much more free time. The comparative efficiency of the new electric appliances removed some of the time-consuming drudgery from housekeeping and promoted the possibility of leisure time. Woman’s magazines of the day noted how many modern young women living in such suburban homes now had the “free time” to devote to social activities, charity work, or others activities. They might even have a career. The idea that it was possible to have both a home and a career first came into vogue for the middle-class at this time. Having a job outside the home was not the norm, but it now, theoretically, became an option. Middle-class ideology began to change so that a suburban woman’s working at a career or job was not automatically assumed to be the consequence of the early death of the male breadwinner. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“Modern” married middle-class women, even those with children, could have a career without automatically being considered negligent wives and mothers. This is not to suggest that the technology of the new housing determined family social and work patterns. Rather, it is to suggest that technological advances, by changing the nature of housework, made it easier for patterns of greater social equality between spouses to develop. A more recent development has been the assumption by adult family members of home repair and improvement activities that were previously done by hired male painters, plumbers, and carpenters. A “do-it-yourself” generation has grown up with the assumption that everything from kitchen cabinets to decks to new bathroom fixtures can be self-installed. TV ads show couples putting in a new ceiling fan or installing new countertops after viewing the hardware warehouse video on how to do it. On the beneficial side, there is a decreasing division between what appropriate men’s work and women’s work. On the negative side, home improvement activities decrease true leisure time. Nonetheless, labour costs all but necessitates that suburban couples who wish to upgrade their homes will do much of their own work. It is taken for granted that they themselves will do much of the work in building a rec room or adding a bedroom. In this respect, the contemporary family unit has a commonalty with early American families, who were expected to physically contribute to the construction and maintenance of their dwellings. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
One thing you should concentrate on is desire, in fact, your alarming number of desires. You should make them conform to My pleasure. That is to say, you should not prefer your own will to Mine, as the Great Matthew recorded in the Lord’s Prayer in his Gospel (6.10); you should fall all over yourself to put My will first in your life. Why? Desires, I have noticed, often rouse you to act before you think. That is nice, but I think you should consider whether you are acting for our mutually agreed upon alliance or just for your own dalliance. If, however, I am the over cause, you will be happy enough, no matter how much I bang you about. However, if you have some covert initiative, something you do not want to reveal to Me, watch your step. It will trip you up and weigh you down. A few things to beware of. First, do not lean too much on these subcutaneous, subterranean desires of yours. Consult Me first. If you do not, it will make you suffer a lot later. One hint. A desire may please you at first, but it does not satisfy for long. It can only lead you to another, seemingly better supposedly greater desire, which itself is just another one in an endless chain of self-devouring desires that can only lead you to spiritual ruin. Second, not every Friendly Affection has to be seized immediately. There can be an interval. Examine it closely. Use restraint. You do not want to distract your mind from your goodly and indeed Godly studies simply because a Friendly Affection suddenly presents itself. Third, not every Unfriendly Affection must be fled from right away. Again, let there be an interval. Instantaneous and negative reaction may result more in Vitus than Virtue. The last thing you want to do is engender scandal in those who look up to you. Worse, you will arouse those who look down upon you; they will whirl you about until your finally fly apart. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Fourth, sometimes you have to use strength, that is to say, to mount an assault against the Sensitive Appetite. The Flesh will make demands. Counter them; demand unconditional surrender—that was the way the pugnacious Paul handled the problem, or so he said in his First Letter to the Corinthians (9.27). Trouble erupts when the Flesh is unwilling to respond to the wishes of the Spirit. Alas, the Flesh has to be broken and bridled until it is willing to do everything that is required of it. That is to say, until it learns to be content with few things, delight in simple things, and overlook annoying things. My words are tied in one with the great mountains, with the great rocks, with the great trees, in one with my body and my heart. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; nourish and sustain them forever. And may my words of supplication before the Lord be nigh unto the Lord our God, day and night, that He maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people America, as every day shall require; that all people of the Earth may know that the Lord is God; there is none else. Save us, we beseech Thee! For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. It is not merely feeing to which we give ourselves up, but being into which we settle. The conception alone of a peace which is out of this World is simply daring: its realization is utterly gorgeous in beauty and joyous in remembrance. Mostly as a result of prayer, but sometimes during an unexpected glimpse, a mystical experience of an unusual kind may develop. One feels transparent to the Overself; it light passes into and through one. One then finds that one’s ordinary condition was as if a thick wall surrounded one, devoid of windows and topped by a thick roof, a condition of imprisonment in limitation and ordinariness. However, now the walls turn to glass, their density is miraculously gone, one is not only open to the light streaming in but lets it pass on, irradiating the World around it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror—Afraid to Move Hand or Foot II!
Immediately after I sat down…and did see a black thing jump into the window. And it came and stood just before my face. The body of it looked like a monkey, only the feet were like a cock’s feet with claws, and the face somewhat more like a man’s than a monkey’s. And I being greatly affrighted, not being able to speak or help myself by reason of fear, I suppose, so the thing spoke to me and said, “I am a messenger sent to you. For I understand you are troubled in mind, and if you will be ruled by me you shall want for nothing in this World.” I would have cried out—would have shrieked, if every never had not been paralyzed. I could not doubt the evidence of my sense—if I could have done so the cold, unearthy horror which sicked my very soul would have borne its undeniable testimony that I had behold the impersonation of the hidden curse that rested on this dwelling. I stood there rigid and immovable, as if that blighting Medusa-glance had indeed changed me into stone. It may have been but a very few minutes—it seemed to me a cycle of painful ages, when the light of a brightly burning lamp shone before me, and I heard the cheerful sounds of the new nurse’s voice in my ears: “Come along, cook. Bless your heart, my dear! you need not be nervous; there is no occasion. Mrs. Winchester, ma’am, are you not well, ma’am? “No,” I said faintly, staggering to the woman’s outstretched hands. “Not down there—upstairs to the children.” She turned as I bade her, and supported me up the stairs and into the nursery, the cook following close at my skirts, muttering fervent prayers and chants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The sight of the peacefully sleeping little ones did far more to restore me than all the essences and chafing and unlacing which the two women busily administered. I had got suddenly ill when coming upstairs was the explanation I gave, which the cook, plainly perceived, most thoroughly doubted, at least without the cause she suspected being assigned, which, even in the midst of my terror-stricken condition, I refrained from giving, I did not speak to the nurse either of what had happened, but I felt that she knew as well as if she had been by my ide all the time. However, when William returned I told him. Distressed and alarmed on my account though he was, yet he did not, as before, refuse credence to my story. “We must leave the house, William. I should die here very soon,” I said. “Yes, Sarah; of course we must leave if you have anything to distress or terrify you in his manner, though it does seem absurd to be driven out of one’s house and home by a thing of this kind. Someone’s practical joke, or a trick prompted by malice against the owner of the property in order to lessen its value. I have heard of such things often.” “William, it is nothing of the kind,” I said earnestly; “you know it is not.” “No, I do not,” said William shortly and grimly, as he opened his case of revolvers, “and I wish I did.” The night passed away quietly, to our ears at least; but next morning when William had concluded the usual morning prayers, instead of the usual move of the servants, they remained clustered at the door, Jansen with an exceedingly elongated visage standing slightly in advance of the group as a spokesman. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
“Please, sir and ma’am, we cannot tell you what to do.” “Why, go and do your work,” retorted William, with a nervous tug at his moustache and an uneasy glance at me. Jansen shook his head slowly. “It cannot be done, sir—cannot be done, ma’am. Why, no living Christian, not to speak of humble, but respectable servants,” said Jansen with a flourish, quite unconscious of the nice distinction he had made, “could stand it any longer.” “What is the matter, pray?” said my husband. “Ghosts, sir—spirits—unclean spirits,” said Charles, in an awestruck whisper which was re-echoed in the cook’s “Lor” “a” mercy!” as she dodged back from the doorway with the housemaid holding fast to one of her ample sleeves, and the lady’s maid holding fast to the other. The New nurse, quietly dandling the baby in her arms, was alone unmoved. “What stories have you been listening to now?” said their master, what a slight laugh and a frown. “No stories, sir; but what we have seen with our eyes and understanded with our ears, and—and—comprehended with our hearts,” said Jansen, with an unsuccessful attempt at quoting Scripture. “What was it as walked the floors last night between one and two, sir? What was it as talked and shrieked and run and raced? What was it as frightened the mistress on the stairs last evening?” And the whole posse of them turned to me, triumphantly awaiting my testimony. I was feeling very ill, and looking so, I daresay, having struggled downstairs in order to prevent the servants having any additional confirmation of their surmises. “That is no affair of yours,” said William gravely; “your mistress is in delicate health, and was feeling unwell all day.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
“Will you allow me to speak, please, sir?” said the nurse, and, as her maser nodded assent, she turned to the frightened group with a pleasant smile. “You have no cause to be afraid, cook, or Mr. Jensen, or any of you,” said she, addressing the most important functionary first—“not in the least. I am only a servant like the rest, and here a shorter time than any one; but I think you are very foolish to unsettle yourself in a good situation and frighten yourselves. You need not think they will harm you. Fear God and do your duty, and you need not mind wandering, poor, lonely souls—-” “Lor” “a” mercy! ‘ow you talk, Mrs. Lewis!” said the coo indignantly. “I have seen them more times than one—many and many a time, Mrs. Cook; and they never harmed a hair of my head,” said the nurse, “nor they will ever harm your.” “Well, then,” said the cook, packing into the hall, followed by her satellites, “not to be made Cleopatra, nor the Virgin Mary neither, would I stay to be frighted out of my seven senses, and made into a lunatic creature like poor Linda was!” “Please to make better omelettes for luncheon, cook, than you did yesterday,” said William calmly, though he looked pale and angry enough, “and leave me to deal with the ghost—I will settle accounts with them!” The nurse turned quickly and looked earnestly at him: “I would not say that, sir—God forbid,” said she in an undertone, and the next moment was singing softly and blithely as she carried the children away to their morning bath. William and I looked at each other in silence. “I wish we have never come into this house, dear,” I said. “I wish from my heart that we never had, Sarah,” he responded; “but we must manage to stay the season out, at all events. It would be too absurd to run away like frightened hares, not to speak of the expense and trouble we have gone through expanding the mansion to four floors with a nine-story tower.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“We can may get it taken off our hands with a substantial loss, perhaps,” I suggested. “See the house-agent, William.” “I have seen him, but we have one of the largest, and most expansive estates in the country. No one can afford it,” he replied. “He deeply regretted that we should have any occasion to find fault, especially after our huge investment in expanding the estate, and it is not even completed yet. The agent also said he was happy to do anything in the way of clearing up this little mystery, et cetera. Of course he was laughing at me in his sleeve.” Again, as after our previous alarms, says passed on and lengthened into weeks in undisturbed quietude. William had a good many business matters to arrange; the children looked as rosy and healthy as in their country home, from their constant walking and playing in the airy, pleasant parks. My own health was not every good; and Dr. Winchester, William’s cousin, was kindest and wisest of grave, gentlemanly doctors; so, all thing considered, we stay at the Winchester mansion we have build into a 600 room Queen Anne Victorian mansion from an 18-room farmhouse. Only on my husband’s account, I wished for any change. Something seemed to affect his health strangely, although he never complained of anything beyond the usual lassitude and want of a tone which a gay Santa Clara season might be expected to bequeath him. He was sleepless, frequently depressed, nervous, and irritable; and still he vehemently declared he was quite well, and seemed almost annoyed when I urged him to put his business aside for the present and leave town. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
He had been induced to enter into a large “Highly Finished Arms” promotion and sales of deluxe Winchesters, and had, besides, some heavy money matters to arrange, connected with his sister’s marriage settlements, which he expected would be required about Christmas. So, all things considered, he had some cause for feeling as haggard as he did. “It will be as well for William to leave Santa Clara, Mrs. Winchester, as soon as he can, said his cousin Dr. Winchester at the close of one of his pleasant “run-in” visits. “His nerves are shaky. We men get nervous nearly as often as the ladies, though we do not confess to the fact quite so openly. A little unstrung, you know—nothing more. A few weeks in sea or mountain air will quite brace him up again.” And as I dressed for dinner that evening, I determined that if wifely entreaties, and arguments, and authority, should not fail for the first time in our wedded life, William should have the sea or mountain air without another week’s delay; and, of course I determined, likewise, to back up entreaties, arguments, and authority with the prettiest dress I could put on. I cannot tell why wives, and young wives too, will neglect their personal appearance when “only one’s husband” is present. It is unpolitic, unbecoming, and unloving; and men and husbands do not like neglect—direct or implied, be sure of that, ladies—young, middle-aged, or old. “Your brown silk, ma’am?—it is rather cold this evening for that cream-coloured grenadine,” said Agnus, rustling at my wardrobe. “No, Agnus, I will not have that brown, I am tired of it,” I replied. If so happened that it was this dress which I had worn on the three occasions when I had been terrified by the strange occurrences in this house; and I had acquired a superstition aversion for this particular robe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
So Agnus arrayed me in a particularly charming demi-toilette of pale yellow silk grenadine and white lace; and I felt myself to be a most amiable and affectionate little wife, as I went downstairs to await William’s return for dinner. I never sat in my pretty dressing-room alone. Truth to tell, I disliked the apartment secretly and intensely, and only for fear of troubling and displeasing George I would have shut it up from the first evening I spent in it. He was late for dinner, and I was quite shocked to see how thin and ill he looked by the gas-light; and, as soon as it was concluded, and that by the assistance of excellent coffee and a vast amount of petting, I had coaxed him into his usual smiles and good-humour, I began my petition—that he would leave town for his own sake. He listened to me in silence, and then said, “Very well, Sarah, we will go as soon as we can board up the east wing; I suppose you may come back here. “Oh! yes, I think so,” I replied, “maybe someone attracted these bad spirits and we need to let things cool off again. We shall spend Winter in New Haven, in our dear old house, William.” “Very well,” he said wearily, “though you must know, Sarah, I am not going on account of this one thing. I would hardly quit my house, indeed, because of ghostly or bodily sights or sounds.” He started up from the couch on which he was lying, flushed and excited as he always was when the subject was mentioned, his eyes gleaming as brightly as the flashing scabbard which hung on the wall before him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
“Certainly not, dearest,” I said soothingly. “I wish I could solve the mystery,” he pursued, more excitedly; “I would make somebody suffer for it! One’s peace destroyed, and people terrified, and servants driven away, as if one was living in the dark ages, with some cursed necromancer next door!” “Oh! well, it is some time ago now, and the servants have got over their fright. Pray, do not distress yourself about it, dear William.” “Ah, well—you do not—never mind,” he muttered; “but I mean to have tangible evidence before ever I leave this house—I have sworn it!” He was not easily roused, and I felt both surprise and alar to see him so now, and for so inadequate a cause. I had almost fancied he had forgotten the matter, as we, by tacit consent, never alluded to it. “Do not you allow yourself to be alarmed, Sarah, that is all I care about,” he went on, pacing the floor. “I have been half mad with anxiety on your account, for fear those idiotic servants should manage to startle you to death some dark evening-cowards, every one of them; but I mean to have someone to stay here and sit up—-” He paused suddenly, and listened, then stepped noiselessly to the door, and opening it, listened again intently. “William,” I whispered. He took no heed of me; but rapidly unlocking a cabinet drawer, he drew out a thirty-shooter, loaded and capped, and with his finger on the trigger stole softly to the door and into the hall, whither I followed him. Everything was silent, and the hall and stairs lamps were burning clear and high. I could hear the throbbing of my own heart as I stood there watching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Suddenly we both heard heavy rapid footsteps, seemingly overhead; and then confused noises, as of struggling, and quarrelling, and sobbing, mingled in a swelling clamour which sounded now near, deafeningly near, and then far, far away; now overhead, now beside us, now beneath, undistinguishable, indescribable, and unearthly. Then the rushing footsteps came nearer and nearer. And, clenching his teeth, while his face grew rigid and white in desperate resolve, William sprang up the staircase with a bound like a tiger. It has all passed in less than half the time I have taken to relate it, and while I yet stood breathless and with straining eyes, William had nearly reached the last step when I saw him stagger backwards, the thirty-shooter raised in his hand. There was a struggle, a rushing, swooping sound, two shots fired in rapid succession, a floating cloud of white smoke, through which I saw the streaming yellow hair and steel-blue eyes flash downward, and then a shriek rang out—the dreadful cry of a man in mortal terror—a crashing fall, beneath which the house trembled to its foundations, and I saw my husband’s body stretched before the conservatory door, whither he had toppled backwards—whether dead or dying I knew not. I remember dimly hearing my own voice in agonized screams, and the terror-stricken servants hurrying from the kitchens below. I remember the kind of face of my new nurse as she bravely rushed down and dispatched someone for the doctor, and made others help her to carry the senseless figure, with blood slowly dripping from the parted lips and staining the snowy linen shirt-front in great gouts and splashes, up to the chamber, where they laid him on his bed, and I, a wretched frenzied woman, knelt beside him with the sole, ceaseless prayer that brain or lips could form—“God help me!” #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
I remember the physician’s arrival, and the grave face and low clear voice of Dr. Winchester, as he made his enquiries; and then another physician summoned, and the low frightened voices, and peering frightened faces, and the lighted candles guttering away in currents of air form opening and shutting doors, and the long hours of night, and the cold grey dawning, the heart-rendering suspense, and speechless, tearless, wordless agony, and the sun rose, gloriously cloudless, smiling in radiance, as if there was not the shadow of death over the weary World beneath his rays, and I hear the verdict—“there was scarcely a hope.” However, God was merciful to me and to him, and my darling did not die. With a fevered brain and a shattered limb he lay there for weeks—lay there with the dark portals half opened to receive him; lay there, when I could no longer watch beside him, but lay prostrate and suffering in another apartment, tended by kind relatives and friends; but at length, when the mellow sunshine, and the crisp clear air of the soft shadowy October days stole into the sick room. William was able to be dressed and sit up for an hour or two amongst the pillows of his easy-chair by the window. And there he was, longing to be gone away from London. “Sarah, darling, weak or strong I must go,” he said in his trembling uncertain voice, and with a restless longing in his faded eyes, “I shall never get better in this house.” And so a few days afterwards, accompanied by the doctor and two nurses, we went down in a pleasant swift railroad journey to our dear, beautiful, peaceful home in New Haven. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
William never spoke of that night of horror but once, when Dr. Winchester told of the story connected with the original 18-room farmhouse we purchased, which morphed into a labyrinth of endless room, twisting and winding tunnels, and catacombs. Thirty years before we bought the farmhouse, the man who was both proprietor and tenant of the estate died, leaving his two daughters all he possessed. He had been a bad man, led a bad wild life, and died in a fit brough on by drunkenness; and these two daughters, grown to womanhood, inherited with his ill-gotten fold his evil nature. They were only half-sisters, and were believed to have been illegitimate also. The elder, a tall, masculine, strongly built woman, with masses of coarse fair hair, and bright, glitter blue eyes; and the younger, a plump, dark-haired rather pretty girl, but as treacherous, vain, and bold, as her elder sister was fierce, passionate, and cruel. They lived in this house, with only their servants, for several years after their father’s death, a life of quarrelling and bickering, jealousy, witchcraft, and heart-burnings, on various accounts. The elder strobe to tyrannize over the younger, who repaid it by deceit and crafty selfishness and black magic. At length a lover came, who the elder sister favoured; whom she loved as fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by fiercely and rashly as such wild untamed natures do; and by falsehood and deep-laid treachery the younger sister cast a love spell on the man and won his fickle fancy from the great, harsh-featured, haughty, passionate elder one. The elder woman soon perceived it, and there were dreadful scenes between the two sisters, when the younger taunted the elder, and the elder cursed the younger. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, as fate would have it, one night and at length—there had been a fiercer encounter of words than usual, and the dark-haired girl maddened her sister by insults, and the sudden information that she intended leaving the house in the morning, to stay with a relative until her marriage, which was to take place in one week from that time—the wronged woman, demon-possessed from that moment, waited in her dressing-room, until her sister entered, and then she sprang on her and screaming and struggling, they both wrested until they reached the staircase, where the younger sister, escaping for an instant, rushed wildly down, followed by her murderess, who overpowered her in spite of her frantic struggles, and with her strong, cruel, bony hands deliberately strangled her, until she lay a disfigured palpitating corpse at her feet. She had several scars that seemed as if they had been long there, and they were done by witchcraft. The officers of justice arrested the murderess a few hours afterwards. The jailers put irons on her legs (having received such a command). [It was the curious theory that chaining the prisoner would prevent her specter from afflicting anyone.] The weight of them was about eight pounds. These irons and her other afflictions soon brought her into convulsion fits so they thought she would die that night. She died by poison self-administered on the second day of her imprisonment. What is now known as the Winchester Mansion had been shut up and silent for many a year afterwards, and when, at length, and when, at length, an enterprising landlord put it in habitable order, and found tenants for it again, he only found them to lose them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Year after year passes away, its evil fame darkening with its massive masonry, for none could be found to sanctify with the sacred name and pleasures of home that dwelling blighted by an abiding curse. “I never told you, Sarah,” William said, “although I told my cousin Dr. Winchester, that from the first evening I led a haunted life in that beautiful house, and the more I struggled to disbelieve the evidence of my senses, and to keep the knowledge from you, the more unbearable it became, until I felt myself going mad. I knew I was haunted, but will that last night I had never witnessed what I dreaded day and night to see. And then, Sarah, when I fired, and I saw the devilish murderess face, with its demon eyes blazing on me, and the tall unearthly figure hurrying down to meet me, dragging the other struggling, writhing figure, with her long sinewy fingers seemingly pressed around the convulsed face, then I knew it was all over with me. If there had been a flaming furnace beside me I think I should have leaped into it to escape that awful sight.” That was over a century ago. Sarah eventually returned to the Winchester all along and made several changes to it over 38 years. It is now a 4 story, 160-room mansion, with over 25,500 square feet, sitting on four acres. It was once up to 600 rooms, likely 95,625 square with as many as 737 acres. The strange thing about witchcraft and legends is many of them are based in truth, and sometimes there are unexplainable continuity errors. Take for example An hysterical fit, from J.M. Charcot, Lectures on the Disease of the Nervous System (London, 1877). Look at the extruded tongue, reported during the seventeenth century in witchcraft cases at Gordon, Boston, Salem, and elsewhere. Notice also the legs crossed in spasm; at one time Mary Warren’s legs could not be uncrossed without breaking them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
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In a Nightmare of Supernatural Terror–Afraid to Move Hand or Foot!
The warning came too late to change that course of event. There has been time when many admitted some doubt of the validity of spectral evidence. This story I will tell to you now, as I have promised to do so, and yet I can hardly make you believe in the reluctance with which I even allow my thoughts go back to the times which I spent in my house—my first town residence after I was married. I loved so much my lovely mansion, I suppose. The wide emerald green lawns and quiet, glassy ponds and streams, bordered by luscious, blooming rhododendrons; of silent, mossy avenues, glorious with the flickering light that stole through pale green beech leaves; of rose gardens with grassy paths, jewel-sprinkled with shell-like petals of white, crimson, pink, and cream-like hues; of old-fashioned rooms with narrow, mullioned windows embowered in scarlet japonica and fragrant, starry jessamine. I supposed I possessed a deep love of them all. This was the first house we were sown in the Santa Clara, California. It was certainly a very fine house, both as o exterior and interior appearances. Large, massively built, agreeably darkened in woodwork and masonry by Time’s shading brush, in excellent repair, and the locality all that could be desire. Wide, lofty apartments, staircases, and landings; a handsome dining-room panelled in velvety dark-green “flock” and gold; a handsome drawing-room panelled in pale cream-colour and gold; airy bed-chambers and dressing-rooms—one, in particular, attached to what seemed the principal bedroom, with a vast mirror occupying the whole side of the apartment which was opposite to the door leading into the bed-chamber. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
“What a nice dressing-room! This house is perfect and expansion will be a joy.” I exclaimed, having a weakness, I confess, for large, handsome mirrors in the rooms I inhabit—William says impertinent things about my “wishing to see as much of myself as I can.” I know I am not all, in fact, rather what he should call petite, if he wished to be polite—but that is not my reason for liking a large mirror. As I spoke the words I looked about mechanically for the house—agent’s clerk who had been sent with us—a nervous-looking little man, with a pasty complexion, and orange-colored hair meekly plastered down at each side of his face. He had been untiringly trotting up and down stairs, unlocking doors, answering questions, and keeping up a harmless soliloquy of chatter about the beauties and excellencies of the “mansiond,” as he called it, ever since he entered its doors, but now he was nowhere to be seen. “What door have you open?” I said, speaking aloud to him, for suddenly a cold blast of air swept up the wide staircase and into the dressing-room door, but not entering. His face looked wither than before, and in his accents there was an almost terrified earnestness that puzzled me. The shadows of the afternoon seemed to deepen. The aspect of the suites of rooms and long silent corridors, with their doors ajar, as if unseen inhabitants were stealthily crouching behind them, drearily impressed me with a sense of dull desolation; and it was with a sudden sensation of childish fear and loneliness that I rushed after my husband, and took his arm as he hastily descended the stairs. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
“A spacious, handsome staircase, William” I remarked. “Yes; and a spacious, handsome price, you may be sure,” William responded. However, in this particular, he was exceedingly, and I agreeably, astonished. To our surprise, the house was rather affordable. William figured there must be a screw loose somewhere. He mentioned his opinion to the clerk in a more business-like expression, to the effect that the price seemed low, and that he trusted there was no—peculiar—eh? “Drains, gas, water, all right, sir—right as—a—a trivet, sir. However, the 18-room farmhouse is incomplete,” sad the clerk, looking over his shoulder oddly, as he spoke. “But chimneys, ventilators, roof, tiles—everything in the perfect repair and order, sir!” However, wonderful or not, the house seemed all that we could desire; the lowness of the price made it a decided bargain. I planned to expand the house, and make it even more lofty, and handsome; and in three weeks, huge furniture vanes, and a clever upholstered, had carpeted, curtained, and furnished our town mansion from garret to basement, and William and I, our two babies, a nurse, two maids, a cook, and a butler, were installed in what would become the Winchester Mansion. Dear William had been very generous—nay, almost extravagant—in his provisions for the comfort and pleasure of his wife and children; and my dressing-room and their nursery were fitted up so luxuriously and tastefully, that my feeling at the first inspection of them was that of self-gratulation on being such a fortunate woman, in having such a home, such babies, and such a husband. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
I arrayed myself for dinner that evening quite gleefully; standing before my splendid mirror amid the bule drapery, cushions, and couches of my charming dressing-room. I put on William’s favourite dress—a bronze-brown lustrous silk, with sparkling gold ornaments: he invariably kissed me when he saw it on, stroked my brown curls and face, and called me “Mrs. Winchester”—and was still standing before the glass smiling at myself, like the happy, foolish little woman I was, when I perceived to my discomfiture that William was standing in the doorway watching my doings, and grinning very visibly under his moustache. “Do not mind me, my dear, I beg! do not me the least. However, when you have done admiring Mrs. Winchester, perhaps you will be kind enough to let me know”—then, suddenly changing his tone, he exclaimed, “Have you the window open, Sarah, this chilly evening?” “No William,” I replied, glancing at it to make sure of the fact. “Change in the weather, then,” my husband said. “Come, Sarah, there is no use in making yourself any prettier!” He had just uttered the last words when I saw him spring aside suddenly, and look around. “What is the matter?” I said—“William, dear, what is the matter?” For his face had grown quite white, and with his back against the wall, he was staring about him wildly. “I do not know—Sarah—something”—he explained in a low tone; then recovering himself, with a laugh, he cried—“I struck myself against the door, I suppose! I declare one would think I was composed of old china, or wax, or sugar candy, I hurt and stunned me so! Come, dearest.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
He had not struck himself, for I had been watching him going out on the lobby, and I felt an uneasy conviction that he knew he had not done so, and only spoke as he did in order to deceive or satisfy me. why? Why did I think so? As I live I cannot tell why I thought so then—I know now. We had the “babies”—as William always called them—in the dessert, after the time-honoured fashion of making olives as well as olive branches of them; and then, when the lite ones had gone to bed, we sat side by side in he summer twilight, I lazily fanning myself, William bending over me the lover-husband he was. Then came the lamps, and I played for him, and we sang duet and spent as happy an evening in our new home as a married pair could wish to spend. I cannot tell why I felt so disinclined to go upstairs that night, tired as I was, too—for we had had a long journey up from the country. However as eleven struck, I routed William out of the easy chair where he had been indulging in a preliminary doze, and, ringing for my maid went up to my dressing-room. I like gas in my dressing-room, though not in my bedroom, and the globes at either side the great mirror were a blaze of light. As I entered I caught the reflection of a woman’s figure in the depths of the glass, no my maid’s. The glimpse I had was of a tall woman, strongly built, and broad-shouldered, a quantity of light hair hanging in a disordered manner on her neck, and the profile of a white, hard, masculine face, with the keen glittering eye turned watchfully towards the door. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This may seem an elaborately detailed description for the momentary glance I obtained, but it is well known with what lightning rapidity the organs of vision will, in moments of terror and amazement, convey impressions to the startled brain, impression accurate and indelible. I had taken but one step on entering, the next step the figure had vanished, and the mirror reflected by my own terrified face, and the homely, cheerful one of my maid Agnus, as she stooped over the dressing-table opening a jewel case. I dropped down on the nearest chair, and, in answer to the girl’s alarmed questions, replied that I did not feel very well. I was sick and shuddering from head to foot. Suddenly it flashed across me that it was from a similar cause I had seen my husband’s face grow ghastly, and that strange, terrified look come into his eyes,–he, who had been a soldier and unflinchingly had fought amidst the dead and dying on bloody Indian battlefields, almost boy as he was then! What was it? What had he seen? Nonsense! was I going to believe I had seen a ghost? Nonsense, a thousand times over! I heard my husband’s cheery voice as he ascended the stairs, and, quite angry with myself for giving way to such folly, I threw on my dressing gown, and, snatching up the brush from Agnus, I pulled my hair down and brushed it quite savagely, until my head ached well—for punishment. If the bright morning light disperses sweet illusions formed overnight, as people say it does, it disperses gloomy ones as well. With the warmth and brightness of the unclouded summer’s sun streaming in through softly coloured blinds, brining out the velvety green of soft new carpets and lounges, the rainbow tints of glittering chandeliers, vases, and ornaments, the gilding on bright fresh wallpaper and the spotless folds of snowy window drapery, it was impossible for an instant to connect anything dark or dismal with the Winchester House. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Why, my dressing-room even where I had been so silly last evening, was like a woodland bower, with its deep purple-blue hangings and rose painted china flower-vases filled with bouquets from our country home. Clustering fragrant honeysuckle half-opened moss roses, drooping emerald-green fern, and masses of delicious jessamine dropping its over-blown blossoms on the white toilet cover, lace-flounced and tied with blue ribbons, as Agnus delighted to have it. “I think this such a charming room and such a charming house altogether, William!” I said; “and you have been such a dear, thoughtful old darling!” For I had perceived that the dear fellow had had his own half-length portrait hung over my writing-table. Quite a pleasant surprise for me, for I thought he intended it to be hung in the dining-room, and I delighted in having the dear pleasant brown eyes looking for a me when I was busy writing or sewing. “I am so glad you like everything, Sarah,” said he. “Why, William, do you not?” However, William had walked off whistling, and presently I heard uproarious baby-laughter, and baby-chatter, and thumping, trotting of small fat feet, as William put the tiny nursery into dire confusion by his morning game of romps with his son and heir, and red-cheeked baby-daughter. And it did seem as if I must have been dreaming or delirious, when this day and many a succeeding one passed away swiftly and pleasantly, without the slightest recurring event to remind me of my strange alarm on the night of our arrival. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
We had been in the Winchester House about a fortnight, when one morning I received a visit from Mrs. Ellen Kenna. A very pretty, lady-like person she was, and as we had some common acquaintances we chattered away very freely and pleasantly for half-an-hour or so. As she rose to go she asked suddenly if we like the house. I replied in the affirmative rather warmly. She was opposite the light, and I saw an involuntary elevation of her eye-brows and compression of her lips that puzzled me. I fancied it was because I had spoken so enthusiastically. Yet her own manner was anything but languidly fashionable, being very cordial and decided. “Yes; it is a very nice house, roomy and well-built,” she said, after a moment’s pause; “I am so glad you like it—I live down the road in Oakland.” We took the carriage to have dinner at Bertha Hass’s mansion that for the following evening, and when we returned about three days later, in spite of a yawning remonstrate from William, I tipped off softly to have a peep at my darlings, before I went to bed. The nursey was a large, pleasant room at the end of the long corridor leading from our own apartments, and, gently turning the handle and gathering my rustling silk dress around me, I opened the door and went in. There was a night-lamp burning clearly, shining softly on the tiny cribs with the sweet flushed infant faces, the long golden-brown lashes lying in dimpled apple-bloom cheeks, the waxen hands and little rounded arms thrown above the tossed golden curls, and the Heavenly calm of the little sleeping forms and pure, peaceful breathing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
I wondered would any mother, no matter how cold and careless, have neglected doing what I did, as I bent over my treasures, and prayed God that His angels might keep watch over each cherub head on its little, soft, white pillow? I had looed at and kissed them, and turned to go, when I glanced toward the nurse’s bed. “Are you not well, Linda? What is the matter?” I said in an anxious whisper. She was a very respectable and trustworthy servant, as well as being, a kind, gentle creature with the little ones, and consequently highly valued by me, but her health was never very good, and she was subject to severe attacks of nervous headache and sleeplessness. She was sitting up in bed, her hands grasping the bedclothes, her face and lips ashy white, and her as big as saucers and staring wildly, as if they would start from their sockets. “Linda! Good Heavens! what is the matter?” I gasped. “Ma’am! Oh, ma’am—oh, mistress, I am dying!” We summoned a doctor and administered restoratives, and chafed the half-senseless girl’s damp, cold hands. I could imagine no cause for her sudden illness, and the others servants were very voluble in exclamations and laments. However, when the physician—a pale, kindly, grave-looking man arrived—after a moment’s examination, he demanded if she had been frightened? I replied in the negative, and was proceeding to describe to him the state in which I had found her, when I heard the housemaid and Agnus whispering energetically together. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The doctor was paying tribute to the dramatic affliction of the girl, when he said, “This strikes hard upon me, that you are at this very present charged with unfamiliar spirits. This is your bodily person they speak to. They say now they see these unfamiliar sprits some to your bodily person. Now what do you say to that?” Agnus said that she saw a specter leaving Linda’s body, as she was going into hideous convulsions. The fit was far too violent to be acting. This was terribly “real” and convincing. “What is it? Speak out at once my god girl!” said the doctor sternly to the housemaid; “you know something of this.” Both servants looked apprehensively at me and at William. “Speak up at once, Bethany; the girl’s life may depend on it! Tell the truth, my girl, and do not be afraid,” said her master kindly, but firmly. “I do not know nothing, sir—indeed, no ma’am, said Angus confusedly; “but—I think, ma’am—she seen the ghost, sir!” “That what!” cried William angrily. “She have, sir!” persisted Agnus eagerly, now that her confession was made. “We are all afraid, sir; but she has been worser nor the rest of us. And she says to me only this morning, ‘Agnus,’ she says, ‘if I see it, I will die!’” “What ghost, you fool?” cried William more angrily. “A pretty set you are!—great, grown men and women, afraid of some bogie story you have heard when you were gossiping with the servants on the balcony, I suppose!” “No, indeed, sir,” said Agnus; “I was not gossippin’, sir; but the parlour-maid over the way, sir Mrs. Kenna’s parlour-maid, ma’am—she told me that there was the Devil–” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“I thought so!” interrupted William. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves not to have an ounce of brains among you.” “But, sir! Agnus burst out again, unheeding her master’s rather uncomplimentary phrenological verdict, “we did not mind, sir, though we was a bit frightened, until we see it, sir! The butler see it, and he ran, and cook ran.” “And you ran after them?” said William, with an indignant laugh. “I did, sir, for I saw it too—a big woman with fair hair all over her shoulders,” said Agnus, in an awestruck whisper to Harriet, who nodded her head. The doctor looked up, gravely and without a smile. The servants clustered together near the door, and muttered in undertones. William looked at me with a forced smile, which died away in an instant: “You are not so foolish as to credit any of this nonsense, Sarah?” he said. The servants all turned eagerly to hear their mistress’s opinion. I am afraid it was written in my pallid face. Was it true? Was it what I had seen? Could there be any reality in this, that here, in our pleasant, happy home, beneath the roof with out helpless little one, was a dreadful, unblessed presence—a shadowy horror; that that thing with the watchful, cruel eyes had not been a mere vision of imagination, the mere offspring of an active brain, and the unstrung nerves of an overtired frame? Is there conclusive proof that the person represented had been trafficking with the Devil? “Oh! they imagined something from the stories they heard, I dare say,” I faltered. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The butler shook his head solemnly: “I could swear to it, ma’am.” “And so could I ma’am!” chorused the cook and housemaid. “Hush!” said the doctor, as the nurse, roused, at length, from her stupor, lay quietly, with closed eyes, from which the tears streamed down her face. “Some one must sit up with her now,” said the doctor, looking around. “I will, sir, if my mistress allows me, said Bethany. Certainly, Bethany,” she said at once. He communicated his instructions to her and took his leave, promising to call in the morning. “Did you ever hear anything like this folly, doctor,” said William, as he shook hands with him at the head of the stairs. “Oh! yes, sir, I often hear such stories,” said the doctor quietly, as he bade us both goodnight.” William! what has frightened the girl? What has she seen?” I whispered, clasping my husband’s arm. “Sarah, go to bed, and do not be a goose,” was William’s reply. “William—I saw that thing—that woman, in my dressing-room,” I said, trembling, “and oh! think if the children were to see I and be frightened like poor Mary!” “Well, Sarah,” said my husband sharply, “if you are going to listen to ignorant servants’ superstitions and run out of your house, just as we are comfortably settled in it, on account of a foolish sickly woman fainting from hearing a ghost story—I say—it is a pity you ever came into it.” He spoke very decidedly and sternly, and yet I felt in my inmost heart that the uttered what he wished me to believe, not what he believed himself. I said no more, but went to my bedroom—not into the dreaded dressing-room—and lay awake listening and fevered with nervous anxiety until the next morning dawned. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The nurse was better and able to speak the next day, though extremely weak and unnerved yet. The doctor forbade much questioning, and all that could be got from her at intervals was that something had come up the staircase and ran through the corridor, that she heard struggling and scuffling outside, and then the nursey door opened and she saw a woman’s face peering in, the eyes gleaming wickedly at her, and it had the yellow hair that “belong to the ghost.” “The woman has had a bad fit of nightmare—that is all, Sarah,” said William, rattling his paper unconcernedly, when I repeated to him the story I had just heard from poor Linda’s trembling lips. It might be so; but why were they all agreed as to what they had seen? Why did they all speak of the tangled fair hair, and the wicked gleaming eyes? Was our house haunted? Was this the mysterious cause of the exceedingly moderate price of the house and land and the house-agent’s profuse civility? The nurse did not recover strength, and being worse than useless in her present weak, hysterical condition, I sent her down to her country home for change of air, and hired another temporarily in her place. The newcomer was a stout, small, cheerful woman of about forty. I liked her face the moment I saw her; for, besides its smiling, honest expression, there was a good deal of decided character in the large firm features. “You appear to be a sensible person,” I said, when giving her her first instructions in the nursey, “and I think I can rely on you. You know my nurse is leaving because of illness, and that illness was caused by her being frightened by—a ghost-story.” I paused; but the woman remained unmoved, listening to me in respectful silence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“The servants downstairs have got some nonsense of the kind into their head,” I went on; “they will try to frighten you, too, and tell you they have seen—-” I could not go on. For my life I could not calmly giver her the description of that shadowy image of fear. “They cannot frighten me, ma’am, said my new nurse quietly. “I am not afraid of spirits.” I thought she spoke in jest, and smiled. “I am not indeed, ma’am,” she repeated. “I have lived where there were such things seen but they never harmed me.” “You do not mean to say you believe such nonsense?” said I, hypocritically trying to speak carelessly. “Oh yes, ma’am, I do! I could not disbelieve it,” said the nurse, opening her eyes with earnestness, “I know the story of this house, ma’am.” What story” I cried. The woman coloured and looked confused. “I beg your pardon, ma’am—I mean what people say is seen here.” “What do they say? Do not frighten me,” I said, and my voice quivered in spite of me; “I have heard nothing but what the servant said.” The nurse looked deeply concerned. “I am very stupid, ma’am; I beg your pardon for repeating such stores to you—I daresay it is only idle people’s gossip.” She went about her duties, and I went—not into my dressing-room—but down into the drawing-room, where I say by the window looking out until my husband returned. Two or three weeks more passed away. I lay down on my pet chintz-covered couch, near the window, to look at the sky and the starts. Dead silence—and the “ting, ting” of the French clock on the mantelpiece marked the half-hour after eight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Dear me, how dark it was growing! this brooding storm I supposed, which had been making me feel so languid and restless. I wish it would come down and cool the air—not tonight, though. Dear me, how lonely it is. I wish William were home. Those women are talking very loudly—I wonder nurse would—here I got drowsy, and my eyes ached looking for the stars that had not come. In a few minutes I roused again, my maternal anxiety changing into indignation as I heard the women’s voices growing louder and shriller, and some doors opened and shut violently. What can nurse be thinking of? They will wake the children most certainly, and William was so long in falling asleep—quite fevers my own boy! I shall really reprover her very plainly. I never needed to do so before. What could she be thinking of? Dead silence again. Well, this was lonely; I was inclined to ring for lights, and turn on all the burners in the chandeliers by way of company. Then I remembered there were some wax matches in one of the drawers of a writing-tray just at hand, and thought I would light the gas myself instead of brining the servants down—yes—but I wanted company. It was so dark and dreary, and—and—I was afraid. Afraid to stir—afraid to look at the door! a numbing, chilling tide of icy fear ebbing through every vein—afraid to draw a breath—afraid to move hand or foot, in a nightmare of supernatural terror. At last, by a violent effort, I sprang at the bell-handle, and pulled it frantically, and as soon as I had done so, with a sudden revulsion of feeling, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my childish cowardice, although I could not have helped it, and it had overcome me as suddenly as unexpectedly. How William would have laughed at me! #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
There were those servants talking again, tramping about and banging the doors as before. Really, this was unbearable; cook must be in one of her fits of temper, and certainly had forgotten herself strangely. And, as the quarrelsome tones grew louder and louder—evidently in bitter recrimination, although I could not catch a word—my own anger rose proportionately, and, forgetting loneliness and darkness in my indignant anxiety lest my children should be waked by this most unseemly behaviour of the servants, I ran hastily out of the room and up the wide staircase. The dime light from the clouded evening sky, still further subdued by the gold and purple-stained glass of the conservatory door, streamed faintly down the steps from the first landing, and by it, just as I had ascended half way, I discovered the short, thick-sett figure of the nurse rushing down—of course, in answer to my ring, I supposed. Involuntarily I stepped aside to avoid coming in violent contact with her as she feld past. No, it was not the nurse; and the woman following her in headlong haste, sweeping by me so that the current of air from their floating dresses struck icily cold on my brow where the clammy dew of perspiration had started in great drops, was—was—-Merciful Heavens! What was that tall figure, with the coarse, disordered, yellow hair, the white face, and glittering, steel-blue eyes, that glinted fiendishly on me for one dreadful instant, and then vanished? Vanished as the pursed and pursuing figures had disappeared in the shadows of the wide, lofty hall, without sound of voice or footstep? #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
If you had a chance to explore areas never before seen within Sarah’s house, would you take it?
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A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
When You Can Stop Thinking of Yourself as Omnipotent, the World is a Safer Place!
Dearest son and friend of Mine, do Me a favour. Put some finality into your life. That is to say, make Me your supreme and ultimate end, and you will mingle with the Blessed. In the past, you have not always done that. More often that I like to say, your affection has centered on yourself and other creatures. So your affection will have to be cauterized. Why? Seek yourself in something, and immediately you collapse and give up. Therefore, you should refer everything to Me. I am the One who gave everything. Individual graces—consider them as drips from the Divine Tap, drops from the Heavenly Basin, and give Me full credit for them; that is to say, in the Divine Plan all things have to be recirculated to their origin. The tintinnabulous and the timid, the rich and the poor, all drink the Living Water from Me. Those who serve Me as though they were slaves—that is to say, spontaneously and freely—will, according to John, “receive grace after grace,” (1.16). Whoever wants to make hay without Me or delight in some good not known to Me will not be rooted in True Joy, nor will one’s heart expand. Rather, one’s spiritual progress will be obstructed and restricted in a multiplicity of ways. How do you get out of this mess, My poor friend? First, ascribe nothing good to yourself. Then do not attribute virtue to any other human being. Last, give God everything, without whom Humankind has nothing. So what is so hard about this? After all, I gave everything I had; I want you to do that same. And I insist—nay, I require—that you thank Me for it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
When Virtue strides into the room, Vainglory vanishes. When Heavenly Grace and True Charity sweep into the room, Virid Envy turns up her nose, High Anxiety has a fit, Particular Friendship is beside himself. We all know why. Grace and Charity have this way of clearing the floor of cranks and releasing all the warmths of the soul. If you get My drift, you will rejoice in Me alone, hope in Me alone. “No one is good,” Luke has quoted Me as saying, “except God alone,” (18.19). God must be praised above all things and blessed in all things. Agency is an eternal principle and is implicit in the test of life. We must constantly choose between opposites: good and evil. Satan sought to destroy the free agency of man, and here on Earth he is working to entangle man in sin. “Wherefore, because that Satan rebelled against me, and sought to destroy the agency of man, which I, the Lord God, had given him, and also, that I should give unto him mine own power; by the power of mine Only Begotten, I caused that he should be cast down; and he became Satan, yea, even the devil, the father of all lies, to deceive an to blind men (and women), and lead them captive at his will, even as many as would no hearken unto my voice,” reports Moses 4.3-4. To use our agency wisely, we need information to act upon. We need a knowledge of the laws of life, with their accompanying blessings and protective punishments. When we know the gospel, the elements of the “thou shalts” and the “thou shalt nots,” we will make better choices. I would give If only we could forget a past that we cannot change, it would give us some comfort. If we could only choose to forget the cruelest moments, we could, as time goes on, free ourselves from pain. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, the wrong sticks like a nettle in our memory. The only way to remove he nettle is with a surgical procedure called forgiveness. Christians have long believed that forgiveness lies at the heart of faith. Psychologists have recently found that forgiveness may also lie at the heart of emotional and physical well-being. For Christians, forgiveness is a familiar concept. We find God is called to “bear with each other and forgive” and see it modeled throughout Scripture—in the narrative of the prodigal son, in Jesus’ command to forgive seventy times seven, and in the parable of the unmerciful servant. Forgiveness is central to the gospel message of Christ’s death and resurrection. We encounter texts and symbols of forgiveness almost everywhere we look—in the Lord’s Prayer, in confession and the assurance of pardon, in baptism, and in the Lord’s Supper. Even though we know a lot about forgiveness and often want to forgive, we do not always know how. The Bible offers no recipe for forgiving. We can get stuck. When someone hurts us, those angry, hurt, and bitter feelings come easily. Maneuvering through the mire of hard feelings takes moral muscle. How do we do it? First, what forgiving does not mean: despite the familiar cliché “forgive and forget,” most of us find forgetting nearly impossible. Forgiveness—at least for significant offenses—does not involve a literal forgetting. We are made to remember hurts. As children need to remember the pain from a hot burner, we need to remember the hurts from people who burn us, so that we can prevent future harm. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Instead of forgetting, forgiveness involves remembering graciously. The forgiver remembers the true (though painful) parts, but without the embellishment of angry adjectives and adverbs that stir up contempt. Forgiveness also differs from ignoring, excusing, minimizing, tolerating, condoning, legally pardoning, liking, and reconciling. At times, the church has done a disservice to survivors of neglect or abuse, suggesting that they must reconcile or must reenter a hurtful relationship with their offenders. Sometimes reconciliation is inappropriate. It is wise to stay away from people who have proven themselves abusive or untrustworthy. Yet we still can forgive—a move that paradoxically frees us from the shackles of resentment and rage. Moreover, we need not wait to forgive until we receive an apology. We cannot always count on our offenders to apologize. Sometimes, we simply see the situation differently. The offender sees a minor slight, when the victim feels a major slam. If we refuse to forgive until we receive an apology, we give the key that can unlock the prison of our pain to the very person who betrayed us in the first place. Scripture does not say that we need to forgive only if the offender apologizes. Yet when we are the transgressors, Scripture is clear: we must confess our sins and repent, turning away from sin. Second, what forgiving does mean: when we forgive, we start by honestly acknowledging the hurt. Forgiving is a lot like grieving. We have lost something—a relationship, trust, or a reputation. Hurt and anger are normal. We acknowledge them. However, then we let go of grudges, bitterness, and vengeance against the person we blame for hurting us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
As Christians, we can focus on the truth that our offender is a person, someone who bears God’s image as much as we do. We can see the hurt they caused us as evidence that they are sinful and as proof that they need grace, just as we do. And we being to see ourselves as agents who can show grace toward them. To make grace concrete, we can find even small ways to genuinely wish them well. Or we may pray for their restoration and redemption in a more ultimate sense. When we do these things—even when we do not explicitly tell the offender—we are forgiving. Our gift of forgiveness is real. And when painful memories and anger bubble up, we roll up our sleeves and flex our moral muscles again. Forgiveness takes effortful practice, and God’s redeeming grace makes our practice perfect. As I have defined them, psychotherapists are professionals who allow people to relate to them in terms of earlier dreaded or desires experiences. They may be treated as selfobjects satisfactory or unsatisfactory, as a compliant or stubborn other, as a tyrant, a terror, a feeder, attacker, protector, omniscient, omnipotent, powerless, always getting it wrong, and so on—just like a parent. Therapists let themselves be used, first as “inner objects,” and later, as the patient improves, as objects in shared reality. That is why psychotherapists deserve their pay (within limits), and why friends and family may in the long run not be the best people to help someone integrate who have gone to pieces. It is not right that they should try to put up with being the object of unrealistic phantasies for more than a little while. If they do, they deprive the sufferer of an important realistic relationship while themselves being no more than inexperienced, untrained psychotherapists. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Professional psychotherapists are needed to be the climbing-frames of the consulting-room adventure-playground, where people can discover what they are made of and what the World of the other is made of. At such time, the therapist us used in the sense of an object. It is not an easy position to occupy! The expected control over the narcissistically-cathected object and its function is closer to the concept which grownups have of the control they expect to have over their own body and mind, than of their experience of others and of their control over them. The object of such affections will feel pretty oppressed! Yet accepting that a person may need to behave in this way is the only way we know of at present, to provide enough safety to let people relax their defences and reach the sore regions. When a baby has to give up one’s imagined omnipotence and live in the World of shared reality, it can be a fortunate circumstance. The rage has the effect of establishing this World as a safe place. The subject says to the object “I destroyed you,” and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says “Hullo object! I destroyed you. I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you.” The subject can now use the object that has survived. From the point of view of psychotherapy, for people to discover that the imagined effects of even the most destructive rage, and even the most chaotic confusion, in fact destroys neither them nor the therapist, may be the major repair to be done. There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring he mind under control—to put it under a daily routine of exercises and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
With a vengeful World retaliating, when you can stop thinking of yourself as omnipotent, the World is a safer place. The (m)other may not have survived in a person’s phantasy—the therapist does: “C’est son metier.” How does this help? It heals splits. Once another person’s reality is safely established as independent of my confusion or rage, I become more capable of realistic acceptance of myself and others, and of ambivalence. I become saner. I can allow my model of myself-in-situation, and my map of myself-in-the-World, to carry contradictory images. I can accept that I am sometimes honest and sometimes not, and that you are sometimes kind to me and sometimes not. By contrast, when I was unsure of your independent reality, I tried to carry only one coherent internally consistent model at any time: the right one. In shared reality, I have to put up with the fact that others are to some extent exactly as I want them to be and to some extent remain stubbornly their own inconvenient selves. Very interestingly, babies whose mothers can tolerate their times of rage, soon show themselves as more sure of themselves than other babies. This must have a bearing, too on gender differences, considering our culture’s encouragement for boy to prove their assertiveness, and for girls to prove their good nature even to the point of submissiveness—even, sometimes, to the point of allowing themselves to be victimized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Babies that have been seen through this phase well are likely to be more aggressive clinically than the ones who have not been seen through the phase well, and for whom aggression is something that cannot be encompassed, or something that can be retained only in the form of a liability to be an object of attack. It is easy to imagine that allowing a person to rage and make chaos is in itself therapeutic. In some circumstances this is so. However, in the circumstances now under consideration, it is the (m)other’s or the therapist’s ability to “survive” that is being tested and established. A person may need to get back to the bad feelings of the very early days, yes, but in my view the therapeutic experience is not just that of expressing the hurt or angry or terrified feelings. These have to be expressed in order that further healing may take place. The real healing comes also in part from being listened to and understood and recognized as a person while having these feelings. The real healing comes from being held while all this is going on, at first by another person, and later by one’s own functioning personality. In this process it may also happen that a person gets in touch with some totally unexpected good and quiet times of being. This is what must sometimes be the aim of regression and relaxation, re-integrating the good and quiet times when someone else is looking after us. In therapy, people can discover another person, the therapist who is affected by the baby (part of them) but whose fate is not under that baby’s control. Symmetrically, that baby can discover that it is part of a whole person. This starts the process of growing up, of becoming an adult who can become angry but who is not swallowed up by anger. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
The anger is integrated as a part of the whole personality, but it is not like the whole. The anger can become depersonalized. We can come distance and detach our selves from other feelings, and cease to be overwhelmed by misery, fear, or futility. The great achievement is to be able to say, “I feel terrible, but I am more than a terrible feeling.” Meaning depends on context. The context holds things together Without a context there is no meaning, only unintegrated bits. For instance, when building a house, a stud is a bit without a context. When the stud is combined with other studs and used to make a frame, it begins to make sense in the context of the cube of which it has become a part. After a good deal more work, it has become part of a house to live in. The fallacy in Christian Science theory is the pretense that problems and pains, diseases and malfunctions, cancer and crime do not exist among us here in this physical World. If we turn only to pure Spirit and leave out the World in time and space and form, then, undeniably, they do not exist. However, we may not leave them out of practical reckoning while we have to live in this body, much as some of us would like to. If the theory floats in mists of fatuous optimism, the art of Christian Science healing does in some cases bring very successful results. Why? It is never the truly spiritual healer who temporarily feels the pain or shows the symptoms of one’s patient’s disease, but only the physical-magnetic healer. Uncritical believers in so-called metaphysical healing and in faith-cure theories are sooner or later subjected to the discipline of facts. The intensity of their pains and the gravity of their ills are intended to, and do, bring them to a truer view of actualities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Instead of blaming themselves for failure to demonstrate good health, they ought to blame these theories for having mislead them. Such failure is a change to revise imperfect beliefs, to cast out errors and start again. This surely is to the good and something to be satisfied about. The problem of bodily healing is a complicated one and often depends on more than a single factor. Those who are likely to decry this proviso are always those who tell us only of the successes of mental or “spiritual” healing, but not of its failures. The comparative figures of the two sets of results are tremendously disproportionate. To open one’s eyes to the flaunted success of this system and to shut them to its aching failures is, not the way to understand it aright. To exaggerate what it has achieved and to minimize or deny what it has been unable to achieve—as is done by its ardent partisans—represents a falling away from intellectual integrity. To take a typical example, consider the famous healing sanctuary at Lourdes, France. It was established in 1860. During recent years the attendance of sick and crippled patents has been no less than six hundred thousand annually. Yet during the first seventy years of the sanctuary’s existence, a total of only five thousand cures was reported. This should represent, on a conservative estimate, about one percent of successful treatments. The number of those pilgrim-patients who failed to benefit must therefore run into millions! We dwell on this example not to decry Lourdes, which is doing a blessed and benign work which everyone should respect, and certainly not to derogate its religious aspect, but to point out that the failures in every school of healing, whether materialists, mental, or religious, must exist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
That the inspiration which brought Lourdes into being was truly divine and that the most amazing cures have been achieved there in a manner only to be described as miraculous, we fully accept. However, there are limitations and disappointments inherently present in this kind of healing must also be accepted. Do they not remind us of those medieval alchemists who talked glibly of transmuting brass into gold, the while their tattered sleeves and torn garments betrayed their shame-faced poverty! Facts are stern and cannot be laughed off. Exaggerated expectations are inevitably disappointing. These failures are not held against such systems. No healing system, no healer, certainly not even the most orthodox, could have a record consisting only of triumphs. However, no movement which boasts of its successes and ignores its failures has the right to call itself scientific. For only by studying its failures could it ever learn not only that there are errors mixed up with its truths, but also exactly what errors they are. There mere giving of an auto-suggestions, such as “I am perfect health,” which is belied by facts and made untrue by the body’s condition, cannot bring about a cure. Such a fictious statement can only bring about a fictitious result. To deny an illness’ existence while refraining from denying the body’s existence, is illogical. The break with long-held bad personal habits, coupled with the brining to birth of entirely new goods ones, is a difficult experience. However, this is also an immensely rewarding one. Pray for guidance in self-improvement and for help in self-purification. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Reality is always a mess. However, it is clear that we are rapidly on our way, and the transition to the electronic office has triggered an eruption of social, psychological, and economic consequences. The current wordquake is more than the result of new machines. It has restructured all the human relationships and roles in the office as well. People now send messages instantly, to places all over the World. They make video calls and correspond with their doctor over the Internet. For the most part, the functions of the secretary have been eliminated. As speech-recognition technology has grown more popular, typing, in many cases, has become obsolete. Dictation equipment is turned to the distinctive accents of each individual user and converts the sounds into written words, thus entirely by-passing the typing operation. When I delivered a speech at the International Word Processing convention, for example, I was asked if my secretary uses the machine for me. When I said I typed my own drafts and that in fact, my secretary could hardly get near my computer, cheers rang through the room. They dreamed of a day when the classified section in the newspaper may include ads like this: Wanted: Group Vice President Responsibilities include coordinating finance, marketing, product line development in several divisions. Must have demonstrated ability to apply sound management control. Report to Exec. VP, multi-line international company. TYPING REQUIRED. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Executives, by contrast, are likely to resist sullying their fingertips, just as they resist fetching their own mugs of coffee, dry-cleaning, lunch and children from daycare. And knowing that speech-recognition equipment is here, and they can dictate and have the machine do all the typing, they will resist learning how to handle a keyboard all the more. The secretary is likely to become a nanny for professional adults, which will be seen as a necessity for many corporations because it will save the executive time and allow one to deal with more pressing matters which will earn the company more revenue. Imagine all the business deals that can be closed on the golf course now. However, the unevadable fact remains that Third Wave production in the office, as it has collided with the old Second Wave systems, has produced anxiety and conflict as well as reorganization, restructuring, and—for some—rebirth into new careers and opportunities. The new system has changed all the old executive turfs, the hierarchies, the gender role divisions, the departmental barriers of the past. Al of this has raised many fears. Opinion divides sharply between those who insist that millions of jobs have vanished (and that today’s secretaries are mainly being reduced to mechanical slaves) and a more sanguine view widely held about secretaries. Secretaries are far from being reduced to mindless, repetitive processors. However, they are becoming “para-principals,” sharing in some of the professional work and decision-making from which they had once been largely excluded until now. What we are seeing is a sharp division between those white-collar workers who move up to more responsible positions and those who move down—and eventually out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
When automation first began arriving on the scene, economist and trade unionists in many countries forecasted massive unemployment. Instead, employment in the high-technology nations expanded. As the manufacturing sector shrank, the white-collar and service sectors expanded, taking up the slack. However, if manufacturing continues to shrink, and if the office employment is to be out through wringer at the same time, where will the jobs of tomorrow come from? Nobody knows. Despite endless studies and vehement claims, the forecast and the evidence are contradictory. Attempts to relate investment in mechanization and automation to levels of manufacturing employment show what the Financial Times of London calls an “almost complete lack of correlation.” Japan once had the highest rate of investment in new technology, as a percentage of value added, of any country in a seven-nation study. It also had the highest growth in employment. Britain, whose investment in machinery was the lowest, showed the greatest loss of jobs. The American experience roughly paralleled that of Japan—technology and new jobs both increasing—while Sweden, France, Germany, and Italy all showed markedly individual patterns. It is clear that the level of employment is not merely a reflection of technological advance. It does not simply rise and fall as we automate or fail to do so. Employment is the net result of many converging policies. Pressures on the job market may well increase dramatically in the years ahead. However, it is naïve to single out the computer as their source. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What is certain is that both the office and the factory are destined to be revolutionized in the decades ahead. The twin revolutions in the white-collar sector and in manufacture add up to nothing less than a wholly new mode of production for society—a gain step for the human race. This step carries with it indescribably complex implications. It will affect not only such things as the level of employment and the structure of industry but also the distribution of political and economic power, the size of our work units, the international division of labour, the role of women in the economy, the nature of work, and the divorce of producer from consumer; it will even later so seemingly simple a fact as the “where” of work. Hidden inside our advance to a new production system is a potential for social change so breathtaking in scope that few among us have been willing to face its meaning. For we are revolutionizing our homes as well. Apar from encouraging smaller work units, apart from permitting a decentralization and de-urbanization of production, apart from altering the actual character of work, the new production system is shifting literally millions of jobs out of offices and back into factories and homes. As more commerce is done online, less people are shopping at physical stores, so we are seeing the need for more factories to house all the products. Also, with pandemic forcing people to work at home, millions have decided they like the change and can get more done and have more time for their family because they are not spending hours communing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Every institution we know, from the family to school and the corporation is being transformed. Watching masses of people scything a field three hundred and sixty years ago, only a madman would have dreamed that the time would soon come when the fields would be depopulated, when people would crowd into urban factories to earn their daily bread. And only a madman would have been right. Today it takes an act of courage to suggest that our biggest factories and office tower may, within our lifetimes, permanently stand half empty, reduced to use as ghostly warehouses or converted into living spaces. Yet his is precisely what we are seeing with the new mode of production—a return to cottage industry on a new higher, electronic basis, and with it a new emphasis on the home as the center of society. To suggest that millions of us will spend our time at home, or in a factory, instead of going out to an office, has unleashed an immediate shower of enlightenment. Once people used to say things like, “People do not want to work at home, even if they could. Look at all the women struggling to get out of the home and into a job!” “How can you get any work done with kids running around?” “People will not be motivated unless there is a boss watching them.” “People need face-to-face contact with each other to develop the trust and confidence necessary to work together.” “The architecture of the average home is not set up for it.” “What do you mean work at home—a small blast furnace in every basement?” “What about zoning restriction and landlords who object?” “The unions will kill the idea.” “How about the tax collector? The tax people are getting tougher on deductions clamed for working at home?” And the ultimate stopper: “What, and stay home all day with my wife (or husband)?” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Yet there are equally, if not more compelling reasons three hundred and sixty years ago to believe people would never move out of the home field to work in factories. After all, they had laboured in their own cottages and the nearby land for 10,000 years, not a mere 360. The entire structure of family life, the process of child-rearing and personality formation, the whole system of property and power, the culture, the daily struggle for existence were all bound to the hearth and the soil by a thousand invisible chains. Yet these chains were slashed in short order as soon as a new system of production appeared. Today that is happening again, and a whole group of social and economic forces are converging to transfer the locus of work. Life is changing, so we must also change. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to kill. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not take what is not given. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not engage in abusive relationships. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not speak falsely or deceptively. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harm self or others through poisonous thought or substance. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not dwell on past errors. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow not to speak of self separate from others. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not harbour ill will toward any planet, animal, or human being. Knowing how deeply our lives intertwine, we vow to not abuse the great truth of the Three Treasures. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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He Covenanted with the Devil Until He Should Arrive to the Age of Sixty Years!
He might be living, or he might be dead. There came no word of him, or from him. I was fond enough of her to be satisfied with this—he never disturbed us. While there were many individual acts of witchcraft in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, there was never an attempt or plot to make witchcraft a formal religion which would supplant Christianity. Yet we need not conclude that William Baker and his fellow-confessors were lying. It is probable that they, like the afflicted girls, were hysterics subject to hallucination. Certainly that is the conclusion to be drawn from Thomas Brattle’s opinion of them in his “Letter”: “my faith is strong concerning them that they are deluded, imposed upon, and under the influence of some evil spirit, and therefore unfit to be evidences either against themselves or anyone else.” Mr. Brattle wrote this in October 1692, when Massachusetts was retuning to stability. However, at the height of the excitement confessions like Mr. Baker’s seemed convincing enough. For one thing, they had a curious precision: he did not say there were about three hundred witches in the country but “about three hundred and sever”; he did not say there were about a hundred young wizards at the mustering of the Satanic militia but “about an hundred five.” However, what made these confessions most believable was that they offered a simple and comprehensive explanation for all the frightening events at Salem, at a time when explanations were not easy to discover. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
There is also some testimony which remains ambiguous even today. Samuel Wardwell, for example, at his preliminary examination confessed himself a wizard. He had begun, he said, with white magic, “with telling of fortunes which sometimes came to pass” And, he said, “he used also when any creature came into his field to bid the Devil to take it, and it may be the Devil took advantage of him by that.” Eventually he had signed a pact: “He covenanted with the Evil until he should arrive to the age of sixty years.” He had renounced this confession at his trial, saying that he had made it, but that he had belied himself. He added that it was all one: “he knew he should die for it whether he owned it or no.” Ordinarily one would simply accept his renunciation. However, there are several puzzling circumstances here. For one thing, it was not all one whether he maintained or renounced his confession. People who maintained their confessions were not being brought to trail, much less executed. For another, at least a part of his confession was true; he had dabbled in the occult for some time, telling a great many fortunes, and boasting that he could make animals come to him when he wished. Finally, Mr. Wardwell was executed. However, in 1693, when the panic had subsided and the climate of opinion totally changed, there were three people who held to their confessions. Two of them were women long thought to be “senseless and ignorant creatures.” The third was Mr. Wardwell’s wife. All of these circumstances are puzzling and some of them are suspicious. However, on the other hand, there is no evidence to support his confessions of having made a pact. The only possible conclusion, it would seem, is that in this case the truth is not obtainable. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
In a situation where the truth was so difficult to find the people of Massachusetts did what anybody else would do—they sought expert advice. In matters of witchcraft the experts were the clergy, and ultimately the advice was sought of the most distinguished clergymen in the colony. Indeed, at least one member of the trial court, Judge John Richards, asked the Reverend Cotton Mather to be present at the first trial. Reverend Mather was too ill to attend, but he did everything he could under the circumstances. He had suggested earlier (the exact date is not known) that the afflicted persons should be separated and an attempt made to cure them with prayer and fasting. He volunteered to take in as many as six of them himself. He had cured the Godwin children, and he might well have cured the Salem girls as well; certainly separation and private care would have been better treatment for hysterical fits than the excitements of a public courtroom. However, unfortunately Reverend Mather’s offer had not been accepted. Now, although he could not attend the first sitting of the court he wrote John Richards a letter offering him his opinions. In the first place, he expected that God would smile upon the labours of the court: “His people have been fasting and praying before Him for you direction, and yourselves are persons whose exemplary devotion disposeth you to such a dependence on the Wonderful Counselor, for his counsel in an affair this full of wonder, as He doth usually answers with the most favorable assistances. Yet he wanted to warn Mr. Richards. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Here is that warning: “And yet I most humbly beg you that in the management of the affair in your most worthy hands, you do not lay more stress upon pure specter testimony than it will bear. When you are satisfied or have good plain legal evidence that the Demons which molest our poor neighbours do indeed represent such and such people to the sufferers, though this be a presumption, yet I suppose you will not reckon it a conviction that the people so represented are witches to be immediately exterminated. It is very certain that the Devils have sometimes represented the shapes of persons not only innocent but very virtuous, though I believe that the just God then ordinarily provides a way for speedy vindication of the persons thus abused. Moreover, I do suspect that persons who have too much indulged themselves in malignant, envious, malicious ebullitions of their souls may unhappily expose themselves to the Judgment of being represented by Devils, of whom they never had any vision and with whom they have much less written any covenant. I would say this: if upon the bare supposal of a poor creature’s being represented by a specter too great a progress be made by the Authority in ruining a poor neighbour so represented, it may be that a door may be thereby opened for the Devils to obtain from the Courts in the Invisible World a license to proceed unto most hideous desolations upon the repute and repose of such as have yet been kept from the great transgression. If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened! Perhaps there are wise and good men that may be ready to style hum that shall advance this caution a witch advocate, but in the winding up this caution will certainly be wished for.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Reverend Mather’s third point is that although he believes that Devils have sometime afflicted men on their own initiative, without being called up by witches, in this case he thinks that witches are involved: “there is cause enough to think that it is a horrible witchcraft which hath given rise to the troubles wherewith Salem Village is at this day harassed, and he indefatigable pains that are used for the tracing this witchcraft are to be thankfully accepted and applauded among all this people of God.” Fourth, he points out that although witchcraft is a spiritual matter and therefore “very much transacted upon the stage of imagination,” its effects are “dreadfully real” and therefore criminally punishable. “Our dear neighbours are most really tormented, really murdered, and really acquainted with hidden things which are afterwards proved plainly to have been realities.” In his fifth and six section he suggests what evidence may be used for convictions. The best evidence, he says, is “a credible confession…And I say a credible confession because even confession itself is sometimes not credible.” He was confident Mr. Richards’ ability to judge such matters: “a person of a sagacity many times thirty furlongs less than yours will easily perceive what confession may be credible and what may be the result of only a delirious brain or a discontented heart.” In obtaining confessions he was “far from urging the un-English method of torture,” but he thought that “cross and swift questions” might be used, along with anything else that “hath a tendency to put the witches into confusion” and this might bring them to confession. If the suspect had made threats or boasts which seemed to require occult power and which came true, this was valid evidence. So were such concrete matters as “puppets” (for image magic) and witch marks on the body. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Reverend Mather had never seen a witch mark on anyone, but he thought a surgeon ought to be able to tell if a bodily excrescence were magical. Finally, he was willing to countenance as experiments (but not as full evidence) some witch-finding techniques which themselves partook of the occult: setting a suspect to repeating the Lord’s Prayer; trying to wound a witch through striking her specter; putting the suspect to the water ordeal. Seventh, and finally, he recommended clemency for “come of the lesser criminals.” If such persons were not executed but “only scoured with lesser punishments, and also put upon some solemn, open, public, and explicit renunciation of the Devil” he thought it might discourage the Devils from afflicting those neighbourhoods in which they had been publicly renounced. Reverend Mather’s letter was written within the context of the Puritan method for arriving at the truth, and it can be fully understood only within that context. In dealing with the American Puritans we must remember always that they had rejected the formidable hierarchies of the Medieval and Renaissance church and state, with all their authority of tradition and inherited position. They had replaced these hierarchies with bodies of ministers and magistrates which, if they were not fully democratic in the twentieth-century sense of the word, were nevertheless elected. The clergyman was called to his position by the members of the church; the magistrate was elected by his constituency. Furthermore, the church had no central administration; every congregation was a law unto itself. The state did have a central administration—a governor and lieutenant-governor and their council—but this administration had nothing even faintly resembling the authority of a royal government. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
My brother, the clergyman, looked over my shoulder before I was aware of him, and discovered that the volume which completely absorbed my attention was a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form. He laid his finger on the Trial which I happened to be reading at the moment. I looked up at him; his face startled me. He had turned pale. His eyes were fixed on the open page of the book with an expression which puzzled and alarmed me. “My dear fellow,” I said, “what in the World is the matter with you?” He answered in an odd absent manner, still keeping his finger on the open page. “I had almost forgotten,” he said. “And this reminds me.” “Reminds you of what?” I asked. “You do not mean to say you know anything about the Trial?” “I know this,” he said. “The prisoner was guilty.” “Guilty?” I repeated. “Why, the man was acquitted by the jury, with full approval of the judge! What can you possibly mean?” “There are circumstances connected with that Trial,” my brother answered, “which were never communicated to the judge or the jury—which were never so much as hinted or whispered in court. I know them—of my own knowledge, by my own personal experience. They are very sad, very strange, very terrible. I have mentioned them to no mortal creature. I have done my best to forget them. You—quite innocently—have brought them back to my mind. They oppress, they distress me. I wish I had found you reading any book in your library, except that book!” Some people were opposed to prosecuting in any witchcraft case, on the grounds that witchcraft was a spiritual mater, a sin rather than a crime, and thus outside the domain of criminal law. However, the laws of every civilized nation provided the death penalty for witchcraft, and so did the Bible (Exodus xxii, 18: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”). #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Another opinion Reverend Mather deals with is that the troubles at Salem were caused by Devils, but not by witches. That is, the idea had already been advanced that the afflicted girls were possessed—infested by Demons—but not bewitched; that the Devils had acted on their own initiative rather than that of witches. This is the idea that was eventually adopted by virtually all of Massachusetts to explain the events at Salem, once it was recognized that most of those executed had been innocent. The basic question, as the seventeenth century understood it, was whether God would permit the Devil to assume the shape of an innocent person. Most authorities, and especially most Protestant authorities, believed that He would, and thus held, like Hamlet, that “the Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape. However, Mr. Richards would not be capable of clearing anybody if he was going to accept the appearance of a person’s specter as conclusive proof of guilt. If such infernal testimony were accepted, nobody could be safe from accusation. Reverend Mather put in forcefully enough. “If mankind have thus far once consented unto the credit of Diabolical representations, the Door is opened!” However, Reverend Mather knew there were people at Salem so committed to the validity of spectral evidence that they were willing to call anyone who challenged it, including himself, a “witch advocate.” All he could do was warn such people that when matters were finished “this caution will certainly be wished for.” And in this he could not possibly have been more right. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Do you believe that the spirits of the dead can return to Earth, and show themselves to the living? Promise me this, that you will keep what I tell you a secret as long as I live. After my death I care little what happens. Let the story of my strange experience be added to the published experience of those other men who have seen what I have seen, and who believe what I believe. The World will not be the worse, and may be the better, for knowing one day what I am now about to trust to your ear alone. On a fine summer evening, many years since, I left my chambers in the Temple to meet a fellow-student, who had proposed to me a night’s amusement in the Winchester estate. I had taken my degree at Oxford. I had sadly disappointed my father by choosing the Law as my profession, in preference to the Church. At that time, to own the truth, I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of an American life. The study of Law supplied me with that excuse. And I chose the Law as my profession accordingly. On reaching the place at which we had arranged to meet, I found that my friend had not kept his appointment. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, my patience gave way, and I went into the gardens by myself. I took two or three turns round the mansion, without discovering my fellow-student, and without seeing any other person with whom I happened to be acquainted at that time. For some reason which I cannot now remember, I was not in my usual good spirits that evening. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
I saw a woman in the gardens, she was quiet. She invited me into the estate. Her face was saddened; her eyes were dropped to the ground, I begged her pardon. She rose to leave me. I was determined to not part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see the Winchester mansion. She hesitated. Then she took my arm. We went away together. A walk of half an hour brought us to the Winchester mansion, the estate was quite large. We went through the beautiful jeweled doors and took an elevator to the 4th floor. She said Mrs. Winchester had been waiting to meet me. She had been suffering from an affection of the throat; and she had a white silk handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She wore a simple dress of black merino, with a black-silk apron over it. Her face was deadly pale; her fingers felt icily cold as they closed around my hand. “Promise me one thing,” I said, “before I go. While I live, I am your friend—if I am nothing more. If you are ever in trouble, promise me that you will let me know it.” She started, and drew back from me as if I had struck her with a sudden terror. “Strange!” she said, speaking to herself. “He feels as I feel. He is afraid of what may happen to me, in my life to come.” I attempted to reassure Mrs. Winchester. I tried to tell her what was indeed the truth—that I had only been thinking of the ordinary chances and chances of life, when I spoke. She paid no heed to me; she came back and put her hands on my shoulders, and thoughtfully and sadly looked up in my face. “My mind is not your mind in this matter,” she said. “I believe I shall die young, and die miserably. If I am right, have you interest enough still left in me to hear of it?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
She paused, for a moment, shuddering—and added these startling words: “You shall hear of it.” The tone of steady conviction in which she spoke alarmed and distressed me. My face showed her how deeply and how painfully I was affected. “There, there!” she said, returning to her natural manner; “don’t take what I say too seriously. A poor girl who has led a lonely life like mine thinks strangle and talks strangely—sometimes. Yes; I give you my promise. If I am ever in trouble, I will let you know it. God bless you—you have been very kind to me—goodbye!” A tear dropped on my face as she kissed me. The door closed between us. The dark gardens received me. It was raining heavily. I looked up at her window, through the drifting shower. The curtains were parted; she was standing in the gap, dimly lot by the lamp on the table behind her, waiting for our last look at each other. Slowly lifting her hand, she waved her farewell at the window, with the unsought native grace which had charmed me on the night when we first met. The curtains fell again—she disappeared—nothing was before me, nothing was round me, but the darkness and the night. In two years from that time, I had returned to the Church. My relatives exerted themselves; and my good fortune still befriended me. I was offered an opportunity of preaching in a church, made famous by the eloquence of one of the popular pulpit-orators of our time. In accepting the proposal, I felt naturally anxious to do my best, before the unusually large and unusually intelligence congregation which would be assembled to hear me. At the period of which I am now speaking, the Santa Clara Valley had been startled by the discovery of a terrible crime, perpetrated under circumstances of extreme provocation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
I chose this crime as the main subject for my sermon. Admitting that the best among us were frail mortal creatures subject to evil promptings and provocations like the worst among us, my object was to show how a Christian man may find his refuge from temptation in the safeguards of his religion. I dwelt minutely on the hardship of the Christian’s first struggle to resist the evil influence—on the help which one’s Christianity inexhaustibly held out o one in the worst relapses of the weaker and viler part of one’s nature—on the steady and certain gain which was the ultimate reward of one’s faith and one’s firmness—and on the blessed sense of peace and happiness which accompanied the final triumph. Preaching to this effect, with the fervent conviction which I really felt, I may say for myself, at least, that I did no discredit to the choice which had placed me in the pulpit. I held the attention of my congregation, from the first word to the last. On the conclusion of my sermon, my soul was literally shaken. Ordering my horse to be saddled, I rode instantly to the Winchester mansion. When I arrived, my mind was blank. I had no thoughts. I had no tears. The butler, Amon, greeted me. I guessed him to be some two or three years younger than myself. He was undeniably handsome; his manners of a gentleman—and yet, without knowing why, I felt a strong dislike to him the moment he opened the door. While waiting in the parlor, little by little, I became conscious of a chilly sensation slowly creeping through and through me to the bones. The warm balmy air of a summer night was abroad. It was the month of August. In the month of August, was it possibly that any living creature (in good health) could feel cold? It was not possible—and yet, the chilly sensation still crept through and through me to the bones. I looked up. I looked all round me. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
I looked around me again. Yes: I saw it. With my own eyes I saw it. A pillar of white mist—between five and six feet high, as well as I could judge—was moving beside me on my left hand. The white colour of it was the white colour of the fog which one might see over the ocean. And the chill which had then crept through me to the cones was that chill that was creeping through me now. I was awed rather than frightened. There was one moment, and one only, when the fear came to me that my reason might be shaken. The doctrine that the Devil could appear in any shape did come to mind. The slow utterance of these words, repeated over and over again: “Mrs. Winchester is dead. Mrs. Winchester is dead.” But my will was still my own: I was able to control myself, to impose silence on my own muttering lips. And I walked through the mansion. And the pillar of mist went quietly with me. I sat down on the stairs looking at the pillar of mist, hovering opposite to me. It lengthened slowly, until it reached to the ceiling. As it lengthened, it grew bright and luminous. A time passed, and a shadowy appearance showed itself in the center of the light. Little by little, the shadowy appearance took the outline of human form. Soft brown eyes, tender and melancholy, looked at me through the unearthly light in the mist. The dead and the rest of the face boke next slowly on my view. Then the figure gradually revealed itself, moment by moment, downward and downward to the feet. She stood before me as I had last seen her, in her black-merino dress, with the black-silk apron, with white handkerchief tied loosely round her neck. She stood before me, in the gentle beauty that I remembered so well; and looked at me as she had looked when she gave me her last kiss on the cheek—when her tears had dropped on my hand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
I fell on my knees at the table. I stretched out my hands to her imploringly. I said, “Speak to me—O, once again speak to me, Sarah.” Her eyes rested on me with a divine compassion in them. She lifted her hand, and pointed to the photograph on the desk. It was the butler. I looked up at her again. She lifted her hand once more, and pointed to the handkerchief round her neck. As I looked at it, the fair white silk changed horribly in colour—the fair white silk became darkened and drenched in blood. A moment more—and the vision of her began to grow dim. By slow degrees, the figure, then the face, faded back into the shadowy appearance that I have first seen. The luminous inner light died out in the white mist. The mist itself dropped slowly downwards—floated a moment in airy circles on the floor—vanished. Nothing was before me but the familiar Lincrusta wallpaper, and the photograph lying face downwards on the desk. I went home. The next day, the newspapers reported the discovery of a murder in the Winchester mansion. Mrs. Winchester was the victim. She had been killed by a wound in the throat. The crime had been discovered between ten and eleven o’clock on the previous night. There is conclusive proof that the butler had been trafficking with the Devil. If spectral evidence was convincing to the magistrates, the ministers, and the people at large, it was a nightmare to the suspects. A violent quarrel took place between them. Lastly, that man, variously described by different witnesses, was seen leaving the door of her mansion on the night of the murder. The Law—advancing no further than this—may have discovered circumstances of suspicion, but no certainty. The Law, in default of direct evidence to convict the prisoner, may have rightly decided in letting him go free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company issued a statement redacting the news report which was later destroyed: “Protecting Mrs. Winchester’s legacy is, and always will be, our focus. For decades, we have battled behind the scenes, enduring shadowy tactics of deception with unauthorized statements and projects created to tarnish. We have always been betwixted as to why there is such a tenacity in causing more pain alongside what we already have to cope with for the rest of our lives. Now, this unscrupulous endeavor to release a statement without official proof or full accounting to the estate compels our hearts to express a word—forgiveness. Although we will continue to defend ourselves and her legacy lawfully and justly, we want to preempt the inevitable attacks on our company by all the individuals who have emerged from the shadows to leech off of Mrs. Winchester’s life’s work. Ultimately, we desire closure and a modicum of peace so we can facilitate the growth of the Winchester Estate and other creative projects that embody Mrs. Winchester’s true essence, which is to inspire and get people to think critically. We welcome and accept people of all creeds, races and cultures in the Universe and beyond.” The official statement reported that Mrs. Winchester passed away peacefully in her sleep on September 5, 1922, and work on the still uncompleted house stopped. I leave you to draw your own conclusions, but just days before I saw her, she looked no older than 22 years old. My own faith in the reality of the apparition is immovable. I say, and believe Mrs. Winchester is immortal, which would explain a lot. Take up the Trial again, and look at the circumstances that were revealed during the investigation in the court. I persist in believing that the man was guilty. I declare that, he and he alone did it. And now, you know why. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
O thou wicket spirit Amon that obeyeth not, because I made a law and invoked the names of the glorious and ineffable God of Truth, the creator of all, and thou obeyest not the might sounds that I make: therefore I curse thee in the depth of Abandon to remain until the day of judgment in torment in fire and in sulphur without end, until thou appear before our will and obey my power. Come, therefore, in the 24th of a moment, before the circle in the triangle in this name and by this name of God, Adni, Great Spirit, give us hearts to understand; never to take from creation’s beauty more than we give; never to destroy wantonly for the furtherance of greed; never to deny to give our hands for the building of Earth’s beauty; never to take from her what we cannot use. Give us hearts to understand that to destroy Earth’s music is to create confusion; that to wreck her appearance is to build us to beauty; that to callously pollute her fragrance is to make a house of stench; that as we care for her she will care for us. Tzabaoth, Adonai, Amioran. Come! Come! for it is the Lord of Lords Adni, that stirreth thee up. I stir thee up, O thou fire, in him who is thy Creator and of all creatures. Torment, burn, destroy the spirit Amon always whose end cannot be, I judge thee in judgment and in extreme justice, O spirit Amon, because thou art he that obeyeth not my power and obeyth not that law which the Lord God made, and obeyeth not the Mighty Sounds and the Living Breath which I invoke, which I send: Come forth, I, who am the Servant of the Same Most High governor Lord God powerful, Iehovohe, I who am exalted in power and am might in his power above ye, O thou who comest not giving obedience and faith to him that liveth and trirumpheth. Therefore I say the judgment: I curse thee and destroy the name Amon and the seal Amon, which I have placed in this dwelling of poison, and I burn thee in fire whose end cannot be; and I cast thee down unto the seas of torment, out of which thou shalt not rise until thou come to me eyes: visit me in peace: be friendly before the circle in the triangle in the 24th of a moment in the likeness of a man not unto the terror of the sons of men the creatures or all things on the face of the Earth. Obey my power like reasoning creatures; obey the living breath, the laws which speak. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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The Very “Fans” of the Cinema Stars and the Famous Footballers Know Better than to Desire that!
The Lord raises up righteous nations and destroys nations of wicked. The mention of that nation which worshipped Nature-gods turns our attention to one of those features in the Christian story which is repulsive to the idea of a “chosen people.” Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start to level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about, Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole Earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that. Such a process is very unlike what modern feeling demands: but it is startlingly like what Nature habitually does. Selectiveness, and with it (we must allow) enormous wastage, is her method. Out of enormous space a very small portion is occupied by mater at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Of all the stars, perhaps very few, perhaps only one, have planets. Of all the planets in our own system probably only one supports organic life. In the transmission of organic life, countless seeds and spermatozoa are emitted: some few are selected for the distinction of fertility. Among the species only one is rational. Within that species only a few attain excellence of beauty, strength, or intelligence. At this point we come perilously near the argument of Butler’s famous Analogy. I say “perilously” because the argument of that book very nearly admits parodying in the form “You say that the behavior attributed to the Christian God is both wicked and foolish: but it is no less likely to be true on that account for I can show that Nature (which He created) behaves just as badly.” To which the atheist will answer—and the nearer he is to Christ in his heart, the more certainly he will do so—“If there is a God like that I despise and defy Him.” However, I am not saying that Nature, as we know her, is good; that is a point we must return to in a moment. Nor am I saying that a God whose actions were no better than Nature’s would be a proper object of worship for any honest human. The point is a little finer than that. This selective or undemocratic quality in Nature, at least in so far as it affects human life, is neither good nor evil. According as spirit exploits of fails to exploit this Natural situation, it gives rise to one or the other. It permits, on the one hand, ruthless competition, arrogance, and envy; it permits on the other, modesty and (one of our greatest pleasures) admiration. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
A World in which I was really (and not merely by a useful legal fiction) “as good as everyone else,” in which I never looked up to anyone wiser or cleverer or braver or more learned than I, would be insufferable. The very “fans” of the cinema stars and the famous footballers know better than to desire that! What the Christian story does is not to instate on the Divine level a cruelty and wastefulness which have already disgusted us on the Natural, but to show us in God’s act, working neither cruelly nor wastefully, the same principle which is in Nature also, though down there it works sometimes in one way and sometimes in the other. It illuminates he Natural scene by suggesting that a principle which at first looked meaningless may ye be derived from a principle which is good and fair, may indeed be a depraved and blurred copy of it—the pathological form which is would take in a spoiled Nature. For when we look into the Selectiveness which the Christians attribute to God we find in it none of that “favoritism” which we were afraid of. The “chosen” people are chosen no for their own sake (certainly not for their own honor or pleasure) but for the sake of the unchosen. Abraham is told that “in his seed” (the chosen nation) “all nations shall be blest.” That nation has been chosen to bear a heavy burden. Their sufferings heal others. On the finally selected Woman falls the utmost depth of maternal anguish. Her Son, the incarnate God, is a “man of sorrows”; the one Man into whom Deity descended, the one Man who can be lawfully adored, is pre-eminent for suffering. However, you will ask does this much mend matters? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Is this sill injustice, though now the other way round? Where, at the first glance, we accused God of undue favor to His “chosen,” we are now temped to accuse Him of undue disfavor. (The attempt to keep up both charges at the same time had better be dropped.) And certainly we have here come to a principle very deep-rooted in Christianity: what may be called the principle of Vicariousness. The Sinless Man suffers for the sinful, and, in their degree, all good men for all bad men. And the Vicariousness—no less than Death and Rebirth or Selectiveness—is also a characteristic of Nature. Self-sufficiency, living on one’s own resources, is a thing impossible in her realm. Everything is indebted to everything else, sacrificed to everything else, dependent on everything else. And here too we must recognize that the principle is in itself neither good nor bad. The cat lives on the mouse in a way I think bad: the bees and the flowers live on one another in a more pleasing manner. The parasite lives on its “host”: but so also unborn child on its mother. In social life without Vicariousness there would be no exploitation or oppression; but also no kindness or gratitude. It is a fountain both of love and hatred, both of misery and happiness. When we have understood this we shall no longer think that the depraved examples of Vicariousness in Nature forbid us to suppose that the principle itself is of divine origin. At this point it may be well to take a backward glance and notice how the doctrine of the Incarnation is already acting on the rest of our knowledge. We have already brought it into contact with four other principles: the composite nature of man, the pattern of descent and reascension, Selectiveness, and Vicariousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The first may be called a fac about the frontier between Nature and Supernature; the other three are characteristics of Nature herself. Now most religions, when brough face to face with the facts of Nature either simply re-affirm them, give them (just as they stand) a transcendent prestige, or else simply negate them, promises us release from such facts and from Nature altogether. The Nature-Religions take the first line. They sanctify our agricultural concerns and indeed our whole biological life. We get really drunk in the worship of Dionysus and life with real women in the temple of the fertility goddess. In Life-force worship, which is the modern and western type of Nature-religion, we take over the existing trend towards “development” or increasing complexity in organic, social, and industrial life, and make it a god. My dear Devout, is there a good way to put the grace of the devotion to work? Of course, there is. You hide it. That is to say, do not flaunt it; do not meander around it; do not maunder over it. A better way to handle the situation is to render yourself undeserving. How? Just imagine that the Gracious Gift is delivered to the wrong person. Namely you. This affection of the soul, this consolation, must not be clung to too tenaciously, for it can very quickly be changed to its contrary. When in grace, think how wretched you are; but when out of grace, think how utterly destitute you must be! Odd thing about the grace of consolation. Not much spiritual progress is made when it is present. However, when it is absent, you do cover rather more ground. How? By dutifully enduring the slippage of consolation; that is to say, by not dozing off during scheduled prayer, not allowing the rest of your ordo diei to fall apart. Just because you feel spiritually dry or mentally anxious, that is no reason to disintegrate. Just do what you think ought to be done and only what you are able to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Many Devouts, when Success does not come up and buss them on the bum, immediately become nervous. That is to say, they sit down and cross their legs in a way that would make the Great Arsenious blush. That is to say, they cross their legs at the knee and drum their fingers on the table. As the Old Jeremiah has said (10.23), not everyone can choose the road one travels. However, God always has the power to give and console when He wants, how much He wants, and to whom He wants. He has only one rule: does it please Him, or does it not? Certain Devouts have thrown caution to the wind; that is to say, wanting to fulfill their expectations, yet unwilling to acknowledge their limitations, they have destroyed themselves. The grace of devotion made them do it! Or so they said. Trouble was, they followed the urging of their heart and neglected the judgment of their reason. Because they presumed the grace was greater than God actually gave, they quickly lost that grace. Instantly, they were thrown down, made destitute, the lowest of the low. They had built themselves a quiet little nest in Heaven, but now they were pulverized and pauperized. Once they flew, but now their wings were clipped. If there were any hope for them at all, it would be under My wings, as the Psalmist had it (91.4). The Devouts who at this point are new and inexperienced in the way of the Lord should pay special attention to this. Why? They can easily be deceived or knocked about in the rugged course of the spiritual life. To avoid much of this roister-doistery, they should take advantage of the experience of the discreet old Devouts in their community. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
When these young Devouts follow their own heads in this regard, they come to regard the elder Devouts as old trouts. That is a perilous path to follow, especially if they have made up their minds to trust no one older than themselves. Rare it is for those “who think they know it all,” as Paul characterized them to the Romans (11.25), to allow themselves to be ruled by others. A tale of two Devouts. One may have a modest education and carry it off with great humility and yet with some hilarity. Another may be a walking encyclopedia spouting the wisdom of the West to a World with wax it its ears. Pick one. It is better to have little to be proud than to pride yourself over a lot. You are not all that wise when you give yourself too much joy. Actually, that joy is rather smaller than you think, and losing it is the last thing you want to do. However, obviously, you are oblivious of your Pristine Destitution and chaste fear of the Lord that should have resulted. You are never so virtuous that in times of crisis you do not find your faith in Me profoundly shaken. No one wants to feel too hemmed in during peacetime, but in time of war, you would welcome restrictions; without them you do not know where you are or were the fear is coming from. Remain humble and modest always. Rein in that runaway spirit of yours, and you will not fall into dangers so easily. Good counsel has it that you should meditate at noonday about what your future will be at midnight. Even in this prayer, remember that the light will return. It is that light I withhold every now and then as a caution to you and a glory to Me. The temptational process has its uses. First, it is better to greet Temptation as an old friend than to meet it as a stranger. Second, merits are not accumulated by the number of visions and consolations you have. Third, your skill in interpreting the Scriptures has little to do with your spiritual progress. Fourth, a young person’s exalted social station in the outside World certainly has absolutely nothing to do with one’s capacity for spiritual progress in the inside World. Fifth, if you are truly humbled and really charitable, if you always seek the honour of God—that has everything to do with your spiritual progress. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Sixth, if you think yourself an ant, and really despise your antics, and do no antagonize others, and prefer to be squished under foot than crowned king of the World—then that is something to be truly proud of. Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife, was one of those baptized by Oliver Cowdery on the Monday morning before Joseph was arrested. While her husband was in court for several days, Emma was concerned about his troubles. In her grief and worry she visited her sister, and it was here that Joseph came after his release. Together they went to their home in Harmony, Pennsylvania, where a revelation was given for Emma. The Lord said: Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your God, while I speak unto thee, Emma Smith, my daughter, for verily I say unto thee, All those who receive my gospel are sons and daughters in my kingdom. Behold thy sins are forgiven thee, and thou art an elect lady, who I have called. And the office of thy calling shall be for a comfort unto my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., thy husband, in his afflictions, with consoling words, in the spirit of meekness. And thou shalt go with him at the time of his going, and be unto him for a scribe, while here is no one o be scribe for him. Thou shalt lay aside the things of this World, and seek for the things of a better. And it shall be given thee, also, to make a selection of sacred hymns…to be had in my church; for my soul deligheth in the song of the heart; yea, the song of the righteous is a prayer unto me. Wherefore, lift up thy heart and rejoice, and cleave unto the covenants which thou hast made. Continue in the spirit of meekness, and beware of pride. Keep my commandments continually, and a crown of righteousness thou shalt receive. And except thou do this, where I am thou canst not come. And verily, verily, I say unto you, that this is my voice unto all. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Emma had had some training in music and singing. She had a clear soprano voice. She delighted in music. She began to select hymns for the new hymnbook according to the commandment of the Lord. Emma gathered together words of hymns for use in the church. The words of twenty-four hymns were published in the official church paper, the Evening and Morning Star, from June, 1832, to July, 1833. The first hymnbook, containing ninety hymns, words only was called “A Selection of Sacred Hymns,” by Emma Smith. This was published at Kirtland in 1835. At Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841, a second and larger edition was published. This was vest pocket size and contained words of 304 hymns selected by Emma Smith. Some of the hymns of these early editions were: “Redeemer of Israel,” “O Jesus, the Giver of All We Enjoy,” “The Spirit of God Like a Fire Is Burning,” “O God, the Eternal Father,” “Earth with Her Ten Thousand Flowers,” “Glorious Things Are Sung of Zion,” “When Earth in Bondage Long Had Lain,” “Hark, Ye Mortals, Hark, Be Still,” “Guide Us, O Thou Great Jehovah.” In the meantime, Joseph was making copies of the revelations he had received. John Whitmer, who had come to live with them for a while, helped him in this work. In July, 1830 a Harmony, Pennsylvania, a revelation was given addressed to Joseph, Oliver Cowdery, and John Whitmer, in which the Lord said: Let your time be devoted to the studying of the Scriptures, and to preaching, and to confirming the church at Colesville; and to performing your labours on the land, such as is required, until after you shall go to the west, to hold the next conference; and then it shall be made known what you shall do. And all things shall be done by common consent in the church, by much prayer and faith; for all things you shall receive by faith. Amen. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This revelation is very important, for it reaffirms the principle of “common consent” in the affairs of the church. A second chance—but redemption follows not a change of body, but a change of heart. Beatitude belongs to God in a very special manner. For nothing else is understood to be meant by the term beatitude than the perfect good of an intellectual nature; which is capable of knowing that it has a sufficiency of the good which it possesses, to which it is competent that good or may befall, and which can control its own actions. All of these things belong in a most excellent manner to God, namely, to be perfect, and possess intelligence. Whence beatitude belongs to God in the highest degree. Aggregation of good is in God, after the manner not of composition, but of simplicity; for those things which in creatures is manifold, pre-exist in God, as was said above, in simplicity and unity. It belongs as an accident to beatitude or happiness to be the reward of virtue, so hard as anyone attains to beatitude; even as to be the term of generation belongs accidentally to a being, so far as it passes from potentiality to act. As, then, God has being, though not be gotten; so He has beatitude, although not acquired by merit. One might expect to encounter three different sets of therapeutic processes in the mind, and possibly also expect that analysts may need three different sets of technical measures, each directed so that it should influence the corresponding area of the mind. First, there are those patients who operate as whole persons and whose difficulties are in the realm of interpersonal relationships. The technique for the treatment of these patients belongs to psycho-analysis as it developed in the hands of Dr. Freud at the beginning of the century. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Then secondly there come the patients in whom the wholeness of the personality only just begins to be something that can be taken for granted; in fact one can say that analysis has to do with the first events that belong to and inherently and immediately follow not only the achievement of wholeness but also the coming together of love and hate and the dawning of recognition of dependence. This is the analysis of the stage of concern, or of what has come to be known as the “depressive position.” These patients require the analysis of mood. The technique for this work is not different from that needed by patients in the first category; nevertheless some new management problems do arise on account of the increase range of clinical material tackled. Important from our point of view here is the idea of the survival of the analyst as a dynamic factor. In the third grouping I place all those patients whose analyses must deal with the early stages of emotional development before and up to the establishment of the personality as an entity, before the achievement of space-time unit status. The personal structure is not yet securely founded. In regard to this third grouping, the accent is more surely on management, and sometimes over long periods with these patients ordinary analytic work has to be in abeyance, management being the whole thing. To recapitulate in terms of environment, once can say that in the first grouping we are dealing with patients who develop difficulties in the ordinary course of their home life, assuming satisfactory development in the earlier stages. In the second category, the analysis of the depressive position, we are dealing with the mother-child relationship especially around the time that weaning becomes a meaningful term. The mother holds a situation in time. In the third category there comes primitive emotional development, that which needs the mother actually holding the infant. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
When understanding and insight bring changes in people’s relationships, based on a natural wish to stop behaving in useless, painful, and/or unpopular ways, we are in the area of classical psycho-analysis. However, what if the therapist’s interpretations, aimed at increasing understanding and self-control, only bring misery, confusion, and ineptitude? Then we may be in other areas entirely. When people seem unable to comply with the psych-analyst’s fundamental rule, of honestly saying what is on their minds, they seem unable to apprehend what is expected of them. At times it is practically useless to try to remind them of the original complaints that prompted them to seek analytic help, since they have become exclusively preoccupied with their relationship to their analyst, the gratifications and frustrations they may expect from it. All sense for continuing with the analytic work seems to have been lost. In another pattern, they repeat endlessly that they know that they ought to co-operate but that they must get better before they can do anything about that. This vicious circle—in their sincere conviction—can only be broken if something that that has gone wrong is replaced in them, or if they can get hold of something in them, which they had at once time but which they have since lost. No wonder. Not only are they in the grip of the old, dreadful, helpless memories, but something new is indeed needed—strength. The people we are discussing here cannot change because they are not strong enough yet. (There are of course exceptions to this generalization, especially among those who, though strong enough structurally, fear to grow up and would prefer to remain children because things have gone wrong somewhere in the three-person regions of their personality.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The need for strength requires psychotherapists to rethink their approach. First of all, less emphasis on instinctual drives may be required. A life lived with the major emphasis on the satisfaction of biological drives is the consequence of a marked and fairly continuous lack of empathic responses in early and later childhood. If the baby had felt good about itself and about the World’s response to it, it would not have had to fall back on simple drive-satisfactions. Feeling good about yourself and your World is the result of a good selfobject phase; feeling good about what you can grab for yourself is the result of failures in that phase. (This does not mean, of course, that drive-satisfactions are not important biological gratifications in the fortunate person’s life also. It means that they are there incorporated in the experience of the self and other—not substitutes for that experience.) The deepest level to be reached is not the drive, but the threat to the organization of the self, the experience of the absence of the life-sustaining matrix of the empathic responsiveness of the self-object. Being, the sense of stable assured selfhood, is the basis of healthy doing, of spontaneous creative activity. Without it, doing can only be forced self-driving to keep oneself going, a state of mind that breeds aggression, in the first place against oneself; and then, to gain some relief from self-persecution, it is turned against other people. In these circumstances: Let me emphasize again that rage and destructiveness…are not primary givens, but arise in reaction to the faulty empathic response of the selfobject. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
An isolated striving to search for an outlet for rage and destructiveness is not part of our primary psychological equipment, and the guilt with regard to unconscious rage that we encounter in the clinical situation should not be regarded as a patient’s reaction to a primal infantile viciousness. When analysands become enraged in consequence of our attack on their resistance, they do so, not because a correct interpretation has loosened defences and has activated the aggressive energy that was bound up in them, but because a specific genetically important traumatic situation from their early life has been repeated in the analytic situation: the experience of the faulty non-empathic response of the selfobject. What were these enraged patients expecting? In this harmonious relationship, only one partner may have wishes, interests, and demands. Without any further need for testing, it is taken for granted that the other partner, the object, or the friendly expanse, will automatically have the same wishes, interests, or expectations. This explains why this is so often called the state of omnipotence. This description is somewhat out of tune: there is no feeling of power, in fact, no need for either power or effort, as all tings are in harmony. If any hitch or disharmony between subject and object occurs, the reaction to it will consist of loud and vehement symptoms suggesting processes either of a highly aggressive and destructive or of a profoundly disintegrated nature—as if the whole World including the self had been smashed up, or as if the subject had been flooded with pure and unmitigated aggressive-destructive impulses. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
On the other hand, if the harmony is allowed to persist without much disturbance from outside, the reaction amounts to a feeling of tranquil well-being, rather inconspicuous and difficult to observe. This difference in mood, expressed in adult language, would run somewhat like this: I must be loved and looked after in every respect by everyone and everything important to me, without anyone demanding any effort or claiming any return for this. It is only my wishes, interests, and needs that matter; none of the people who are important to me must have any interests, wishes, needs different from mine, and if they have any at all, they must subordinate theirs to mine without any resentment or strain; in fact, it must be their pleasure and their enjoyment to fit in with my wishes. If this happens, I shall be good, pleased, and happy but that is all. If this does not happen, it will be horrifying both for the World and for me. On the level of the basic fault, any difference is felt by the patient to be a major tragedy, reviving all the biter disappointments that established the fault. There is also an absoluteness of this state of mind. With the regressed patient the word “wish” is incorrect: instead we use the word need. If a regressed patient needs quiet, then without it nothing can be done at all. If the need is not met the result is not anger, only a reproduction of the environmental failure which stopped the processes of self growth. The individual’s capacity to “wish” has become interfered with, and we witness the reappearance of the original cause of a sense of futility. Therefore analysts must do everything in their power not to become, or to behave as, separate sharply-contoured objects. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
They must allow their patient to relate to them or exist with them as if they were one of the primary substances. This means they should be willing to carry the patient, not actively, but like water carries the swimmer or the Earth carries the walker, that is, to be there fore the patient, to be used without too much resistance against being used. This is the counselling ethic at its best: attentive listening, confirming, mirroring, reflecting accepting without judging or condemning, concerned with feeling rather than fact, responding to what makes sense rather than to wrong or silly bits, celebrating rather than nit-picking, and so on. Small wounder that we have found, regardless of the school of thought to which US psychiatrists, psycho-analysts, psychotherapists, or counsellors belonged, their patients got better according to the extent to which they could give them accurate empathy, unconditional warmth, with genuineness and authenticity. Friends do it effortlessly. People who have these resources easily available have an advantage in ministering to the distressed psyche. Some therapists find it easy only with relatively sensible people. Others find it easier with the very disturbed, strange, and apparently incoherent—if necessary for years. Other again had better not try. There are innumerable ways in which analysts may respond to their patients’ subtle forms of regression…indifference, disapproval, some slight sign of annoyance. They may tolerate acting out but follow it immediately with a correct and timely interpretation which, in turn, will take the patient some steps further to learning the analysts’ language and will inhibit further acting-out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
They may sympathetically permit is as a kind of safety-valve; or they may take it in their stride, feeling no more, or for that matter no loess, need for interpretation (id est for interfering with the acting out), than with any other form of communication, say verbal associations. Evidently it is only in the last case that acting-out and verbal associations are equally accepted as communications addressed to the therapist. What ought to happen in therapy, is for analysts to let themselves be used a “primary objects,” objects of the absolute and primary love which existed before a basic fault cut the person off from the memory. This is not a task for loving friends to do on a non-professional basis. It needs a peculiar combination of freedom and firmness about boundaries, which is not compatible with everyday personal relationships. It is often argued that psychological treatment may cure people suffering from nervous troubles or those whose sickness are largely the result of their own imagination, but that such treatment is useless for physically caused maladies. The only way to get at the truth about this problem is to divide psychological treatment into mental and spiritual categories. Mental treatment is suitable for both nervous and physical troubles because in involves a higher power than the thinking or imagining one, a truly spiritual power which is able to affect the physical body no less than the personal mentality. Mental treatments include a large part of so-called spiritual healing, which is not genuine spiritual healing at all. Philosophy is able to make this differentiation because it understands the psyche of a human and one’s inner constitution, because it has a deeper knowledge than scientific observers working from the outside or religious devotees working by faith alone can get. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Our knowledge of the laws which govern the psychological causes of sickness and the spiritual healing of disease is still incomplete and uncertain. Before one talks of depending upon the Overself one must first have established a relation with it, earned a title to its grace. Otherwise, the talk is premature. Nor can such dependence ever annul the duty of utilizing all ordinary means, all human channels. The possibility of healing physical ailments by spiritual means depends in the last analysis not upon the personal will of the healer but upon the divine soul of the patient. By Its grace, which is a definite force, the soul can assist both mind and body. Those critics who deny the reality of Grace as well as those who deny the possibility of spiritual healing are tersely answered by the writer of Psalms 103.3: “Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healteth all thy diseases.” Such healing does no contradict the natural laws; it co-operates with them. Thus, to expect an antiquated man to be turned into a young man by its assistance, is unrealizable. To demand a new leg to replace an amputated one, is unreasonable. However, all things are possible to those who love God. Oh God of all, at this time of our gradual awakening to the dangers we are imposing on our beautiful Earth, please open the hearts and minds of all your children, that we may learn to nurture rather than destroy our planet. Amen. His enemies, on isles and seas, will suffering endure; but He will increase abundant peace to upright humans and pure. Then perfect joy will bring our Lord, the sacred vessels will be restored; the exiles, He will gather them into rebuilt America; day and night shall be His light a canopy of splendor; a crown of praise His people will raise to crown their Lord and Defender. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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When You Pursue Only Your Own Interests, You May be Said to Have Fallen Out of Love!
Drown me in Love, my Lord, that I may learn how smooth and swimming it is to love. Love has me in its grasp, sending me to the heights with fervor and wonder I did not know I have within me. The Lord has made known how people ought to treat one another. By searching the scriptures on this subject, we become more fully aware that we do have a responsibility to promote the happiness and well-being of our fellow humans. For example, through Moses the Lord said: “Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,” reports Leviticus 19.18. To help us understand what is meant by this, the Lord has given some specific examples of what a person will not do to one’s neighbour if be truly loves Jesus. “Ye shall not steal, neither deal falsely neither lie one to another. Thou shalt not defraud thy neighbour, neither rob one. Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind,” reports Leviticus 19.11-14. Furthermore, the hired servant should be paid promptly for one’s work: “the wages of one that is hired shall not abide with thee all night until the morning,” reports Leviticus 19.13. “Thou shall not oppress an hired servant that is poor and needy, whether one be of thy brethren, or of thy strangers that are in thy land within thy gates: At one’s day thou shalt give one one’s hire, neither shall the sun go down upon it,” reports Deuteronomy 24.14-15. Let me follow You on high, my Beloved Lord “canting the canticle of love,” as Isaiah put it (5.1). Let my soul, beside itself with love, weary itself in Your praise! Let me love You more than myself! #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Let me love myself because You loved me first! Let me love everyone else who truly loves You! That sounds like a lot, but it is only what the law of Love, of which You are the Chiefest Illumination, tells me I have to do. Love’s swift, sincere, pious, joyous, pleasant, brave, patient, long-suffering, virile, and selfless, as Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Corinthians (13.4-7). Love’s selfless; that is to say, when you pursue only your own interests, you may be said to have fallen out of love. Love is mindful of others, humble, honorable; not soft, not giddy, not messing around with the meaningless tasks of this World. Love is sober, chaste, not given to flights of fancy, quiet, and has all the senses under control. In tatters, like a waif or a wastrel, Love nonetheless can approach a prelate with confident step. Love is devoted and thankful to God, trusting and hoping in Him, even though it has been a long tie between consolations. That is to say, Love and Pain go hand and hand throughout life. You may think you know something about Love, but if you are not prepared to suffer for or stand by the Loved One, then you are not worthy to be called a lover. Any lover worth one’s word should freely embrace the hard and the harsh for the Loved One, and at the same time one should not allow oneself to be distracted by Contraries or Contretemps. The World’s dirt seems so remote from these moods of complete goodness as to seem non-existent, or a mere vaporous mist at most. With the glimpse a feelings overspreads one’s heart of benevolence towards all living creatures—not only animal but even plant. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
One would not, could not knowingly harm a single one. The Christians call this love, the Buddhists compassion, the Hindus oneness. My own term is goodwill, but all are right. These are different facets, as seen from different points. In this wonderful state one becomes keenly aware of the love that is at the core of the Universe, and therefore at one’s own core too. However, one not only absorbs it, one also radiates it. It is not something to be held selfishly, like a material possession. As it is received, so it is given. There is no possibility here of feeling stagnant, mediocre, ordinary. It is their very contraries that one feels. There are exquisite moments when all existence seems elevated to a higher plane, when one’s individual being is absorbed in a harmony with all things. The feeling which comes over one at this stage is indescribably delightful. One recognizes its divine quality and rightly attributes it to a transcendental source. No vision accompanies it. Yet the certitude and reality seem greater than if one did. The common youthful experience of falling in love bears some of the leading characteristics of this uncommon mystical experience of awakening to the divine reality. However of course it bears them in a grosser and smaller way. Some of them are: a feeling of “walking on air,” a frequent recollection of beloved at unexpected moments, a glowing sense of deliverance from burdens, a cheerful attitude towards everything and everyone, intense satisfaction with life, rosy expectations about the future, expanded sympathies, dreamy absent-minded lapses from attention to the prosaic everyday round, and new appreciation of poetry, music, or Nature’s beauty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
There is a self which one feels within one yet is not oneself. Something unknown yet joy-giving. Some dynamic force streams through the blood in one’s veins, the feeling in one’s heart, and the will in one’s innermost being. It is no ordinary force, for one knows that never or rarely has one experienced its like before. There is magic in its movement, enchantment in its effect. The things of the World fall far away from you and a great spell will seemingly be put upon the leading mind till you remember little of name, or kin, or country, and care less. You lie in the lap of a shining mood, granted respite from heavy cares and given relaxation from corrosive thoughts. You become aware of the secret undercurrent of holy peace which flows silently beneath the heart. Although one’s general experience of it will be of its gentleness, there will be times when one will feel only an authoritative and commanding force in it, when tremendous power will manifest and rule in some episode or event. One may have a vague feeling some immaterial presence around or within oneself, a presence uplifting, ennobling, unworldly. Not only is the kingdom of Heaven within us but we are ourselves within the kingdom. We may discover this as a psychic and visual experience, as some do, or simply as a feeling-and-knowing experience that All is God. It is a transparence because one feels open, letting in a rare mood. It is also a transcendence, because one feels lifted out of one’s ordinary “I” and put down again on a higher level. Reverence for the divine presence filled my heart awe at the divine wonder permeated my mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One will feel spontaneous peace that comes from one knows not where, intellectual conviction that the right path has been found, mysterious detachment that takes hold of one during Worldly temptations and Worldly tribulation alike. When you are in this wider consciousness you are at home. Outwardly you may be without a roof to shelter your head but still you will feel protected, secure, and provided for. Your feeling and your trust are not groundless. For the outward manifestation of this inward care will follow. You will comprehend that while the Overself thus enfolds you, you can never again feel lonely, never again find the sky turned black because some human love has been denied or been withdrawn from you. It is there, in the deep center of oneself, that one finds holiness and liberation. From the physical standpoint, the ego first becomes aware of the Overself as being located in the heart. However, in higher mystical experience, this awareness is free from any bodily relationship. A feeling of lightness and freedom, songlike well-being and perfect harmony, comes with this disidentification from the body. I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts: a sense sublime, of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns. Dear soul, up to this point in our friendly chatsworth, with lots of give and take on both sides—and I hope you will not take offense—but I think I can safely say, you are not what I would call—and I want you to know that I speak only as a friend—a vigorous or prudent lover. One feels a rightness about the World-plan and a loveliness in some deeper part of oneself. It may remain for a little while only but its memory will remain for long years. In this lofty mood, bringing so much good will and insight with it, as it does, one is inclined to ignore misunderstanding and hostility from any quarter which caused one resentment or even suffering in the past. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Now this brings us to the oddest thing about Christianity. In a sense the view which I have just described is actually true. From a certain point of view Christ is the same sort of thing as Adonis or Osiris (always, of course, waiving the fact that they lived nobody knows where or when, while He was executed by a Roman magistrate we know in a year which can be roughly dated.) And that is just the puzzle. If Christianity is a religion of that kind why is the analogy of the seed falling into the ground so seldom mentioned (twice only if I mistake not) in the New Testament? Corn-religions are popular and respectable: if that is what the first Christian teachers were putting across, what motive could they have for concealing the fact? The impression they make is that of humans who simply do not know how close they re to the corn-religions: men who simply overlook the rich sources of relevant imagery and association which they must have been on the verge of tapping at every moment. If you say they suppressed it because they were Jewish people, that only raises the puzzle in a new form. Why should the only religion of a “dying God” which has actually survived and risen to unexampled spiritual heights occur precisely among those people to whim, and to whom almost alone, the whole circle of ideas that belong to the “dying God” was foreign? I myself, who first seriously read the New Testament when I was, imaginatively and poetically, all agog for the Death and Re-birth pattern and anxious to meet a corn-king, was chilled and puzzled by the almost total absence of such ideas in the Christian documents. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
One moment particularly stood out. A “dying God”—the only dying God who might possibly be historical—holds bread, that is, corn, in His hand and says, “This is my body.” Surely here, even if nowhere else—or surely if not here, at least in the earliest comments on this passage and through all later devotional usage in ever swelling volume—the truth must come out; the connection between this and the annual drama of the corps must be made. However, it is not. It is there for me. There is no sign that it was there for the disciples or (humanly speaking) for Christ Himself. It is almost as if He did not realize what He had said. The records, in fact, show us a Person who enacts the part of the Dying God, but whose thoughts and words remain quite outside the circle of religious ideas to which the Dying God belongs. The very thing which the Nature-religions are all about seems to have happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religions are all about seems to have really happened once: but it happened in a circle where no trace of Nature-religion was present. It is as if you met the sea-serpent and found that is disbelieved in sea-serpents: as if history recorded a human who had done all the things attributed to Sir Launcelot but who had himself never apparently heard of chivalry. There is, however, one hypothesis which, if accepted, makes everything easy and coherent. The Christians are not claiming that simply “God” was incarnate in Jesus. They are claiming that the one true God is He whom the Jewish people worshipped as Jahweh, and that is it He who has descended. Now the double character of Jahweh is this. On the one hand He is the God of Nature, her glad Creator. It is He who sends rain into the furrows till the valleys stand so thick with corn that they laugh and sing. The trees of the wood rejoice before Him and His voice causes the wild deer to bring forth their young. He is the God of what and wine and oil. In that respect He is constantly doing all the things that Nature-Gods do: He is Bacchus, Venus, Ceres all rolled into one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
There is no trace in Judaism of the idea found in some pessimistic and Pantheistic religions tht Nature is some kind of illusion or disaster, that finite existence is in itself an evil and that the cure lies in the relapse of all things into God. Compared with such anti-natural conceptions Jahweh might almost be mistaken for a Nature-God. On the other hand, Jahweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. He is not the soul of Nature nor of any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in the high and holy place: Heaven is His throne, not His vehicle, Earth His footstool, not Hs vesture. One day He will dismantle both and make a new Heaven and Earth. He is not to be identified even with the “divine spark” in humans. He is “God and not man”: His thoughts are not our thoughts: all our righteousness is filthy rags. His appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom noticed) from those machines which humans were to make centuries after Ezekiel’s death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo. Jahweh is neither the soul of Nature nor her enemy. She is neither His body nor a declension and falling way from Him. She is His creature. He is not a nature-God, but the God of Nature—her inventor, maker, owner, and controller. To everyone who reads this essay, the conception has been familiar from childhood; we therefore easily think it is the most ordinary conception in the World. “If people are going to believe in a God at all,” we ask, “what other kind would they believe in?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We mistake our privileges for our own instincts: just as one meets ladies who believe their own refined manners to be natural to them. They do not remember being taught. Now if there is such a God and if He descends to rise again, then we can understand why Christ is at once so like the Corn-King and so silent about him. He is like the Corn-King because the Corn-King is a portrait of Him. The similarity is not in the lest unreal or accidental. For the Corn-King is derived (through human imagination) from the facts of Nature, and the facts of Nature from her Creator; the Death and Re-birth patten is in her because it was first in Him. On the other hand, elements of Nature-religion are strikingly absent from the teaching of Jesus and from the Judaic preparation which led up to it precisely because in them Nature’s Original is manifesting itself. In them you have to have from the very outset got in behind Nature-religion and behind Nature herself. Where the real God is present the shadows of that God do not appear; that which the shadows resembled does. The Hebrews throughout their history were being constantly headed off from the worship of Nature-gods; not because the Nature-god were in all respects unlike the God of Nature but because, at best, they were merely like, and it was the destiny of that nation to be turned away from likenesses to the thing itself. The goodness of anything is twofold; one, which is of the essence of it—thus, for instance, to be rational pertains to the essence of humans. As regards this god, God cannot make a thing better than it is itself; although He can make another thing better than it; even as He cannot make the number four greater than it is; because if it were greater it would no longer be four, but another number. For the addition of a substantial difference in definitions is after the manner of the addition of unity of numbers. Another kind of goodness is that which is over and above the essence; thus, the good of a human is to be virtuous or wise. As regards this kind of goodness, God can make better the things He has made. Absolutely speaking, however, God can make something else better than each thing made by Him. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
When it is said that God can make a thing better than He makes it, if “better” is taken substantively, this proposition is true. For He can always make something else better than each individual thing: and He can make the same thing in one way better than it is, and in another way not; as was explained above. If, however, “better” is taken as an adverb, implying the manner of the making; thus God cannot make anything better than He makes it, because He cannot make it from greater wisdom and goodness. However, if it implies the manner of the thing done, He can make something better; because He can give to things made by Him a beer manner of existence as regards the accidents, although not as regards the substance. It is of the nature of a son that he should be equal to his father, when he comes to maturity. However, it is not the nature of anything created, that it should be better than it was made by God. Hence the comparison fails. The Universe, the present creation being supposed, cannot be better, on account of the most beautiful order given to things by God; in which the good of the Universe consists. For if any one thing were bettered, the proportion of order would be destroyed; as if one strong were stretched more than it ought to be, the melody of the harp would be destroyed. Yet God could make other things, or add something to the present creation; and then there would be another and a better Universe. The humanity of Christ, from the fact that it is untied to the Godhead; and created happiness from the fact that it is the fruition of God; and the Blessed Virgin from the fact that she is the mother of God; have all a certain infinite dignity from the infinite good, which is God. And on this account there cannot be anything better than these; just as there cannot be anything better than God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Man has always been fascinating with going back in time. The question has often been asked, if you could go back in time, would you do anything differently? But what if it came out another. However, no one asks, if you could go forward in time, what would you change? As fewer workers in the rich nations have engaged in physical production, more have been needed to produce ideas, patents, scientific formulae, bills, invoices, reorganization plans, files, dossiers, marker research, sales presentations, letters, graphic, legal briefs, engineering specifications, computer programs, and a thousand other forms of data or symbolic output. This rise in white-collar, technical, and administrative activity has been so widely documented in so many countries that we need no statistics here to make the point. Indeed, some sociologists have seized on the increasing abstraction of production as evidence that society has moved into a “post-industrial” stage. The facts are more complicated. For the growth of the white-collar work force can be better understood as an extension of industrialism—a further last surge of the Second Wave—than as a leap to a new system. While it is true that work has grown more abstract and less concrete, the actual offices in which this work is being done are modeled the after Second Wave factories, with the work itself fragmented, repetitive, dull, and dehumanizing. Even today, much office reorganization is little more than an attempt to make the office more closely resemble a factory. In this “symbol-factory,” Second Wave civilization also created a factorylike caste system. The factory work force is divided into manual and nonmanual workers. The office is similarly divided into “high abstraction” and “low abstraction” workers. At one level we find the high abstracters, the technocratic elites: scientist, engineers, and managers, much of whose time is taken up with meetings, conferences, business lunches, or in dictating, drafting memos, placing phone calls, and otherwise exchanging information. One recent survey estimated that 80 percent of the manager’s time is spent in 150 to 300 “information transactions” daily. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
At the other level we find the low abstracters—white-collar proletarians, as it were—who, like factory workers throughout the Second Wave period, perform endlessly routine and deadening work. Mostly female and nonunionized, this group can justifiably smile with irony at the sociologists’ talk of “post-industrialism.” They are the industrial work force of the office. Today the office, too, is beginning to move beyond the Second Wave and into the Third, and his industrial caste system is about to be challenged. All the old hierarchies and structures of the office are soon to be reshuffled. The Third Wave revolution in the office is a result of several colliding forces. The need for information has mushroomed so wildly that no army of Second Wave clerks, typists, and secretaries, no matter how large or hard-working, can possibly cope with it. In addition, the cost of paper work has climbed so calamitously that a frantic search is underway to control it. (Office costs have swelled to 40 or 50 percent of all costs in many companies, and some experts estimate that the expense companies spend per employee annually is $1,844. The expense for preparing one business letter anywhere between $75 and $150 for a typical one-page letter of 350-450 words). Moreover, while the average factory worker in the United States of America today is supported by an estimated $150,000 worth of technology, the office worker, as one Xerox sales man out it, “works with about $13,500 worth of computers and machines, and is probably among the least productive workers in the World.” Office productivity has climbed a bare 4 percent over the past decade, and conditions in other countries are probably even more pronounced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Contrast this with the extraordinary decline in the cost of computers, as measured by the number of functions performed. It has been estimated that computer output has increased 10,000 times in the past fifteen years, and that the per-function cost today is down 100,000-fold. The combination of rising costs and stagnating productivity on the one hand and computer advances on the other make an irresistible combination. The result is likely to be nothing less than a “wordquake.” Over 66 percent of Americans use a computer at work, and over 80 percent of them say it is essential to their jobs. With this much workplace use and demand, it is important to understand the way a computer can affect your job. Many Americans rely on their computer skills to find meaningful employment and to work effectively once employed. Computer and information technology (IT) touch nearly every aspect of modern life. Information technology can help with such diverse tasks as driving motor vehicles and diagnosing disease. IT enables seamless integration and communication between businesses anywhere in the World. The IT industry is one of the largest in the World employing 1.7 million people. The global computers market is expected to grow from $331.45 billion to $367.56 billion on 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 10.9 percent. Major companies in the computers market include HP; Apple; Advantech; Eurotech and Kontron. The market is expected to reach $505.45 billion in 2025 with CAGR of 8 percent. The computer is still sometimes called a “smart typewriter” and this device fundamentally alters the flow of information in the office, and with it the job structure. It is however, only one of great family of new technologies deluging the white-collar World. As businesses continue to work primarily remotely, video is increasing in importance. Being able to see team members helps build a sense of comradery and helps everyone feel less isolated from one another, while making collaboration more productive. What we are looking at is the beginning of what some term the “paperless office” of tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Not only will video benefit your workforce in the way of conferencing and meetings, it also is the preferred way to consume all content in general. In fact, employees are 75 percent more likely to watch a video than read text. Technology in business communication is largely centered around remote work. We have witnessed a huge mobile tsunami over the past two years. This will only continue as 5G is arriving and offers more in the way of mobility. In fact 1 in 2 people will not return to jobs that do not offer remote work. Also, 75 percent of people feel more productive at home, while 80 percent expect to work from home at least tree times of week. For those concerned about the environment, this is a great solution because it will reduce air pollution, traffic, and fuel consumption. Working from is very important, which is why more people are buying larger houses than they need, so they can have space to work in a quiet area. Instead of wasting money on cars and maintenance and fuel, they are able to invest in a home, something that will earn them money over time. Therefore, people also want to keep their neighborhood peaceful and attractive. To physically maintain communities, there are several millions of dollars of low-interest loans available to remodel homes and upgrade apartments. Ten percent of all apartment building flats are inspected every year, and a building must be brought fully up to code before it can be sold and title transferred. Some communities even used to offer grants to landlords to discourage all-one-race apartments. On a voluntary basis, a landlord could enter a five-year agreement to let Housing Centers serve as the landlord’s rental agent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The landlord, on singing, became eligible for matching grants up to $10,000 per unit to improve the apartment interiors; there were larger grants for exterior renovations. The Housing Center, in turn, actively sought non-European American tenants for buildings that were predominately European American and European America tenants for buildings that were predominantly non-European American. In both goals of physically maintaining the suburb and encouraging integration, the community program was remarkably successful for a quarter of a century. The communities were tightly managed, and that did not appeal to some. The community would quickly intervene to prevent signs of building deterioration and to encourage racial harmony. The suburb rigidly enforced building codes and also acted swiftly to prevent unethical or illegal activities by realtors. Brotherly love is not synonymous with friendship, although it may be part of it. Friends like each other, delight in each other’s companionship, are confidential, loyal, trusting, and share many mutual interests. Friendship is reciprocal. Brotherly love is more unselfish than either romantic love or friendship. One possessed of Christian love has a profound concern for the welfare of others. One loses one’s life in their interests. One’s life is alter- or other-ego centered. It does not matter whether the other person—the one loved—appreciates or responds to the love shown one, because brotherly love nourishes itself. It resides wholly in the person who loves and does not need response to keep it alive as romantic love and friendship do. The real test of whether one has brotherly love was given by Jesus when he said and exemplified: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you,” reports Matthew 5.44. Brotherly love is impartial and, therefore, universal. One who has brotherly love is concerned for any and every human, whether one be sinner or saint, attractive or unattractive, of the same or of another faith or race. In fact, if one is selective as to whom one loves, the chances are one loves no human in a brotherly way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
What gives a person the sense of being well and “together”? How does a person become strong, in the sense of having good self-esteem, a god ability to understand situation and use them creatively, good personality-organization which allows feelings and needs to find expression in actions and in gratifications which in turn feed self-esteem? We do not know for sure. We may have come guesses based on what good parents, good friends, and good therapists have in common. It has been interesting to note what parallels between the behavior of good parents and good therapists. Literally, psychotherapy means “ministering to a person’s breath, soul, life.” Parents do this, and psychotherapists do this, but they are not the only ones. Friends and lovers are also notable in this respect. Friends and lovers have certain advantages in ministering to each other. However, in some particulars the professionals have the advantage. First of all, we must remember the many people who have no friends and yet need to have their psyche ministered to. Equally important, there are some things which are incompatible with friendship but which need to happen if a person’s psyche is to be restored, and so this must be left to the professionals. What these things are will become clearer in the course of these essays; they have to do with the circumstances in which a person can make a new beginning. In psychotherapy a person may find the secure boundaries which are essential for this work. Psychotherapists can impose the boundaries within which work with transferences and regressions can safely be carried on. They can set rules and insist on them: only fifty minutes per session, only one session per day, no physical violence. Also, their other close relationships are not endangered by this relationship. And so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What friends are able and willing to do for each other depends on many factors and I see no good in trying to lay down the law about that. My own views are sometimes made clear in this essay and sometimes not—in the latter case often because I am in fact not clear about them myself. Psychotherapy is a developmental process, as growing-up is, and the two have features in common. A difference is that psychotherapy is remedial: it is intended to make people better, to make good some deficiency or disturbance whose roots my go back to the days of childhood. This necessarily raises questions it has been convenient to evade until now: what do I mean by “good” development and by a “fortunate baby”? And if something goes “wrong,” what do I mean? And what do I mean by “better”? My own values necessarily permeate this essay, and it is time to look at these explicitly, however briefly. There are interrelated clusters of values that seem important to me: I think it is better for children (and for those who come into psychotherapy) if, in the course of development, they gain in self-knowledge including knowledge of unwanted regions of the self, self-acceptance including acceptance of at least some unwanted regions of the self, self-direction including the ability to choose one’s own goals and values, self-love, love of other people and knowledge and acceptance of some of their unwanted regions, ability to relate to and yet be separate from others, tolerance of frustration when goals, values or affection require, a varied set of values, freedom to develop further. The first culture of values has to do with the geography and logistics of the self. It seems important to me that people should have the opportunity to discover who they are—what is good and bad in them, what hurts, what delights, and so on—as well as the opportunity to decide what to do about it. The second cluster has to do with relationships. It seems important to me that people should enjoy themselves and each other, and that they should know the difference. The third cluster is about favorable conditions for work, growth, and change. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
In psychotherapy, as in helping children grow up, the ideal development is one in which each new stage is accepted in such a way that the satisfactions of the previous stage are still accessible, neither associated with such pain that thoughts of it must be avoided at all costs, nor so delicious that developing to the next stage seems a trouble from which we recoil. Ideally we should only have to overcome our natural reluctance, conscious or unconscious, to think about painful as well as about pleasant things. However, bad things may have happened to us before we have sufficiently well-organized self-regions to absorb them. What are the consequences? In some circumstances, the memory-traces of the bad experiences are kept apart, and so are not subject to modification by later events. These split-off memory-traces can later be responsible for overwhelming feelings of misery, emptiness, inertia, and fear. By “overwhelming” I mean literally that we feel we have ceased to be people and are just clumps of dreadful feelings. We may try to rationalize those feelings—we feel so terrible because we failed an examination, lost a lover, or a job, or are worried about the state of the World. However in fact, we feel terrible because we are not in touch with memories from when we did not yet exist as persons and yet were in a state of suffering; it would be more accurate to say “There is a sense of dreadful misery” than to say “I feel very miserable”: this misery of those earlier says has never been integrated. If we are ever to feel better, the bad memory-traces of those days have to be integrated later in less painful contexts. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
During that process of integration, a process of dissolution also takes place. These reorganizations enable us to see things as they are, more or less closely connected with us and, by the same token, more or less distant from us. Thus we get a self which as feelings but is not dissolved in them. In therapy or in everyday life, processes have to happen at the end of which a person can say “I feel miserable”: there is an “I” to feel it. The misery no longer feels overwhelming, eternal, and immovable. After that, further healing can take place. Let there be peace, welfare, and righteousness in every part of the World. Let confidence and friendship prevail for the good of east and west, for the good of the needy south, for the good of all humanity. Let people inspire their leaders, helping them to seek peace by peaceful means, helping them and urging them to build a better World, a World with a home for everybody, a World with food and work for everybody, a World with spiritual freedom for everybody. Let those who have the power of money be motivated by selfless compassion. Let money become a tool for the good of humanity. Let those who have power deal respectfully with the resources of the planet. Let them respect and maintain the purity of the air, water, land and subsoil. Let them co-operate to restore the ecological soundness of Mother Earth. Let trees grow up by the billions around the World. Let green life invade the deserts. Let industry serve humanity and produce waste that serves nature. Let technology respect the holiness of Mother Earth. Let those who control the mass media contribute to create mutual understanding, contribute to create optimism and confidence. Let ordinary people meet by the millions across the borders. Let them create a universal network of love and friendship. Let billions of human beings co-operate to create a good future for their children and grandchildren. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Let us survive in peace and harmony with Mother Earth. It is up to us to receive and transmit our Torah. It is up to us to see that the World still stands. May the time be not distant when nation will not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, for the Earth will be filled with the wonder of life. Then shall we sit under our vine and our fig tree and none shall be afraid. We seek a renewed stirring of life for the Earth. We plead that what we are capable of doing is not always what we ought to do. We urge that all people now determine that a wide untrammeled freedom shall remain to testify that this generation has love for the next. If we want to succeed in that, we might show, meanwhile, a little more love for this one, and for each other. The Heavenly hosts in awe reply: “His Kingdom be blessed forever and aye.” Their song being hushed, they vanish away; they may never again offer rapturous lay. But America, therein excel—fixed times they set aside, with praise and prayer, Him One declare, at morn and eventide. His portion them He made, that they His praise declare by night and day; a Torah, precious more than gold, He bade them study, fast to hold; that He may be near, their prayer to hear, for always wear will He as diadem fair His people’s prayer in His phylactery, wherein is told of America’s fame who oft God’s unity proclaim. It is also meet God’s praise to sing in presence of both prince and king. With tempestuous glee, like a stormy sea, they surge and ask: “Who, then, is the Friend of thy heart, for who thou rt cast in the lions’ den?” From that which we fear, make us fearless. O bounteous One, assist us with your grace. May the atmosphere we breathe breathe fearlessness into us: fearlessness on Earth and fearlessness in Heaven! May fearlessness surround us above and below! May we be without fear by night and by day! Let all the World by my friend! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
Featuring an open concept living area and a covered patio in the center, this home is great for entertaining. The spacious walk-in pantry is the perfect complement to the gourmet kitchen with included island.
A porch this lovely means plenty of time outdoors in all kinds of weather. And though the Mills Station Residence 4 is the largest in the community, we still need a little extra space in the playhouse outside. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/
Randolph Harris II International 