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It Comes on You Like a Spell and Your Poor Mind is Full of Hell
Every cross roads has a story. The Devil and his works have long assumed many forms. In modern America, rebellion for the sake of rebellion has taken precedence over genuine need for change. The frozen sperm of Satan’s magical children have been born upon the Earth. The child is no longer made in the image of God, but in the form of Satan. The quality of children has become more important than the quantity because relative material stability has been reached with the help of technology. A child who can produce is more important than having many children. A swordsman needs but a good smith to forge him a stout blade. Christians are facing a conflict because as man becomes more able to extend his life and prevent death, many consider this to be due to witchcraft and demonic elixirs which are not natural. Some question if Christians will want to experience immortality because they cannot afford to be aligned with things of the Devil. Satanism differs from other religion because it does not hold man enthrall of a fantasy, it rather President a little slice of Heaven here on Earth, known as The American Dream. Satanism is taken out of logical rather than desperation. The need for a cultural stimulus and aesthetic satisfaction has been with us every since the struggle to stay alive ceased to be so whelming that it absorbed all of man’s time and energy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
William was a general practitioner in an isolated area in the Rockies. There was no other doctor for miles around. He worked day and night, but no matter how hard he worked there was never enough to support his large family and he was always in debt to the bank. For a long time, he had advertised in medical journals for a partner to give him some relief, but he insisted that no one suitable had ever shown up. He operated in fields, homes, and hospitals, and sometimes at the bottom of a mountain crag. He was immensely resourceful and almost completely exhausted, but not quite. He came for treatment with his wife because they were having marital problems, and his blood pressure was going up. In the end, he found a University Hospital not far away which has some fellowships for general practitioners who wanted to become specialist. This time he did find someone to take his pace as a country doctor. He gave up his complex and lucrative practice and found that he had enough assets to keep his family going while he settled down as a surgical resident with a small stipend. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “But I never thought I’d get away from my driving Father Part until I’d had a coronary. But I didn’t have a coronary, and this is the happiest time of my life.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It is evident that his spellbreaker was to have a coronary, and he thought that was the only way he would ever get off the hook. However, with the help of the group, he did manage to break out of his script in good health. William illustrates in a relatively simple and clear-cut way the action of the whole script apparatus. His counter script came from both parents: “Work hard.” His father than gave him the pattern of a hard-working doctor. His mother’s injunction was “Never give up. Work hard until you drop dead.” However, his father gave him the spellbreaker: “If you have a coronary, you can relax, ha ha.” With his treatment did was get into that part of his brain or mind whence all these voices sent their directives. The injunction was then lifted by giving him permission: “You can relax without having a coronary.” When this permission made it way through all the shells and devices protecting the script apparatus, it broke the curse. Note that it was useless to say to him “If you keep on this way, you will have a coronary.” He was well aware of that threat, and telling him again only made him feel more miserable because he wanted a coronary, which would free him one way or another. What he needed was not a threat, nor an order (he already had enough orders in his head), but a license that would liberate him for those orders, and that is what he got. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Then he ceased to be a victim of his script, and became his own master to do his thing. He still worked hard, and he still followed his father’s medical pattern, but he was no longer script-ridden to overwork nor script-driven to drop dead. Thus, at the age of fifty, he became from to fulfill the autonomous aspirations of his own choice. Make sure what you really want before you go after it. The bitter experience in life is to find after years of effort that the thing you have gained is not the thing you want. It is admittedly painful to tear one’s will away from one’s desires but it is still more painful to have it torn away by life’s experiences. Hence, the philosophical method to conquer desire is a twofold one. We must let it wear itself out by submitting to it through experience and letting it come up against inevitable disappointment, disillusionment, or suffering whilst alongside this we must become reflectively and analytically aware of its causes, self-deceptions, and consequences. It is a matter of gradually letting the desires lost their intensity until we become free of them not through their forcible renunciation nor through the long-drawn process of waiting for the golden years to comes but through the process of learning to live more and more within the satisfactory beatitude of the Overself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
We give up our desires not by negating them but partly by comprehending their mechanistic cause and mentalistic nature and partly by superseding them with the exalted peace of the Overself. The undeveloped mind lives only for the day. It can see the immediate events in a series but cannot conjure up the ultimate ones. The disciple dares not risk such a blind condition. He must deliberately set out to bring the two together, by the use of creative imagination or by analytic reflection or by both. If passion rises in him, at least its counterbalance, the mental picture of the evil consequences of passion, rises a second later with it. If a man is not free from lust, fear, and anger, be sure he is not united with the Overself, whatever other qualities, powers, or virtues he shows. Long continued reflection turned sharply and analytically upon desires and cravings helps to counter them, but does not basically weaken them. For that, contrary emotions must be aroused. This is most effectually done by happenings and experiences. However, because these are mostly beyond our choice, the third way left to us is to seek Grace. One way to invite this Grace is by sitting in mediation upon the non-self. He may complain of his weakness and immediately submit to a temptation. Or he may recognize that the Higher Self is also him; he may try to use will and grow in strength by this resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
He finds that he is perceptibly pulled away from fleshly lust to a deeper level where the calmness and the judgement enable him to realize that the lust belongs to his animal physical inheritance and not to his inmost character and that, therefore, it may be brought under control and discipline. If he acquires the power to achieve this, it will come imperceptibly for it will come mostly by grace. The satisfaction of passion has a claim on the animal body, but it must always be subject to the higher claims of reason and intuition and the need for the sense of human responsibility. The amoral is always the first step to the immoral. The idea that he has to attain mastery over the desires of the flesh is a correct one. However, that this mastery will lead to reunion with a “soul-mate” is not the teaching of the best mystics or philosophers. What really happens is a reunion with the true “Beloved,” who is none other than the Soul of the individual, his higher Self. This is a real living entity, whose presence is felt, whose words are heard, and whose beauty arouses all one’s love. Where man is open only to Worldly forces and not to inner ones’ where he submits to the World’s demands and ignores the soul’s; and where he succumbs to his own terrestrial forces without thoughts of regulating, controlling, and disciplining them, we may expect to find that he is quite insensitive to any teaching of this kind. He is like a person who has been caught in a mire and with every movement gets deeper into it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
He will learn the pleasure of self-control. It is not always easy but all effort for the rewards bear fruit. The man who can develop emotional placidity and rise above passions begins to know what peace of mind means. That is only a beginning for in its fullness it can come only with the knowledge and the enlightenment of Truth. Until then this placidity will free him from the constant alternation, the rise and fall of feeling, the elation and depression to which the average person is subject. Whether it be to acquire fame or accumulate wealthy or any of the other major desires, what he wants from life will in the end rest on his stage of spiritual evolution. The terrestrial man is there, but it must be brought under control or it will claim too much and diminish his aspirations. Then they become fitful, coming less and less, departing more and more. The passions contain futility, danger, and defilements. Self-conquest must be his secret wish’ deliverance must become his impassioned yearning. When wholetime meditations and his spare time thoughts are unremittingly given to uprooting passions that hinder spiritual progress and cultivating ideas that promote it, the neophyte will not be left without reward. Restricted by no monastery’s vows and obeying no order’s rules, he may yet be purer in thought and conduct than most of the self-actualized Christians. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The terrestrial of our inheritance will then be kept in its proper place, subjugated, its strength absorbed into his higher will. Within this highly structured and orderly society, the exterior developments of industrialism and progress within the natural sciences has brought not only material wealth but also increased pollution and waste, without forgetting increased ill health in the wake of this pollution and stress. The focus must now lay on health, nature, spirituality, and so forth. However, the contemporary focus on a profitable present and an almost superstitious belief in a science for the future should bring about a romantic longing for distant pagan pasts. The current generation born in America is fed up with what is being offered. What better way to protest than to just head out into nature in a highly romanticized state of mind? They have also found out that there have already been precursors in older generations who have explored exciting phenomena like nudism and vegetarianism. Americans have also simply started acting out rather than just talking about change. And I do not mean these Americans who are perceived by the World as being so weak because they cannot deal with the outcome of the American election. I am talking about those who have stopped placing their faith in a human being and place it in God. They are minding their own business and working with their hands to amass money so they can live a life they desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In an age where even kids playing hopscotch and hiking has become politicized, turning to spirituality is one of the most mature things a man can do. Being able to step out and embrace the California morning sunshine is much better than seeing a guard in the gun tower. The threat of being in the center of the most cellblock of a prison in the State, where men are kept in cages with walkways above so it is possible for guards to stroll around and look down into the pits; cells with no furniture except a drain-hole toilet, and when the prisoners go out guards are carrying clubs surround them is often where people who do not go to Church and fear God end up. No students of American politics could fail to see the inevitable uprising of this revolutionary tribe of young Christian activists, religions offspring of the first social media-Einstein-multidimensional-simultaneous-immediate-energy generation. All the computers are turned on. Jet streams across WiFi, seamlessly transitioning spiritual healing as it sweeps through the homes and corridors of those in desperate need of the gospel of Christ, turning on fourteen-year-olds through the computer screen. Wise ancient children, the smartest, best endowed, healthiest. Time’s sweet pollen laughing answer to the lethal pressure of computerized humnoids pumping out propaganda over Obama TV. As these reports smoke and laugh, they do not realize that their days are numbered and streaming content is stealing thousands of viewers away from free TV daily. With lower ratings, the station’s revenue declines, the quality of programs suffers and less people tune in to the fake news. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
And everyone complains about everything becoming so political, but it is because that it what the TV news finds profitable and it is all that people talk about. However, for decades, people have been complaining that the news is rubbish. It is not what they consider news to be. People used to think news was investigative reports about things like the artic ice, or how there were actually Pilgrims, like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who had peaceful dinners with the Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day. Or how planet TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, is 20 percent lager than Earth and can sustain life. Everything has become political or about getting famous because that is what people focus on. Once you turn your attention to more important things, like learning to cultivate the land, how to create the perfect drought resistant lawn, or why ICE cars are important for our future, then you will start to see the beauty in life again. The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which, through sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes. This powerful little group of initiates knowns that it has all the rights. Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Thus, a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge. The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire. They cannot hope to dominate the entire Universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the Universe. Sade never believed that his fellow countrymen would be capable of the additional effort needed to make it “republican.” However, if crime and desire are not the law of the entire Universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict. They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion. Thus, it is necessary to create from all these fragments a World that exactly coincides with the new law. The need for unity, which Creations leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm. The law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the World. Even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers, it must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
At its best, criticalness is a sincere effort to help other improve. At its worst, it is the compulsion to get other people before they get you. If you are a manipulator who exaggerates the values of criticalness, you distrust and blame others. This keeps you “above” their level, but it often keeps you isolated and lonely as well. It is as if you were playing a game which you often win, but cannot enjoy winning because it is a secret game, and only you know about it. If you expose it, you cannot play anymore. So you sit at home, all alone, never admitting to anyone the secret of your game. The game is called, “I am better than you,” and you can find all the evidence you need to support the fact that you are winning. However, with no one to share the victory with, you only feel more isolated from others and think less of them. If you are a master, you are learning to trust others more and more every day. You are becoming more willing to forgive them for their natural tendency to be human. In particular, you are learning to appreciate your own humanness. Having done this, you see yourself, not as above others, yet not below them either. You begin to regard them as friends, rather than enemies or competitors. Your actions toward them are rewarded with love and caring rather than a hollow victory in being “right.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
As a master, you appreciate your supportiveness as well as your criticalness. You do things for others rather than to them. You stop judging others, because you stop judging yourself. Ultimately, bring right loses importance. Winning loses importance. And being with people grows more important every day. If it is not cultivated, attitudes toward transference, for instance, range from considering it a fiction which protects the therapist from the consequences of his real behaviour and its effects, to viewing it as early stereotypic behaviour which will be extinguished in the natural course of events. Symbolic analysis plays little role, partly because it is usually content-specific and covered by response to emotion. (I believe the so-called archaic symbols are significant, chiefly because they are cleaner communicants; like new words in a foreign language, they shake loose the multiple complexities of conventional meanings, and say just the elementary things each person means them to say.) The unconscious does not currently figure in client-centered literature. It is considered a reductionist assumption about phenomena better understood in terms of attention and “levels of awareness.” An ahistorical bias has always been plain among us, and this is one of the currents which moves us to an appreciation of some of the existential writings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Diagnosis is a moot point too, though our departures are not as radical as they once were. The word “schizophrenia” becomes a damning designation. To have it once applied to a young man can be to ruin a career, despite all evidence of subsequent healthiness. A name implies a concept; and if this concept is unsound, the diagnosis can ruin treatment; the very naming it can damage the patient who we essay to help. The sick in mind…are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. It is not that we decry classification as such; we recognize it as a useful scientific tool. However, when it leads to reification of terms, it is dangerous. We have been in an unprecedented era of self-actualization. Young people and most intelligent older people who appear to be laid back are taking care of their own situation first. They are “getting their heads together,” discovering and tending their bodies, learning how to produce their reality movies. College students are not charging after partisan dogmas or idealistic rhetoric. However, do not be deceived by this quiescence. It denotes neither apathy nor stupidity. In fact, it may well be the better part of wisdom to lay back until something worthy of your intelligence comes alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The existentialists also have pointed out that the self is made through decisions. You become what you decide. If, in the choice between running away or facing an unpleasant task, you choose to face up to the issue, you have become a better person. If you choose the weaker and more cowardly alternative, you become, at that moment, on the basis of your own choice, a weaker, lesser person. The behaviourists have, on the other hand, suggested that you have no “choice” but that your choices are determined by factors that control you, such as your parents’ wishes, your genes, and social demands upon you. Again the existentialists reply that one can also choose to let others make decisions for oneself but that the responsible direction is to recognize that, in almost all difficult decisions, the choice is still yours. The fake-nationalists are such terrible creatures, that on one occasion, they drove our unforgettable former President Clinton to bluntly express his opinion. State authority can guarantee peace and order only when the state World-concept and the World-concept of the people agree. Violent elements promoting a World-concept, one that differs from the people’s, will look like individual criminal groups and will not be seen as champions of a great idea which is opposed to the views of the state. If this were not the case, and the opposition held a World-concept that the people’s World-concept, the state can apply the most violent measures for centuries against the terror threatening it, but, in the end, the state will submit because it is unable to defeat the opposing idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the professional personnel and programs for the citizens of Sacramento and is committed to protecting life and property from fire and explosions through inspection, investigation, training, education, data processing and statistical fire reports. “A child was caught in one of the rooms. The main fire was on the second floor of this apartment building, and there were women and kids downstairs screaming at us. We used every length of hose in the bed, it was a long stretch, because we had to go around a courtyard and up the stairs. The fire was coming around the cracks of the door to the second-floor doorway. I remember thinking, ‘This is it, this is where the stuff hits the fan.’ We had to knock down the fire before the guys from the truck could get in to search. I was on the nozzle, and we crawled through the doorway, and suddenly I had excruciating pain in my knees. The heat went right through my boots. We first hit the doorway with the line, then the hallways and the ceiling. The heat was extraordinary. We didn’t do it scientifically, we went in very, very fast because there was somebody in there. Halfway down the hall, I screamed, ‘My knees are burning.’ My officer said, ‘My knees are burning, too, but we have a job to do. Move in.’ I said to myself, ‘He’s right.’ #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
“It was the most fire I had ever seen, it was from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. There was all sorts of junk on the floor—a baby carriage frame, a shopping cart. The metal was glowing. It was blocking our way. I said, ‘We’ve got to pass this stuff out.’ I couldn’t move around it, and I couldn’t climb over it. The guy behind me thought I said, ‘I’m going to pass out.’ Realizing that communications were down, I handed the line over to the backup, grabbed the shopping cart, stood up, and moved it out of the way. When I lifted the shopping cart, just for those few seconds, I got second-degree burns on my fingers. I got back down and grabbed for the line, and they gave it back to me. I realized that this must be really bad, because you never get the line back. We went on, and I was thinking, ‘This is it. My sanity is gone. Nobody can stand this much pain. I can’t give in to it.’ Then I told myself, ‘You don’t feel it.’ A lot of guys don’t feel it when they’re burned. I did. I felt the whole thing, the whole time. I was making a conscious effort not to pay attention to it. I just kept moving. I have visions that I wasn’t going to have any knees left, they were just going to be done. Afterwards I really didn’t think I did that good a job. I was disappointed in myself. While I was throwing that stuff out, it must have looked like I was backing out. Maybe I could have climbed over that stuff. I felt I was too slow. I should have moved in a lot faster. And then, when I got outside, my knees were killing me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“I found out the rescue had been made by a die-hard fireman I know, X, the salt of the earth. He always has a frown on his face. He had gone up the fire escape and into one of the back windows and found a kid in the bathroom, a three- or four-year-old boy who was in the next bed to me in the emergency room. Rosy pink cheeks, he looked like he was half Black and half Irish. Really beautiful-looking child. They were taking him to the air chamber at the hospital, a decompression chamber for smoke inhalation victims. Anyhow, after the fire was out, we went back up with the hose, and I remember I had trouble walking upstairs because of my knees. The truck really took most of the line up. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was dragging. I didn’t say anything about my knees. I kept thinking it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I was making too much of it, and everybody else must be just as sore. I did say to somebody, ‘Boy, my knees are really killing me.’ And he said, ‘God bless you. My wife and I will pray for you.’ I got back to quarters, and my lieutenant said, ‘You don’t look so good. Are you sure you had the right gloves on?’ He was worried about my hands. I told him it wasn’t my hands, it was my knees. He said, ‘Well, all of our knees hurt a little.’ I said, ‘No. They really hurt.’ This was bout forty-five minutes after getting back. He said, ‘All right, let me see.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“I pulled up my pants, and my knees looked like a couple of golf ball blisters. I said, ‘Holy God.’ I had pulled some of the skin off. The chief took me to the hospital. I was dirty. They put on a sulfa drug, which is supposed to be a miracle drug for burns. They determined I had second-degree burns. At the burn center a few days later, they determined that the burns were third-degree. The doctor at the burn center said it was the most common kind he treats at the hospital. Burned knees. From kneeling on a hot surface. It seems that each time I knelt, I was burning the knees deeper and deeper. The doctor said I had cellulitis, which is a bad infection. ‘You have to be admitted right now. You’re going to have to go on intravenous for six or seven days. Then you’re going to have grafting.’ I was shocked. I had to call my wife and tell her and the family. That was very hard. I spent thirty-three days there, on and off. I’ve had three surgical grafts since then. I don’t think the guys who haven’t been in that situation know how painful it is. The burn is just the beginning. After that is when all the pain starts. Being in the burn center with other firefighters, there is a lot of camaraderie there. You’re all in the same boat. There were two others there, one with knees and the other had a hot cinder down his boot and he grabbed it with his hand. I thought I was in hell. I woke up in this icy room, and I was in a room full of men. God is punishing me, I thought. It was like a MASH unit. What an education. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The skin grafts came from my hips and pelvis. Supposedly it wouldn’t show so much there. Because I was a firefighter, they took deeper sections of skin, because I was going to be back on my knees. One of the guys was a probie. His recovery was going to be a lot longer than mine. You’re lying in bed, half naked, but we tried to make the best of it. We became very close. When we were separated at one point, we came to see each other on crutches or in a wheelchair. His wife had a baby since. I remember feeling very close to him. We shared the experience of the job.” The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to working closely with fire service organizations and other proactive groups to enhance solutions to the fire problem. The services provided by the agency include: arson investigations, fire prevention safety in buildings, boiler and pressure vessel safety, the program for petroleum and chemical tanks, collecting and analyzing fire reports, and the personnel standards and education for the firefighters in Sacramento. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars and other American made good and services. Also, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
Paranormal investigators have recorded disembodies voices and witnessed strange shadows following them through The Winchester Mystery House. The enormous 19th century mansion once was nine stories tall, and had 600 rooms, but the 1906 earthquake demolished the nine-story observation tower, and took much of the 4th floor with it. However, 160 rooms, of which 110 are available for tour, still exist in this meandering catacomb.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Happy Veteran’s Day!
Lord, Don’t Let Me Die Like this
There is the blindly instinctive and passioned terrestrial will in man, which violently drives him to seek and be satisfied with bodily satisfactions. There is also a higher will which gently draws him to transcend the body altogether. If the only enjoyment a man knows is that of physical sensations, he is only a dressed-up, walking, and thinking animal. The law of chastity requires that sexual relations be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman. In addition to reserving sexual intimacy for marriage, we obey the law of chastity by controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Jesus Christ taught, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” reports Matthew 5.27-28. It is an essential part of the Quest’s work to separate the man from his passions, to subjugate the animal in him so as better to cultivate the godlike in him. Both desires and fears bind a man to his ego and thus bar the way to spiritual fulfilment. They could not exist except in relation to a second thing. However, when he turns his mind away from all things and directs it towards its own still center, it is the beginning of the end for all desires and all fears. The end of all this long self-training to cast out personal grief and terrestrial passion is blessedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The heart must become empty of all desires. This brings about the emotional void, which corresponds, in its own place, to the mental void experienced in the depth of mystical meditation. To this emptiness he must give himself, with it he must satisfy himself. In this way he obeys Jesus and becomes “poor in Spirit.” Poor in Spirit refers to a spiritual state of humility and dependence on God. It is a recognition of one’s need for God and a growing dependence on Him. It is also a sense of spiritual bankruptcy, powerlessness, and unworthiness before God. What is it worth to a man to be free from the passions, and free from the inner divisive conflicts which their activity must necessarily produce in him? Are they not the chief obstacles which prevent him from attaining that inner calm wherein alone the ego can be faced, caught, and conquered? And this done, what is there to keep the Overself from taking possession of him? Few men are moved by a single motive. For most men the contrary is the fact. This is because first, the ego itself is a complex and second, the higher and lower natures are in conflict. Discrimination is needed to penetrate the thin surface of so many pleasures, while the strength is needed to say “No” when this is wiser than accepting them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It is not only needful to understand the characteristics of one’s desires but also their source. This knowledge will help him to improve character and attain true self-reliance. It is a strange paradox that on whatever desire a man wields the axe of non-attachment, he will thereafter become possessed of the power to attain it. There is this great paradox on the Quest: that the more the disciple obtains the power to bring about the fruition of his desires, the more he loses those desires! If we lack the willpower to overcome bad habits that have become popular and conventional, at least let us try not to justify our indulgence by specious reasons. The blind impulses must be checked by willpower, the lower nature must be disciplined and the lower energies directed into higher channels. It is perfectly possible, where fate ordains, to live continently and chastely, however strongly sexed a man may be. However, to achieve this, he must utilize the analytic reason, the creative imagination, and the active will in understanding and disciplining his energies and then he must redirect them towards aspirational, intellectual, or moral ideas or transmute them into practical work. He who begins by refusing to be a slave to the palate’s perverted appetite will find it easier to go on to refusing to be a slave to lust. A triumph over the one prepares the way for, and helps in the achievement of, a triumph over the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It is true that we all share a terrestrial body with the lower creatures. However, that does not force us to stay on their level emotionally. Every desire conquered feeds his strength and fortifies his will. The man who has made his way to the top of his profession but failed to make the conquest of his passions, is still an unbalanced creature, an unsatisfied human being. The extremes of abstention which follow repugnance, indifference, or self-struggle and the satiety which follows helpless yielding are both undesirable. The necessities of Nature hold us in their thrall but there is first, a difference between them and the desires of the ego and second, a difference between the true necessities which are inescapable from physical existence and the false ones which have been imposed on us by age-old habits, traditions, environments, and outer suggestions. That desire is a true one whose source lies in a genuine need, not in mere greed. Repentance redeems man, lifts him above the lustful dog to the loving human being, distinguishes him from the mere animal. We are cast out of Heaven by our own passion and kept out by our own attachments. If today we are miserable exiles, the way to remedy such a situation is clear. We must free ourselves from the one and disentangle ourselves from the other. He should desire that which will itself cut off all desires. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“Experiencing” is defined as an inner stream of feelings to which you can every moment attend inwardly. It is simple, effortless and available to us all. Yet it is maddeningly elusive. Try these experiences: Feel your body from the inside. Is there tension in your muscles? Is your stomach wound tight like a watch spring? Take a deep breath and feel what happens to that tension. Sit a while without moving. Does some prickliness begin to form just under the skin? Recall the full feeling you once had after overeating. Recall the heaviness, the discomfort, the difficulty in breathing. What does being bored really feel like? That strained, impatient deadness almost hurts, does it not? Something deep down screams soundlessly at you to get out of the boring situation. Can you recall feeling that? These are but three examples of experiences. They do not involve learning or doing. You can have them instantaneously. And there are thousands more available to you—each distinct from all the others. To have an experience, to really “get into” a feeling, involves a release or surrender. Behind the surrender is a basic willingness to trust, to accept that the inner core “knows what is best” for you. Thus experiencing holds the solution to all your internal mysteries, the truth of your existence. If experiencing is so wonderful and useful, why is it so elusive? Who do we shun the prospect of getting to our inner core and discovering our true being? Probably because we are afraid. We anticipate the truth will be too painful, that when we look inside at what really is, we will not like what we see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Ironically, by trying to avoid the pain of looking within, we virtually guarantee the continued pain of our incomplete, manipulative behaviour. True, some will shed some tears on the way into their core, but compared to the tears of helplessness one has already shed, they are a few random raindrops in a storm. And who knows how many future tears he has avoided by reaching down and finding his inner source of power—a source which he can use to untangle the painful web of helplessness his life has become. People who benefit most from therapy are those who are “experience-oriented,” who subjectively follow their feelings even though they have not explicitly thought them all out. Being willing to let your experience talk to you is the first significant step from manipulation to mastery. There are some common ways people approach a problem. One way is to belittle the problem. This is when one says, “It really is nothing…I should not let a few pains bother me.” Such an approach will get you nowhere. If pains are important enough for your body to feel, they are important enough to look into, get inside of, and get clear. You do not make a problem go away by belittling it. In fact, by pushing it aside, you probably make it worse. Often times people analyze their problems. We might assume someone has something to do with our problem. However, the analysis may or may not be correct, and it does nothing to change the feeling. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
You can analyze furiously the whole time you are having the feeling, but if it is there in your guy, with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, your analysis will not ease or make it disappear. A lot of people also face down the feeling. Some say to themselves, “I will have to grit my teeth, stand up to it, walk through it,” which sounds courageous and noble, but is actually false bravado. This approach does not work because when you do it, you do not touch the place where change takes place: in your body. You are just mouthing a courage which can only be found deep inside, at your core. Another method is lecturing yourself. The script often goes like this, “If I could just grow up and be adult about this, I am sure everything would be all right.” This does not work either. The lecture is based on the mistaken notion that adults do not have feelings, or if they do, they do not have the right to the feelings. When you lecture yourself, all you do is pile guilt on top of whatever the problem is. And the guilt just makes it worse. Drowning the feeling is another method. When you try to tune the problem out because it makes you feel worse, you sink into the discomfort, hoping you will find it less painful, but knowing deep down that you will not. Whenever you sink into this unchanged feeling, it makes you feel as bad as the last time. You are no further ahead. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Since these five approaches are not physical, they cannot work. The feeling is physical and can only be changed by a physical process, such as focusing. When a man finally focuses, a very real change happens in him, something which he can build on. Even though it appears that some people play the victim in life, that circumstances seem to be manipulating him, they are still manipulators. Some people may stay married to a homosexual husband, playing upon one’s own helplessness and their husband’s sense of guilt to take care of her, even though they both resented it. The unspoken (and sometimes even spoken) message is, “I am too weak and helpless to take care of myself and the boys, so you have to.” This manipulation is rewarded by his grudging support, but it has its price: It traps her in an unhappy marriage, it prevents her from going out and learning to make it on her own, it reinforces her own feeling of helplessness. How can you deal with this type of manipulator in your everyday life? Well, for starters, you will have to fight the temptation to take the easy way out. You will have to refuse to do things for the weakling and instead, encourage him or her to be strong and self-directed. I once had a friend whose wife was afraid to go to the store and buy a newspaper. She said she did not like the way the clerks leered at her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
So my friend would stop in his way home from work and buy the newspaper himself. It was easier than arguing with his wife about it. Finally, he said, “I do not read the evening newspaper, I watch the news on TV. If you want the paper, buy it yourself.” She refused, but she still wanted the newspaper. So my friend began by accompanying her to the store the first few times until she felt more comfortable about it. In time, she went to get the paper without a second thought. My friend used this same technique when it came to his wife’s getting a driver’s license. At first, he refused to drive her places, even though he had been chauffeuring her for years. When she grew tired of taking buses and cabs, he offered to teach her how to drive, and she eventually accepted the offer. Now she had her own car and capably goes wherever she wants. In refusing to be manipulated, my friend made his wife angry and perhaps caused her some pain. However, in the end, he helped her gain strength—and helped free her from a continuing life-script of manipulation. The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law. “If you want to be republicans, one more effort” means: “Accept the freedom of crime, the only reasonable attitude, and enter forever into a state of insurrection as you enter into a state of grace.” Thus total submission to evil leads to an appalling penitence, which cannot fail to horrify the Republic of enlightenment of natural goodness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
By a significant coincidence, the manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was burned during the first riot of the Republic, which could hardly fail to denounce Sade’s heretical theories of freedom and to throw so compromising a supporter into prison once more. By doing so, it gave him the regrettable opportunity of developing his rebellious logic still further. The universal republic could be a dream for Sade, but never a temptation. In politics his real position is cynicism. In his Society of the Friends of Crime he declares himself ostensibly in favour of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating. It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates. The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities. The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal. It must pretend to obey the law. In a World that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal Heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. However, to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this World is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When it comes to therapy, we really want to think of that person as a person—someone unique with dignity and capacity, worthy of our unreserved respect. If we must have a word for it, “client” seems more expressive of that. Why “client-centered”? This matters much more. Again, the negative purpose is only to distinguish between this and “therapist-centered,” “theory-centered,” “society-centered,” etcetera. There are such things. The positive meaning is immense. It expresses the major goal of the therapist; to understand and accept the perception and feelings of the client; to share the client’s view of reality rather than to impose his own. It follows than that we rely heavily upon the growth capacity of the individual. The therapist is an active and significant person, but he cannot heal—he can only help to create conditions in which the natural regenerative powers take effect. As for motive, the drive toward self-actualization is a primary one; every human being would rather be better than worse, and strives toward the enhancement of self even though the strivings may often be thwarted and regressive. These assumptions about motive and capacity combine into a general ethic, which can simply be called self-determination. Client-centered therapy is founded on the conviction that man should be free, and to this end makes freedom a major means in the therapeutic experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
This is not, as some think, a reflection of political attitudes which supposedly prevail in America. It is a personal psychological conviction that the man who is most free will be most healthy. Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience, therefore the greatest probability of an adaptive response. For the individual, it seems that the urge to freedom is an urge to health, and precedes, rather than reflects, a political order. It is common for a person to experience conflict between wishes. He or she may want to study and also to go to the movies. Someone may want to marry one person and at the same time be in love with another. A person may want to have fun but also to be “good.” The healthy thing to do with conflict is to acknowledge its existence within the self, study all the alternatives as rationally as one can in the light of one’s value system, make a decision, act on it, and accept all the consequences. Among the consequences to be accepted are regrets over what one has lost in connection with the abandoned alternatives. No decision can ever be made without some fear that it is the wrong decision. There is nothing inconsistent with healthy personality in the idea that a decision, once made will still leave the person uncertain that it is the best or “rightest” one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Existential conflicts frequently arise where each choice has positive values and negative implications associated with it. Any alternative, if chose, will affect one’s life profoundly. To make decisions, such as whether to marry or not, to take this job or that, calls for courage. The ability to decide such conflicts is an attribute of healthy personality. Such courage seems to grow out of past experiences at decision-making, experience that fosters independent security. The younger generation is generally viewed as being too laid back, apathetic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and sensual. There are periods when a species or an individual or a nation needs to lay back, mellow out, cocoon-quiescent and recoup. Intelligent pursuit of happiness is a challenge of the human experience. However, this quiescence is more apparent than real. The spellbreaker, or internal release, is the element which lifts the injunction and frees the person from his script so that he can fulfill his own autonomous aspirations. It is a pre-set “self-destruct” which is obvious in some scripts but has to be hunted for or decoded in others, much like the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle which served the same function in Ancient Greece. Not much is known about it clinically, because people come for treatment just because they cannot find out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
For example, in a “Waiting for Rigor Mortis” or “Sleeping Beauty: script, the patient thinks she will be freed of her frigidity when she meets the Prince with the Golden Apples, and may very likely feel that the therapist is that Prince. However, he declines the honour, mainly for ethical reasons, but also because when he previous (unlicensed) therapist took on the job, his Golden Apples turned to dust. Sometimes the spellbreaker is merely ironic. This is a common situation in losers’ scripts: “Things will be better after you are dead.” The internal release may be event-centered or time-centered. “When you meet a Prince,” “After you die fighting,” or “after you have three children” are event-centered antiscripts. “When you pass the age at which your father died,” or “After you have stayed with the company thirty years” are time-centered. Whoever puts a moral purpose into life automatically lifts himself above the physical level of mere animality. For him begins a struggle between the slavery of sense and the freedom of enlightenment, between blind emotion and deliberate will, between inward weakness and inward strength. Henceforth, he seeks happiness rather than pleasure, the calm of a satisfied mind rather than the excitement of satisfied senses. If this is a stoic ideal, it is a necessary one, for he must conquer himself. He hates himself, and no man can live in peace with what he hates. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department protects the people of Sacramento with public education, fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services. The Sacramento Fire Department partners with the community to mitigate risks, and responds to all calls for service with skill, dedication, and compassion. “We were asleep, and the alarm came at about 5.55 on a Sunday morning. My company, Engine XX was first in. It was a one-family row house, two floors and a basement. It started as a fire in the basement and had spread to the first floor. I was the nozzle man. We knocked down the floor fire on the first floor, then we tried to find the entrance to the basement. We stumbled around in the living room because there was so much furniture in it and we couldn’t see in the smoky darkness. The family had redone the basement, and instead of opening a door and going down steps to the basement, you had to open the door and walk about eight feet before you came to the steps. We didn’t know that at the time. It’s an unusual arrangement for that kind of house. Anyway, we couldn’t find the basement. It started getting real hot in there, and everything started cracking. The lieutenant, Y, said, ‘Too hot. Let’s get out of here.’ Before we could make a move, the floor collapsed and knocked us down. The fire just took off, and we were trapped in there. I was slightly unconscious for a while, then I had to pause a little while to get my senses together, because I was burned on my forehead. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“Lieutenant Y was in worse trouble. He was dazed. I had to get him out of there. I grabbed him under the arms and started to lead him toward the back door, but we stumbled over the furniture, and we tripped and fell. So I grabbed him by the hand, and my glove came off. The next thing I knew, my hand was badly burned. Then I started dragging him along the floor, and the next thing I knew, I was stuck. My air mask had stuck on a table or chair or something. I was stuck, and I couldn’t move. It was real scary. It was like being in hell, really. I thought, ‘Lord, don’t let me die like this. I deserve a chance.’ I thought about my wife. We were only married a year. I said, ‘Wow, I’m going to leave my wife right now, and my family.’ The way it happened, it was unbelievable. I was totally stunned. I didn’t believe I would be in a situation like that. From my training and previous experience in other fires, I knew we had to get out of there. I tired as hard as I could to get us out, but every time I tried to move, somehow I was getting weaker and weaker. I thought it was hopeless. Then my air bottle ran out of oxygen. I thought I was going to die of suffocation. I was just hoping I wouldn’t burn to death. But the fire didn’t seem like it was coming toward us anymore. I could hardly breathe in my air mask, and I had too much smoke in my chest. Just then, the other guys managed to get back in there and pull us out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“At the hospital they put a tube into my lungs. They could hardly get it down there, my throat was so swollen. It had been burned by the heat. They were showing it down there, and I was scared. They finally got it down. I don’t remember much of my first three days in the hospital. A lot of people said they came up to see me, but I don’t remember who. I asked somebody if everybody had made it out od the fire all right, and they said no. I saw the other two firefighters who were hurt, but I didn’t see Lieutenant Y. I kind of figure he had died. After the third or fourth day, everything started hurting real bad. My hand. My face. I was in a lot of pain. It took me a while to get over that. The first day was hardest for my wife. She was really hurt to see me, but she tried to hold it back. Afterwards, she didn’t want me coming back to the department, but I told her that that was what I wanted to do. So she respects that, and she supports me. I was in therapy for a year and a half for my hand, using grips and putty. Then I went to this physical therapy center and did all sorts of other things, exercising every day, working with my hand to build things. Today my hand is not as good as it was, but it’s okay. The department was excellent, supportive in every way. Everybody came up to see me, even guys I didn’t know. It seemed like the whole fire department was at the hospital. Anything I wanted or needed, they got for me. They treated me excellently. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I was off the job for about five and a half months, then I was put on light duty for about a year. Now I’m back on the job full-time. Everything is pretty cool. I’m lucky to be alive, right?” Professionalism leads the Sacramento Fire Department to continuously improve their knowledge and skills, always striving to be “first in” with excellent service. The Sacramento Fire Department also strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
The Menagerie Oddities Market is back this Holiday season!
On every Saturday from November 30 to December 28, from 11am to 5pm, Winchester Mystery House will host the 6th annual Menagerie Holiday Oddities & Curiosities Market, with new vendors every week. Join the Yuletide Oddventure and stuff those stockings with something weird they won’t forget this holiday season! 🎄
Link in bio for more information! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
America Love it or Leave it: How Can a Lost Mind be Recovered?
Our life experiences are distracting us and dulling our spiritual view so much so that we are not focusing on that which matters most. I wonder, do we miss opportunities to learn of the Lord and feel His love? Do we miss opportunities to share with others—especially children—that which matters most, the gospel of the Lord, Jesus Christ? We have all seen children and youth standing in the crowds confused and wanting to know what matter most. I can almost hear this child and other children crying out the words so many of us have sung, “Please teach me to walk in the light.” Are we teaching our children to know, feel, and rejoice in the beauty, power, and miracles of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Let us nurture our children concerning Him whom we call the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us teach our children the grand saving principles of the gospel. Children require the ability to knock that having faith in the Saviour and following Him will help them to receive peace in this beautiful World that is experiencing trials and tribulations. As you include your children at your family dinner table, as you involve them in daily prayer and scripture study and in family home evening, you are following the example of the Saviour by loving and teaching them. As you do this, let them know that together your family is striving to keep the commandments and to be worthy to be an eternal family. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
It may be during the information one-on-one times that the Spirit will prompt us to ask just the right questions or to say just the right thing to help our children know and feel the light of the Lord. If we make the opportunities, the Spirit will guide us. We have wonderful, capable children in our midst. We can help them find peace in this life and in the life to come. After all, you do not want to raise your children to be on the run, to have to dye their hair to evade law enforcement. Some people who do not walk in the foot steps of the Lord end up having to live underground and join the Weathermen Underground tribe. You do not want your children to have to work with dope dealers to raise a quarter of a million dollars to pay manic guerrillas to keep them safe, to pay for hair dye, and fast cars as they drive up Highway 101 to north Oakland. There is the chance that the police and CHP will throw up roadblocks and you will have to stay at a stash pad and wait it out before the coast is clear to drive to Salt Lake City. It is better to raise your children to be American Legion hunting-fishing guys, or a soft Middle American woman, or everyone’s TV girl—a Holy Family. It is best to become a Holy Family of Elegance. When it comes to psychotherapy, words themselves are vague and insecure and our ignorance so great that we tend in desperation to assume meaning where none exists. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Let us recognize that the true nature of psychosis is a mystery. (And the nature of the most prevalent convulsive treatment, electroshock, is called a “mystery within a mystery” by the most authoritative book on the subject.) One of our problems, then, is how to deal with a subject consisting of experience which at its worst is indescribable from the inside and incomprehensible from the outside, and this without using words which are themselves confounding. “Psychosis,” for instance, has an authoritative, antiseptic sound, but its real sterility lies mainly in its lack of clear meaning. It simply replaces “madness”—now a literary term, and “insanity”—which represents a dated legal concept. Falling into pseudoscientific conventions of language will not help. At the present stage of knowledge, the questions are well enough represented by asking simply: What does it mean to “lose one’s mind”? How can a “lost mind” be recovered? For that matter, how is the mind developed in the first place? It is our assumption that “mind” develops and exists beyond brain, and following from this, the assumption of social psychological origin of much mental disturbance. It sounds simple, but there is by no means wholehearted agreement in the field on this issue. Current work on molecular structure and the chemistry of schizophrenia, for instance, challenges psychological assumptions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
It is possible, of course, that biochemical methos of treatment will develop actual cures for psychotic states, thus outmoding psychotherapy. No less a therapist than Dr. Freud thought so in regard to schizophrenia. Also fashionable are experiments with drugs which induce pseudo-psychotic states, which suggest to some that if such states can be caused by chemical means, they can also be cured by chemical means, and further that the mechanism of disturbance is fundamentally biochemical. Undeniably there is always a biochemical basis for behaviour of the human organism. However, this does not rule out psychological influence, in either the sickening or the healing process. It is certain that anxiety can cause diarrhea. Chemical mechanism? Surely. And a virus or a laxative might cause the same apparent result, but that would not alter the fact that anxiety, a psychological state, can and does cause diarrhea (as surely as a nonchemical state may cause someone ten feet away to blush). Nor would it mean, more obviously but no more truly, that even though the eventual chemistry, mechanism, and result are the same, two different causes (laxative and anxiety) are therefore the same. Nor would it mean than an antidote for diarrhea is a specific treatment for either anxiety or a virus, or that a specific for one is of any use for the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Similarly, a chemically induced psychotic state may not be a true psychosis even though it has the same appearance in terms of hallucinations and like effects. A chemical antidote for the pseudo-psychosis is not necessarily effective for a true psychosis, even though a chemical mechanism exists in either case. Psychological influence is not eradicated by the artificial imitation of its effects. Even though “tranquilizers” will tranquilize, so will a blow on the head, and neither one is equivalent to, or can deny the existence of, “peace of mind.” That which we call a “psychosis” is not a disease. It is a learned behaviour, exaggerated to a point of no return, id est, where control is lost and the exaggerated behaviour “takes on a life of its own” temporarily. Because this exaggeration is so overwhelming, so much beyond our ordinary capacity to assimilate, it appears to us that we are no longer dealing with, for instance, ordinary suspicion, but something quite different—“paranoia.” Then it appears that psychosis is not of the same order, not on the same continuum, as “normal” or “neurotic” behaviour. However, as psychotic behaviour becomes more common it is seen as a form of maladjustment similar in kind ot lesser degrees of maladjustment, though so much greater in quantity that it seems different in quality too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
There is one sense, unfortunately, in which it is different. A boulder balanced on the edge of a precipice can be pressed ounce by measured ounce toward rolling off. Each ounce is just like the last, but when the quantity of pressure totals to the “breaking point,” the quality of the consequences changes radically. No longer will the relief or counterpressure of one ounce recover the balance. Even if the boulder is not smashed in the fall, an enormous effort is required to restore it to its original position. It is because of this effort (which so few can make, and so many need) that it is necessary to prevent the “psychotic situation” in life. The “psychotic situation” is a precondition to the psychotic state, which may or may not follow. In our society, there is an overwhelming emphasis on thinking. In school, we were taught almost entirely to think rather than to feel. We were told to “use our heads,” to think through problems, to study hard and be sensible. This approach is supposed to lead to success in the World. The trouble is, while thinking is unquestionably important, it is of limited value. Thinking, you see, is entirely concerned with the past and the future. We cannot think about the present moment; we can only feel it. The present, a microscopic dot on the line from past to future, does not lend itself to thinking—for the simple fact that thinking takes time. The moment we think, even if we think about “now,” it is already in the past. Thinking can help us learn from the past and plan for the future, but it cannot help us experience the now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Thinking results in action. First we think, then we do. We are a society of thinkers and doers. However, we are also a society of manipulators because all this emphasis on the mind has taught us to be cunning and calculating. When we use our heads only, we become manipulators—functioning with only part of our human capacity. So thoroughly are we oriented to doing, we shy from theories that tell us there is nothing we can do about a situation. The truth is, in some situations, there is absolutely nothing we can do. Sometimes no actions can be taken to help a person be confident. One must be confident, be secure, be powerful—and to do that, one must discover his core being. A system based on thinking is limited because it is based on concepts and theories borrowed from others, generally others’ books. It is borrowed knowledge—and borrowed knowledge does not overcome ignorance; it hides ignorance. Borrowed knowledge is “knowing without knowing.” The more of it we amass, the more darkness and ignorance we keep in our inner cores. We can develop our logic, but logic alone leads only to conclusions, never to the truth. Because the truth needs no proof. It does, however, need the heart. This is where experience comes in. Knowledge of the truth comes from our experience of it, from a feeling which originates deep down in our cores. It is totally individual, intensely personal, and entirely subjective. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
You cannot know what love is by reading about it. You must experience it. You cannot take a course in love—or confidence, or any other value for that matter. Books and course are things of the mind. Values are things of the heart as well as the mind, and they come from within. However, people spend so much time in school and not everyone believes in God, nor do they go to church. Therefore, it might be conducive to offer a psychology class on how to love. People spend so much time learning how to think and how to hate. If we taught people how to express platonic love in college, it might generate better human beings that are able to deal with stressful situations and will be less critical of others’ perceived faults. Some people view themselves as weak and powerless because they have never experienced their own personal power. All of the doing is merely activity at the circumference of one’s true self. In the focusing process, one can break through the circumference and find something else. In surrendering to helplessness, one may discover a capable self in one’s core. The “something” that one finds is the real I. And finding it, one knows, intuitively, that one had and still has power. Note that, in this experience, one does not actually do anything. A man may not know what to do. However, that is not important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
When the right thing to do comes alone, he will do it, based on his new, intuitive knowledge that he can do it. Not borrowed knowledge, from books or lectures or friends, but intuitive knowledge from within. Some people will thus have an instantaneous experience of mastery. When control is so perfect that he can never again raise his voice in anger, he needs turn attention to only one other passion—the spiritual. Such a chaste aloofness will help with mental, spiritual, and emotional clarity. When desires die without regrets, he begins to taste real peace. When cravings slough off naturally, like a serpent’s skin, he finds tranquil happiness. If not all of it, the man who can win his way to freedom from anger and finally liberate the mind from passion may need much of his lifetime for the work; but what he gains is of inestimable value. For this brings him closer to awareness of the Overself. As aspiration for the Overself grows stronger, other desires grow weaker. If you are ever to emerge from the darkness, you must possess an insatiable longing for light. He arrives at purity by a cultivated discipline of the mind rather than by a forcible atrophy of the senses. If he can find it and heed it, the thread-like intuition which will lead him out of animality into serenity will be his best guide. It is not possible for these finer elements to become, little by little, paramount in his outlook, consciousness, and conduct without a corresponding decline in the coarser ones. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
He will gradually become the ruler of his physical appetites and then the master of his bodily desires. Indeed, as all his longings for the Overself slowly gather themselves together into a great dedicated life, there is an equally great shift-over from the terrestrial part of his being to the truly human, allied with an opening-up of the angelic or divine part. The fruits of extravagances involving pleasures of the flesh, the harvest of promiscuity of pleasures of the flesh, the gleanings of irresponsibility with pleasures of the flesh, and the gratifications of license involving pleasures of the flesh must be subjected to the hard discipline of reason. Those who will not do so must sooner or later pay the price in fears, anxieties, irritations, regrets, disillusionments, shames, and despairs. So long as a man identifies himself with the physical body, so long will he perforce have to identify himself with its desires and passions. Only when he transfers this self-identification to the infinite mental being can he completely detach himself from them. When they are still in subjection to passion, of what use is it for men to talk of freeing themselves from subjection to egoism? The student of philosophy will try to comprehend the sensations got from sensual pleasures impartially and impersonally. Man knows instinctively what will give him momentary emotional satisfaction; he must wrestle with reason to know what will give him deep enduring happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
When different pleasures compete for suffrage or when duty competes with desire, reason must arbitrate. Desire carried to an undue extent becomes a passion disturbing to the equilibrium of life and character. When a man finds that despite all his efforts to improve himself and reform his character, he still remains the same, it is an indication that new methods must be tried. The scourging of the flesh may be needed by, and may help, those who find their overheated passions and lusts get out of hand. However, it will not end those troubles of man, even though it may tame them for a time. Something more must be added, or must replace them—first, knowledge; second, work on the process of attention. The instinctual animal urge plus the ambitious drive for power and the personal desire for property keep men from spiritual aspiration. If he is filled with selfish interest alone, seeking the fulfilment of personal ambitions irrespective of any higher considerations; if terrestrial passion drives him and greed dominates him, he blocks his own way. Purification from such attachments must be the first endeavour. Pleasures which corrupt character are undesirable; but those which uplift character (like the finest works of Aaliyah, Beethoven and Handel) are desirable. There is a level of tension below which the person can think rationally and act effectively. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
When tension increases above this point, efficiency breaks down, and irrational thinking and expressive behaviour takes the place of rational thinking and effective action. This point on the tension continuum is called the frustration threshold. It varies from person to person, and within the same person at different times. A mother wants her house to be clean and orderly. In the forenoon, her three-year-old daughter Annie might spill a glass of milk, leave her Barbie dolls in disarray, and scatter magazines all over the newly cleaned living room. The mother’s reaction at the time is one of mild anger, followed by efficient attempts to set things straight. At five-thirty in the afternoon, the child repeats her efforts at messing up the house. This time, the mother “explores”—she sends the child to her room, screams, and is unable to prepare supper until she has vented her tension. Optimum physical health produces a high frustration threshold. A sick or exhausted person has less energy to cope with tension and is more easily frustrated than one who is fit. People who manage to survive the extremely corrupt Sacramento City—a so-called death camp—have pointed out that a strong commitment to life and a sense of mission to fulfill were definite factors in survival. Individuals with such a sense of mission were less readily frustrated by the deprivations, stresses, and pressure of extremely hostile environments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
When Zorba, the Greek, was unable to express his grief following the death of his beloved son, he danced a Cretan dance until he dropped from exhaustion. On another occasion, when he felt he had at last found the solution to a problem of brining logs down a mountainside, again he danced. Finally, when the plan to bring logs down the mountain failed, and his boss’s investment was dismally lost, the boss asked Zorba to show him how to dance, and the two men danced and laughed like madmen. When someone has access to such means of self-expression, as in dance, violent exercise, painting, or song, that person can release the inevitable frustration of life without recourse to mindless, destructive outlets of tension. As Reich pointed out, sexual orgasm also provides a natural means for the dissipation of tension. In fact, prolonged privation of pleasures of the flesh is a common cause of frustration. It is however, a mistake to think that other frustrations, such as material misunderstandings, are all relieved by pleasures of the flesh. Nothing is more revealing in this respect than the famous lampoon, read b y Dolmance in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the curious title: People of France, one more if you want to be republicans. Pierre Klossowski is right in attaching so much importance to it, for this lampoon demonstrates to the revolutionaries that their republic is founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right—and that by guillotining God on 21 January 1793, they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
The monarchy supported the concept of a God who, in conjunction with itself, created all laws. As for the Republic, it stands alone, and morality was supposed to exist without benefits of the Commandments. It is doubtful, however, that Sade, as Klossowki maintains, had a profound sense of sacrilege and that an almost religious horror led him to the conclusions that he expresses. It is much more likely that he came to these conclusions first and afterwards perceived the correct arguments to justify the absolute moral license that he wanted the government of his time to sanction. Logic founded on passions reconclusions before the premises. To be convinced of this we only have to appraise the admirable sequence of sophisms by which Sade, in this passage, justifies calumny, theft, and murder and demands that they be tolerated under the new dispensation. It is then, however, that his thoughts are most profound. He rejects, with exceptional perspicacity for his times, the presumptuous alliance of freedom with virtue. Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner’s dream, cannot endure limitations. It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom. On this essential point Sade never varies. This man who never preached anything but contradictions only achieves coherence—and of a most complete kind—when he talks of capital punishment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime. “My imprisonment by the State, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.” From this feeling of horror, he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned. A few years later Nodier summed up, perhaps without knowing it, the position obstinately defended by Sade: “To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after a calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible.” Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life. Sade is more moral, we see, than our contemporaries. However, his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals. You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence. Even if only once, from the moment you accept murder, you must allow it universally. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Permissions are the chief therapeutic instrument of the script analyst because they offer the only chance for an outsider to free the patient from the curses laid on him by his parents. The therapist gives permission to the patient’s Child by saying either “It is all right to do it,” or “You do not have to do it.” Both say to the Parent “Let him alone.” Thus, there are positive and negative permissions. In a positive permission, or license, “Let him alone!” means “Let him do it!” This cuts off the injunction. In a negative permission, or external release, it means “Stop pushing him into it!” This cuts off the provocation. Some permissions can be regarded either way. This is particularly true of antiscripts. Thus, when the Prince kissed Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, he was offering her both a license to wake up and a release from the witch’s curse. One of the most important permissions is a license to stop acting stupid and start thinking. Many patients of advanced years have not had a single independent thought since early childhood, and have quite forgotten how it feels to think, or even what thinking means. With properly timed permission, however, they are able to come through, and are more than delighted when they say out loud at the age of sixty-five or seventy what may be the first intelligent observation of their adult lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Often it is necessary to undo the work of previous therapists in order to give a patient permission to think. Some of them have spent years in mental hospitals or clinics where the slightest attempt on their part to think independently came up against powerful resistance from the staff. There they were taught that thinking is really a sin called “intellectualzing,” to which they must confess promptly and promise never to indulge in again. Many addictions and obsessions are based on parental come-ones. “Do not stop taking drugs (or you may stop coming home to ask for money)” says the mother of the heroin addict. “Do not stop thinking about pleasures of the flesh,” says the parent of a lecher or a nymphomaniac. And the whole concept of permissions as a therapeutic instrument was started by a gambler who said: “I do not need someone to tell me to stop gambling, I need someone to give me permission to stop, because somebody in my head says I cannot.” A permission, then, allows Jeder to be flexible, instead of responding with fixed patterns frozen by slogans and controls. This has nothing to do with “permissive up brining,” since that is full of imperatives, too. The most important permissions are to love and to change and to do things well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
A person with permission is just as easy to spot as one who is all tied up. “He sure has permission to think,” “She sure has permission to be beautiful,” and “They sure have permission to enjoy themselves,” are Martian expressions of admiration. (One of the frontiers of script analysis is the further study of permissions, primarily through observation of eye movements in very young children. Thus, in some situations the child glances sideways at his parents to see if he has “permission” to do something; in other cases, he seems to be “at liberty” to follow his own inclinations without consulting them. Such observations, carefully evaluated, may result in a significant distinction between “permissions” and “liberties.”) The term Genetic Counseling indicates that a genetic consumer consciousness is dawning. The emphasis is on genetic disorder, not upon genetic endowment, but this is to be expected. A new technology always appeals to hive-security first as a way of dealing with danger. Awareness of genetic disorder precedes awareness of genetic excellence, just as psychiatry precedes self-actualized psychology. Pathology precedes potential. When the experts in a hive begin treating “broken-down personalities” they have recognized the existence of “personality.” The next step is for healthy individuals to take charge of their own “selfs.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
New technology always appeals to hive-security first. The Ad Hoc Committee on Genetic Counseling of the American Society of Human Genetics described genetic counseling as a “communication process which deals with the human problems associated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a genetic disorder in the family.” This one-day workshop is primarily for health professionals who want to learn how to do genetic counseling or who want to strengthen their skills in this field. Hidden in this course description are valuable neurogenic clues, evolutionary evidence, which is easily overlooked by hive observers because it reveals much about the neurogenetic stage of the give culture—and of the planet. Genetic counseling appeared a generation after personality counseling. When an advanced, post-political culture offers courses in “Job Counseling,” “Personality Counseling” or “Martial Counseling,” Evolutionary Agents know that a move towards self-actualization is occurring—a free-mobile-individually oriented society is emerging. The military defense groups are willing to train those who are willing to be trained and have a good temperament and they simply do not bother training those who lack discipline. Being part of the United States of America’s armed forced is an honour and a privilege. It is ridiculous for an organization to even attempt to train some hundred thousand men in the State’s twilight of decline when, only a few years before, the State disgracefully abandoned one hundred and seventy million. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. They ensure Sacramento City can respond to, recover from, and mitigate against any hazard that affects their city, the region, the state and beyond. “I like ladder work. It’s probably the most dangerous jobs in firefighting, and the real purpose of it is to go in and look for anyone trapped in a fire. You’re more or less on your own, you’re not with the rest of the men, and you don’t have the benefit of the hose line. I was assigned the SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) that day. We got the call to a fire in a three-story dwelling. We are second in. Another engine and ladder company was ahead of us. When I got off the truck, I was all prepared to go in the building. It was a strange fire, actually—a kerosene heater, which was overfilled. It has been knocked over, and the kerosene went between the floor and the wall down into the basement from the first floor and was ignited by the hot water heater. So the fire ran up the walls to the upper floors, and the flames were coming out the third-floor windows when I got there. As I say, I had my air pack on. I went around to the back alley before the other guys. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“The first company was still trying to get the ladders up in this narrow alley. I went up some steps to the kitchen door and kicked it open. A couple of guys were already in there on the floor. They didn’t have packs, so they were taking a beating from the smoke. One of their ladder guys also had a pack, so his chief put him on a hose, and he said to me, ‘Go down to the basement with this guy and give him a hand with the tip.’ Engine or ladder man, it didn’t matter to him. He saw we both had packs, and it was pretty smoky. I helped this guy drag the line, and we both went down to the basement from the kitchen very quickly, because it was like a chimney. It was getting real hot, and the fire flashed over us. He hit it with water and knocked it down. There was a small window next to the steps, and he was trying to fog the smoke out the window. The heat was coming toward us the whole time. Then apparently somebody saw how bad it was getting and called, ‘Everybody out of the basement.’ There were only the two of us there. I didn’t hear it. The guy on the tip supposedly did and told me he was leaving. Again, I didn’t hear him. He closed down the hose, and all of a sudden he was gone. I learned later that he went out the window. He had to take the pack off to fit through the window, it was so narrow. I didn’t know he had left. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“So the water was stopped, and I was lone in the basement. I couldn’t go back up the steps to the kitchen, because when he shut down the water the fire had flashed over again and set fire to the stairs. You see, the water wasn’t really putting the fire out, but it was keeping the heat away from us. Now it was getting very hot. It was very dark, it was smoky, I couldn’t see. I was down on my stomach on the basement floor, looking for the back door I knew was there, but I couldn’t see it. I was probably only ten feet from it the whole time. I became a little disoriented, but I didn’t panic. I had been in basement fires before, and I knew you shouldn’t panic. I thought, ‘Now, how did I get into this situation. I don’t have any water. I don’t have anyone with me.’ I could see that the fire had engulfed the kitchen steps and I couldn’t make it up there. I knew there was a back door there somewhere, but the people had been remodeling the basement, and I had to feel my way through a lot of debris. There was paneling against one wall, and I thought that might have been the door. I slid on it like a slide and fell to the floor. I say there for a second, and said, ‘I gotta compose myself, or I’m going to be in trouble here in a minute.’ I thought to myself, I’ve been through a lot in my life. I probably should have been dead eight times over. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘I haven’t come this far to die in this person’s basement. This can’t happen to me. I’m going to survive. I’m not going to die in this guy’s basement because he was overfilling his kerosene heater.’ I got mad then. I remember. I said, ‘Dammit, I’m not staying here. I’ve got to get out.’ #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“So what I had to do was raise my mask and holler for help. If I hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have found me, because they didn’t know I was in there. This guy didn’t tell them I was still down there, and my lieutenant hadn’t ordered me to go down there; he thought I was on one of the upper floors. It was the chief of the other company who had sent me down there. They heard my hollering, and they were saying, ‘Come this way. This way.’ I would put my mask back on and walk toward their voices. I couldn’t see anything, so I was going by their voice. But they couldn’t hear me with my mask on. They didn’t know where the hell I was. It was getting harder and harder. It was very hot down there. I burned my ears, and I still had my helmet on. I knew if I didn’t get to that door soon, I wouldn’t make it, so I just kept going. I pushed things out of the way, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I had my hand stretched out like a blind man, and somebody grabbed my hand, and they pulled me out. One of my boots came off, and my helmet fell off. They never found my helmet, it had melted away, and the only thing left of my boot was the sole. There are points that I don’t recall. I didn’t actually black out, but I think it was my mind acting it out for me. I don’t recall exactly how I got to that back door. I was just glad to feel someone’s hand. I was kissing the floor, and the gentleman who grabbed my hand was in the doorway. He couldn’t advance any further. In fact, he was on the ground, and somebody had hold of his legs. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“I didn’t realize I was saved until I was in the rescue squad actually. I was on my way to the hospital, and I was holding the oxygen mask over my face, and I started crying. It finally hit me that I had almost died. I don’t normally cry. I believed I was going to be all right. I knew I was hurt, but I also knew I was going to make it. The first night in the hospital was hell. I had a tube going down my mouth into my lungs. It has a ballon-type thing at the end of it to keep the air passages open. Everything in there was swelling, and I would have chocked otherwise. And they were pulling a lot of things out of my lungs and throat, big pieces of black stuff. I didn’t know I had taken that much smoke, I had thought it was mostly heat. They gave me morphine, but I was conscious when they were putting that thing down my throat. It makes you gag. They refused to give me more morphine, saying they had given me enough already. When I wanted to say something I had to write it down, because I couldn’t speak. So the first night I was going in and out of consciousness. I kept writing down, ‘If you don’t take this tube out of my throat, I’m going to pull it out myself.’ I was a terrible patient that first night. I was in intensive care, and the orderlies, nurses, and doctors were at the desk fifteen feet from me, drinking soda. My mouth was so dry, I wanted some water, and they wouldn’t give it to me. They’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll get you something,’ thinking I’d go to sleep and forget. I would wake up an hour later, and nothing would be there. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“My father was there within an hour. He’s a fireman, too, and he heard the call come on the fire radio. He knew, before he was told, that I was in trouble. He heard the call for the rescue squad, and he said, ‘I knew it was you.’ The commissioner came, and so did a couple of guys I work with and my wife and my mother. Everyone showed a lot of concern, and everyone was as nice as could be. It meant a lot to me. Because it was nice to see familiar faces. The next day I was more relaxed. I didn’t fight the tube, I just tried to make the best of it. Then I felt lucky. I felt glad to be alive. I was released from the hospital a week later, and after a few days at home, I was mad. Angry that I got hurt when I shouldn’t have been hurt, that my whole life had changed. I don’t like changes. I’m used to going to work, and now I had to stay home. I wanted to get out of the house and couldn’t. I was miserable as hell, I was climbing the walls. I took a lot of it out on my wife. She had had a back operation less than a year earlier and was bedridden. Then she had had a premature baby, and my son was in intensive care for two months. He had just gotten out of the hospital and weighed only 21/2 pounds (1.14 kilograms). So she was dealing with her back, and the baby was home on a monitor and she was worrying about him breathing, then I came home and she worried about me breathing. So her back was forgotten for a time, and now it’s in terrible shape. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“I was miserable even to the kids. I was jumpy all the time. I was physically hurt, and I was still spitting up things. My ears were burned, and the doctors told me I would need glasses, because my corneas were burned. I became depressed, and I was mad. The only ones to take it out on were my wife and kids. I feel bad for them now, but they understood. My wife was great. She had a lot of patience with me.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to build a safer and more resilient Sacramento. Firefighters and EMT put their lives on the line every day, several times a day to provide the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive service possible. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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A Ransom for Many
Evil is a deviation from the good due to a human deflect in cognition or intention that leads to mistaking appearance from reality. Prudently, most men sink into nameless graves, and now and then, a few forget themselves into immortality. In the day-to-day process of living, with all its trails, challenges, and discouragements, we often underestimate our own God-given attributes and abilities which makes it possible for each of us to pattern his or her life after that to the Saviour and, in fact, do some of the things He did as He lived here among men. We may never personally experience the miracle of raising the dead, or be one to turn water into premium cranberry juice. We may not be one of thousands who may be fed from a few loaves and fishes, or be part of the miraculous experience of walking on a stormy sea. However, for each one of us, there are several Christlike patterns of living we can be a part of in our mortal sojourn. For instance, with us here today, there are more than a few who display unquestioning obedience to whatever is asked of them—as did He. There are those who are complete in their forgiveness of the offenses of others—as was He. The list of Christlike attributes and patterns of living goes on and on, as does the list of those who will continue to strive to be obedient, however difficult it may be. Thank Heaven for those who keep trying! They cannot fail. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
It is incredible to think, at first, that man’s fate, all his nobility and all his degradation, is decided by a child no more than six years old, and usually three, but that is what script theory claims. After talking to a child of six, or maybe three, it is a little easier to believe. And it is extremely easy to believe by looking around at what is happening in the World today, and what happened yesterday, and seeing what will probably happen tomorrow. The history of human scripts can be found on ancient monuments, in courtrooms and morgues, in gambling houses and letters to the editor, and in political debates, where whole nations are talked down the righteous road by somebody trying to prove that what his parents told him in the nursery will work for the whole World. However, fortunately, some people have good scripts, and some even succeed in freeing themselves to do things their own way. Human destiny shows that, by diverse means, men come to the same ends, and by the same means they come to diverse ends. They carry their scripts and their counter scripts around in their heads in the form of Parental voices telling them what to do and not do, and their aspirations in the form of Child pictures of how they would like it to be, and among the three of them they put their shows on the road. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
There they find themselves entangled in a web of other people’s scripts: first their parents, then their spouses, and over all of them, the scripts of those who govern the places where they live. There are also chemical hazards like infectious diseases, and physical ones, such as hard objects that the human body is not constructed to withstand. The script is what the person planned to do in early childhood, and the life course is what happens. The life course is determined by genes, by parental background, and by external circumstances. An individual whose genes cause intellectual disabilities, physical deformity, or early death from cancer or another disease or virus, will have little opportunity to make his own life decisions or to carry them through to completion. The course of his life will be determined by inheritance (or perhaps birth injury). If the parents themselves suffered from severe physical or emotional deprivation as infants, that may destroy their children’s chances of carrying out a script, or perhaps even of forming one. They may kill their offspring by neglect or abuse, or condemn them to life in an institution from an early age. Diseases, viruses, accidents, oppression, and war may terminate even the most carefully thought out and best supported plan. So can a walk or a drive through the script of an unknown person: an assassin, thug, or car-crasher. #RandolpHarris 3 of 20
A combination of these—genes plus oppression, for example—may close so many avenues to members of a certain line that they have few choices in planning their scripts, and it may make a tragic life course almost inevitable. However, even with strict limitations, there are nearly always some alternatives open. An aerial bomb, an epidemic, or a massacre may leave no choice at all, but at the next level, the person may be able to choose between killing, being killed, or killing himself, and there his choice will depend on his script, that is, the kind of decision he made in early childhood. A selfless person is one who is more concerned about the happiness and well-being of another than about his own convenience or comfort, one who is willing to serve another when it is neither sought for nor appreciated, or one who is willing to serve even those whom he dislikes. A selfless person displays a willingness to sacrifice, a willingness to purge from his mind and heart of personal wants, and needs, and feelings. Instead of reaching for and requiring praise and recognition from himself, or gratification of his own wants, the selfless person will meet these very human needs for others. Remember the words of the Saviour as He taught His disciples on an occasion when personal recognition was being sought: “But Jesus called them to Him, and saith unto them, …whosoever will be great among you, shall be your minister: And whosoever of you will be the chiefest, shall be servant of all. For even the son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give His life a ransom for many,” reports Mark 10.42-45. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The difference between life course and life plan can be illustrated by considering two rodents used in an experiment to show that the early experiences of a mother rodent can affect the behaviour of her offspring. The first animal was named Victory Purdue-Wistar III, or Victor for short. (Purdue-Wistar was the actual surname of the rodents used in this experiment, and Victor and Arthur were the forenames of their godfathers, the experimenters.) Victor came from a long line of experimental subjects, and his genes suited him for this station in life. His mother, Victoria, had been handled and caressed when she was a pup. His distant cousin, Arthur Purdue-Wistar III (Arthur) was equally suited to being an experimental subject. His mother, Arthuria, had been left in her cage and was never handled or caressed when she was little. When the two cousins grew up, it was found that Victor weighed more, explored less, and dropped his excretions more often than Arthur did. What happened to them in the long run, after the experiment was over, is not stated, but it probably depended upon external forces, such as what the experimenters needed to use them for. Thus, their life courses were determined by their genes, their mothers’ early experiences, and decisions made by stronger forces over which they had no control and to which there was no appeal. Any “scripts” or “plans” they wanted to carry out as individuals were limited by all this. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Thus Victor, who liked to vegetate, could so indulge himself; while Arthur, who wanted to explore, was frustrated in his cage; and neither of them, however strong the urge, could seek for immortality through reproduction. Tom, Dick, and Harry, distant cousins of Victor and Arthur, had a different experience. Tom was programed to press a lever to avoid getting an electric shock, and as a reward he would get a pellet of good. Dick was programmed the same way, expect that his treat was a drink of alcohol. Harry was also programmed to avoid the unpleasant shock, and his reward was a pleasant shock instead. Then they were switched around so that in the long run all three of them learned all three of the programs. After that, they were put in a cage with three levers: one for food, one for alcohol, and one for the pleasant shock. Then each one could make his own “decision” as to how he wanted to spend his life: eating, lying in a drunken stupor, or getting electric thrills, or any combination or alternation of these. Furthermore, there was a treadmill in the cage, and each one could decide whether he wanted to take exercise along with his other rewards. This was exactly like a script decision, for each rodent could decide whether he wanted to spend his life as a gourmand, an alcoholic, a thrill-seeker, or an athlete, or whether he preferred a moderate combination. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
However, although each could follow his “script decision” and take the consequences as long as he remained in the cage, the actual outcomes of their lives depended on an external force majeure, for the experimenter could interrupt the experiment and break up the “script” whenever he felt like it. Thus, their life courses and their life styles were largely determined by their “life plans” up to the final outcome, which was decided by someone else. However, these “life plans” could only be chosen from among the alternatives offered by their “parents,” the experimenters who programmed them. And even that choice was influenced by things that had happened to them earlier. Although men are not laboratory animals, they often behave as though they are. Sometimes they are put in cages and treated like rats, manipulated, and sacrificed at the will of their masters. However, many times the cage has an open door, and a man has only to walk out if he wishes. If he does not, it is usually his script which keeps him there. That is familiar and reassuring, and after looking out at the great World of freedom with all its joys and dangers, he turns back to the cage with its buttons and levers, and knowing what if he keeps busy pushing them, and pushes the right one at the right time, he will be assured of food, drink, and an occasional thrill. But always, such a caged person hopes or fears that some force greater than himself, the Great Experimenter, or the Great Computer, will change or end it all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The forces of human destiny are foursome and fearsome: demonic parental programming, abetted by the inner voice the ancients called the Daemon; constructive parental programming, assisted by the thrust of life called Phusis long ago; external forces, still called Fate; and independent aspirations, for which the ancients had no human name, since for them such were the privileges mainly of gods and kings. And as a resultant of these forces there are four kinds of life courses, which may be mixed and lead to one or another kind of final destiny: scripty, counterscirpty, forced, and independent. What can we do to cultivate and nurture the divine quality of selflessness? May I suggest, as a first step, that there be an incredibly careful, introspective evaluation. Consider the behavioural patterns we have just referred to. As part of this self-evaluation process, uless we recognize a need to change, it is important to remember there can be no successful change in any of us. That must come first. With the recognition of the need to improve, may we now suggest that as part of the process of cultivating and nurturing the attribute of selflessness, we begin to develop an attitude of service—the ongoing desire for the well-being of others. A beginning would be feeling empathy for those who need uplifting, then acting with caring thoughtfulness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Once, I welcomed this beautiful and friendly German shepherd, Mr. Peepers, who belonged to the neighbours, and chased away an ugly dog who slithered like a snake. Leo asked me, “Why do you chase Snakey away?” I said, “Because he is ugly. I do not like him.” Leo said, “Mr. Peepers likes him. Mr. Peepers lets Snakey eat from his plate.” I was very ashamed, and confused and troubled about how I had come to feel about Snakey as I did. I was touched by the matter-of-factness of Leo’s observation, and disturbed that I had tried to impose my prejudice on seven-year-old Leo. Next time that Snakey came on our land, I called him, and when he came to me, I patted him on the head. He wriggled all over with happiness, and his “ugly” little eyes became so bright and dancing that they seemed to shoot out sparks. I shared his joy and loved him. It seems to me that in education it is more important to question than it is to give answers. This is hardly the way it is done about in school. I think that “education” is the chief reason why so often when I am asking a question, I feel that I must try to give an answer, rather than saying “I do not know” or asking another question. Recently when I was being interviewed on a podcast to arrive at something (which we did not—we threw out the tape) I noticed that when the interviewer asked a question, I struggled to answer it, when the thought in my head was “That question is not going to arrive at what you want. Could you ask another question?” If I had thrown out most of the questions this way, we would not have had to throw out the tape. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another thing about accepting truth is that non-acceptance often brings about a fiction. A Hawaiian woman told me that Hawaiian mythology as it is written in books is all wrong. I asked her how this had happened. She said, “Oh, the haoles (white people) asked us about it and then laughed at us for what we told them. So then we told them lies which they believed, and we laughed at them.” I have seen this happen with Navajos and anthropologists. One sees it happen all the time within a family. How can it be different in psychotherapy? How can there be a good interpersonal relationship without respect on both sides? I do not always respect everyone, but when I do not, it is good for me to know this, and to know that I cannot at such times be helpful to another person. If I “try to help” someone when I do not feel respect for them, I am fooling myself. I am not responding to them, but to some notion of what I “should” do for people, even though I may truly wish to be helpful. I must not conceal from myself that I am not being helpful. Limitation is comprehensive and difficult to define because it concerns the elusive concept of “self.” What I mean here is perhaps best indicated by William James’s concept of the “real self” as distinguished from the material and social self. In simple terms it concerns what I really feel, what I really want, what I really believe, what I really decide. It is, or should be, the most alive center of psychic life. It is this psychic center to which the appeal is made in analytical work. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
In every neurosis its scope and its aliveness are decreased, for genuine self-regard, native dignity, initiative, the capacity to take responsibility for one’s life, and like factors that account for the development of self have always been battered. Moreover, the neurotic trends themselves have usurped a great deal of its energies because—to resume an analogy previously used—they turn a person into an airplane driven by remote control. In most instances there are sufficient possibilities for recapturing and developing the self, though the strength of these possibilities is difficult to estimate at the beginning. However, fi the real self is considerably damaged, the person has lost his own center of gravity and is directed by other forces, from within or from without. He may over adapt himself to his environment and become an automaton. He may find his only right to existence in being helpful to others, and thus be socially useful though his lack of any center of gravity within himself is bound to hamper his efficiency. He may lose all inner sense of direction, and either drift aimlessly or be entirely directed by a neurotic trend. His feelings, thoughts, and actions may be almost entirely determined by an inflated image which he has built up of himself: he will be sympathetic not because he really feels it, but because to be sympathetic is part of his image; he will have “friends” or “interests” because those friends or interests are required by his image. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Maslow proposed the term peak experiences to describe occasions of great joy, moments of intense happiness and satisfaction that may be occasioned by knowing one is loved, by a fulfilling intimate relationship, by the completion of a long and difficult project, or even by eating simple fare after a period of long privation. An intensely contested game of gold, tennis, or handball can be a “high.” Maslow argued that the World is seen in its essence, as it really is, during and after such occasions of peaking. He further asserted that such moments are times when a person “has it together,” is more integrated, less self-conscious; indeed, is more fully functioning and less armoured against the World. Although Maslow chose the term peak experiences (current slang uses the terms highs, or ups as opposed to downs), I would like to extend its meaning and use Ted Landsman’s term positive experiencing. Positive experience refers to all occasions of pleasure, fun, satisfaction, completion of projects, fulfillment of hopes—the good moments in life. Of course, when these are undergone to bring about some meaningful and hoped-for outcome, positive experience can also include pain and suffering. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Positive experience, then, is what life is lived for. This statement is not a return to a hedonistic theory of human life, because meaningful positive experience goes beyond, through it includes sensuous pleasure. Positive experience includes the experience of the fulfillment of meaning. When a person lives a life that does not yield its due measure of positive experiencing, that person begins to lose morale. He becomes increasingly dispirited and hopeless, and under these circumstances may even attempt suicide. Certainly, sudden reductions in customary positive experiences, and with no apparent hope of amelioration, are likely factors in reduced resistance to infectious ills. Positive experiencing is good for physical, psychological, and spiritual health. Indeed, one definition of love for another is concern that positive experiencing will come his way more often. Health personality entails the ability to act in ways that produce positive experiencing for the self and for others. Two kinds of experiences seem to contribute to the development of the healthy personality or to becoming a “beautiful and noble person,” as described by Landsman—first, the positive experience, significant experiences of joy, happiness, warmth, and so on; and secondly, those negative or unhappy experiences that result in a strengthening of the self or in learning about the self. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
The positive experience of being loved, for example, is clearly a growth-facilitating happening. Healthy children and adults need a consistent flow of these experiences to, at the very least, be sure that life is a joyous experience or that life holds the potential for joy, delight, ecstasy, compassion, warmth, and so on. Rizzo and Vinacke askes a sample of people of wide ages ranges about their critical experiences and found that those who described these experiences as being happy (or positive or mixed) also made high scored on the Personality Orientation Inventory, indicating high self-actualization. The desire for motherhood is Nature’s urge in the individual; it is entirely on par with the illusions of intimacy. See if for what it is worth, no more or less, and leave the rest to fate; if it comes or you may then enjoy it. If it does not, you will remain undisturbed. The patent, the husband, or the wide who demands continuous attention and undivided devotion, who assumes as a natural right the duty of making decisions for one, turns a home into a goal. The only relatives he recognizes are not blood ones but loves ones, inner and outer, lasting spiritual affinities not temporary physical accidents, mental and not geographical ones. Family life gives great joys on the one hand, and grave anxieties on the other. It was always like that, and we cannot alter but must accept it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
With all its ups and downs, the householder life is the best after all. Most of the qualities needed for spiritual development can be got from it. Parents should respect the child’s individuality and not let it get too dependent and too attached, thus robbing it of the capacity to grow mature and self-reliant. The over-protectiveness of fear-ridden mothers toward their children and the over-possessiveness of comminating mothers show a lack of faith in the one case, and a lack of understanding in the other. It is part of family relationship for the children to identify themselves, by extension, with their parents. Thus, it is what the French call “egoisme a deux.” Relationship is a matter of soul, not a measure of blood. Once across the threshold of puberty, the boy begins the unfolding of the emotional nature. Each child will then develop his own individual feelings and passions as a process of growth towards manhood. How can this be done unless the young begin at the same time to develop away from utter dependence upon the mother? They must begin in however small a degree to claim their freedom and move away emotionally from their physical source. All this is to be accomplished by stages and not all at once until maturity is reached. Then, just as the fledgling bird must emerge from the nest and learn to fly even at the risk of falling, so the young must learn to stand on their own feet in order to reach maturity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
What holds true for psychology holds true also for sociology. If I am not concerned with society, then my thinking about society has no focus; it is nothing more than a blind groping, even if the blindness is hidden by a collection of “data” and impressive statistics. If I am concerned with man—and how can concern with the individual man be separated from concern with the society of which he is a part?—I am struck with the suffering that society causes, and I am prompted by the wish to reduce the suffering so as to help man to become fully human. If one is concerned with man, then this concern poses various questions: how can man be free, how can he be fully human, how can he become what he could be? It was this concern which prompted Marx to make his great discoveries. They, like any other scientific discovery, were not at all correct; in fact, the history of science is the history of errors. This holds true for Marx’s as it does Dr. Freud’s theories. What matters is not that a new insight is necessarily the last word of truth, but that it is faithful, that it is conducive to further discovery, and more than that: that in discovering truth, man changes himself because he becomes more awake and can transmit this greater awakedness to those who follow him. The interrelation between concern and knowledge has often been expressed—and rightly so—in terms of the interrelation between theory and practice. As Marx once wrote, one must not only interpret the World, but one must change it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Indeed, interpretation without intention of change is empty; change without interpretation is bling. Interpretation and change, theory, and practice, are not two separate factors which can be combined; they are interrelated in such a way that knowledge becomes fertilized by practice and practice is guided by knowledge; theory and practice both change their nature once they cease to be separate. The problem of the interrelation between theory and practice has still another facet, the connection between intelligence and character. To be sure, every individual is born with a certain level of intelligence, and no psychological factors are responsible for his being either an idiot or a genius. However, idiots and geniuses are exceptions; what impressed me more and more was the stupidity of most people who do not fall under wither of these extreme categories. I am not referring to the lack of the sort of intelligence, which is measured by intelligence tests, but to the incapacity for understanding the less obvious causes of phenomena, of grasping contradictions within the same phenomenon, of making connections between different and not obviously related factors. This stupidity is most apparent in the views people have about personal relationships and social affairs. Why is it that people cannot see the most obvious facts in personal and social affairs and, instead, cling to cliches which are endlessly repeated without ever being questioned? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Intelligence, aside from the native faculty, is largely a function of independence, courage, and aliveness; stupidity is equally a result of submission, fear, and inner deadness. If an essential part of intelligence consists in the ability to make connections between factors which so far have not been seen as being related, the person who sticks to the cliché and to convention will not dare to recognize such connections; the person who is afraid of being different will not dare to recognize fictions for what they are, and hence will be greatly impeded from uncovering reality. The little boy in the story of the emperor’s clothes who sees that the emperor is naked, is, after all, not more intelligent than the adults, but he is not yet so eager to conform. Furthermore, any new discovery is an adventure, and the adventures require not only a certain degree of inner security, but also a vitality and joy which can be found only in those for whom living is more than releasing tensions and avoiding pain. To reduce the general level of stupidity, we need not more “intellect” but a different kind of character: men who are in love with life. However, there are dangers to intellectualization and the misuse of words. Words can be used without meaning what they purport to mean; words can be empty shells, and one can learn certain philosophical, religious, and political ideas as one learns a foreign language. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Sacramento Fire Department promotes safety, protects life and property every day. “I remember one day I was detailed over to the battalion chief to be the chief’s aide. Guys referred to the aide as a double-dealing, double-clutching, clipboard-carrying apple polisher. This was all in fun, though, because the chief’s aide had to be a guy who was experienced and knew what he was doing. He was also the guy who approved vacation switches. So one summer day when the sidewalks of Sacramento were steaming hear, there was a job in one of the old tenement buildings, and, like always, hundreds of people crowded the sidewalk. It was my job, after the fire was put out, to talk to the people who had been burned out of their apartments and get all the information from them about the people who lived there and the possession lost in the fire. If they had the Crown Jewels from the Tower of London stuck in a back closet, I wanted to know about it. There was one woman sitting on the stoop. She was about twenty-four years old, good-looking, with those wide eyes that seem to convey innocence. I asked her her name. She said, ‘Famali Jenkins. I wrote it down, thinking it was a kind of exotic name. In the black culture there are many exotic names, particularly if they’re using African names. I asked her to spell it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“She said, ‘F-E-M-A-L-E.” Her name was Female Jenkins, and my first inclination was to laugh. Then it dawned on me that probably when she was born, in the hospital that brought her forth to be one of God’s children, the mother had no immediate name to give to the hospital authorities, so they jotted in her sex, thinking, I suppose, that the real name could be inserted sometime in the future. Well, the real name never got attacked, and here the girl child of the Jekins family was left with this mark on a piece of paper for the rest of her life. Here she was on a crowed stoop in Midtown Sacramento, beneath her still smoldering apartment, telling me that her name is Female.” The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is fire protection and to respond to emergency situations, and they make a point to do this with compassion. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, even if things are not going well, and you are a bit tired and sad, raise your children to love America and be patriot citizens. Also, let them know how important it is to love God and Jesus Christ and to be ethical and moral, and to obey the laws. We can help stop corruption and evil one person at a time. It only takes five good people to facilitate a change in a small group. To show support for America, remember to buy American cars and American made products. Respect law and order and treat others with dignity and kindness. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, under God, Indivisible with Liberty, and Justice for all. God is in His holy Temple, Earthly thoughts be silent now, while reverence we assemble, and before His presence bow. He is with us, now and ever, when we call upon His name, aiding every good endeavour, guiding every upward aim. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Oh, Beautiful for Patriot Dream
The individual American is free at any time to escape from the consequences of an injustice which he has suffered at the hands of a political party, or which he thinks he has suffered—in other words, make his voice heard by voting or recalling a politician. It is in the interests of the nation to remove the cases of social unrest. The sentiment of the American people alone is to solve the dispute in an honourable way; or, to put the case more correctly, matters would not have come to such a dispute at all. If unsocial and dishonourable treatment of men provokes resistance, then the citizens can convince Congress to impose its decision in the conflict until the constitutional legislative authorities do away with the evil through legislation. Therefore, it is evident that if the people are to have any chance at all of winning through in the struggle for their country, they must be grouped with their fellow Americans and present a united front before the state, who incorporates in its own body the massed strength of the vested interests of the people or the country an undertaking which it conducts. Thus, when the people are united, they can inculcate and strengthen a sense of social responsibility in the country and open the road to practical results. In doing this, they tend to remove those causes of friction which are a continual source of discontent and complaint. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Democrats do not fulfil this much-desired function of the Constitution of the United States of America, or they have rendered in ineffective by sabotaging it through their political influence. Democrats have accordingly seized political advantage through theft, violence, and coercion and have taken the country under their exclusive power, without any protest from Republicans and patriots. In this way, they have established for themselves a solid bulwark behind which they can safely pervert our youth, destroy American traditions, and retire whenever a struggle is assumed, or a critical aspect of their fraud is uncovered. Thus the genuine purpose of the Republic gradually falls into oblivion, and is replaced by communism. For the Democrats never trouble themselves to respect and uphold the original purpose of the Constitution of the United States of America which is the movement the country was founded on. They simply overtake the Movement, lock, stock, and barrel, to serve their own political ends. Within a few decades, the United States of America will be transformed, by the Democratics, from an instrument originally fashioned by God for the defense of human Christianity and human rights into an instrument for the destruction of the national economic structure. If one side be sufficiently unscrupulous and the other sufficiently inert and docile, the interests of the American citizens will not be allowed for a moment to cross the path of its true purpose. In this case, our capitalistic nation will be turned into a communistic territory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
As of the beginning of the year 2000, the Democratic party has already ceased to recognize the purpose for which it has been founded. From year to year, it fell more and more under the political control of communist nations, until it is finally being used as a battering-ram against national security. Democrats have shattered, by means of constantly repeated blows, the fortification of the National Security Division, and the National Treasury of which so much time and care had been used to create. Now, these communist forces have crept out of the horse, opened the gates, and are allowing America to be invaded by hostile undocumented populations, ultimately destroying the country, as the Democrats deprive the people of their economic foundations. Attention to the real interests of the American people, on the parts of the Democrats, have steadily decreased. If the social and cultural demands of the broad masses remain unheeded under these cunning leaders, the gloomy prospect which has presented itself to this beautiful nation will create so much anxiety among the people that they will be unable to suppressed and oppose even the more blatant authoritarian tactics. And conditions will be such that those Democratic leaders will not have to even trouble about attempting to justify their unconstitutional actions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
As the masses are taught to suffer in silence, human rights will become less significant and the possibility of satisfying the American Dream will dwindle and whatever stance the few patriots that are left may take will become less and less effective. This will be in part because of the diabolical plant to weaken their fighting power by persuading the masses to paralyze the second amendment for it is just a ridiculous measure. However, it is amazing that Democratics think that the only thing that is valid in America is a poem on the statues of liberty, but the Constitution of the United States of America can be discarded like a dirty Pamper. If one remembers what a small measure of thinking power the broad masses possess, one will not be astonished by these allegations. Our ancestors did not receive the land we live on as a present from Heaven, but they had to risk their lives and fight for it. In the future, we will not obtain the land, and the life it offers for our nation, through any act of Heavenly generosity. We will only obtain the land we need through the might for the victorious swords. The scriptures tell us the Lord established the Constitution of the United States of America. “And for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands of wise men whom I raised up unto this very propose, and redeemed the land by the shedding of blood,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.80. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Even a divine constitution requires something further; it demands a kind of people who will, by their very natures, receive and respect such a constitution and function well within the conditions it establishes. Where indeed shall we find such a people today? Hod has mane it possible for the holy priesthood and the Church to be restored upon the Earth—the restoration of the gospel of Jesus Christ—but only in America. Can you understand the way God has worked? Commit yourself to preach the message of the Lord’s glorious achievement in America and teach it to your children. This is a time when we can afford to be patriotic, in the best sense of that term. There is reason to be proud that we live in an established land that has been conditioned by the Lord so that His gospel could be restored. The purpose of America is to provide a setting wherein that is possible. How shall we honour of founding fathers and those who have served this mighty country? First, by striving to make our citizenry the righteous people of the Lord. And second, by telling the story of what the Lord has done for you and me and this great nation. God lives and Jesus is the Christ. “And now, we can behold the decrees of God concerning this land, that it is a land of promise; and whatsoever national shall possess it shall serve God, or they shall be swept off when the fulness of His wrath shall come upon them. And the fulness of His wrath cometh upon them when they are ripened in iniquity. For behold, this is a land which is choice above all other lands; wherefore he that doth possess it shall serve God or shall be swept off; for it is the everlasting decree of God. And it is not until the fulness of iniquity among the children of the land, that they are swept off,” reports Ether 2.9-10. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
If he has lost his employment, if serious illness descends on his family, it is natural and pardonable for a married man with responsibilities to worry or to be anxious; but if he is also philosophically inclined, he will check his worry and anxiety by calm reasoned analysis followed by prayer, meditation, and finally a handing of the problems over to the higher power. It is not that he is to be without pity for the misfortunes and miseries of others—such a thing would be impossible—but that he insists on taking a larger and longer view of them. It is better that we pass by unnoticed rather than be praised or blamed. For then there will be no strain on our peace of mind. If praised, we may swell with pride. If blamed, indignation may disturb our feelings. He may not give more than a part of himself to these lesser loves. His deepest feelings must remain remote from them. Conquest of the emotional nature and knowledge of the truer character of death will be evidenced when, at the actual passing of a near one, he seems insensible to grief. To be detached from anything means that he can take it or leave it alone. Ambition wears thin with time or even wears out altogether. The hour may come when it means nothing and when a man feels nothing of it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Only the young are so eager to risk the perils of upward flight to fame. The reflective man is indifferent to Worldly ambitions as the aged man is tired of them. Philosophy leads its votaries to a somewhat similar detachment, by supplying new incentives, does not lead to negative results. The process of inner disentangling in the quest of total freedom may have to be wide-sweeping. Not only desires but also duties may have to go, not only long-hoarded possessions but also relatives and friends. There are those who regard such detachment as too cool, perhaps even too inhuman. They are displeased with this rule. They will let nothing disturb their tenderest affections, yet the ego lurks here too. Another good way to uncover the plot and some of the most important lines in a person’s script is to ask: “If your family life were put on the stage, what kind of play would it be?” Such family dramas are usually named after the Greek Oedipus and Electra plays, in which the boy competes with father for his mommy and the girl wants daddy for her own (the Electra complex). However, the script analyst must know what the parents, called for convenience Supideo and Artcele, are up to meanwhile. Supideo is the other side of Oedipus drama, and expresses the frank or disguised feelings of pleasures of the flesh of the mother for her son, while Artcele is the other side of Electra and shows father’s feelings for the girl. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
A close inquiry will nearly always reveal rather obvious transaction which demonstrate that these feelings are not imaginary, even though the parent tries to conceal them, usually by playing “Uproar” with the child. That is, the disturbed parent tries to cover up his Childs feelings of pleasures of the flesh for his offspring by coming on Parental and ordering the offspring about in a quarrelsome way. However, on certain occasions they leak out, despite all efforts to disguise them by “Uproar” and other devices. Actually, the happiest parents are often those who openly admire the attractiveness of their children. The Supideo and Artcele dramas, like Oedipus and Electra, have many variations. As the children grow older, they may be played out as mother sleeping with son’s boyfriend or father sleeping with his daughter’s chum. Farther out and even more “gamy” versions are mother sleeping with daughter’s boyfriend or father sleeping with son’s girl. (This may occur when mother has no son of her won to play Jocasta with, and similarly if father has no daughter of his own.) This compliment may be returned by the young Oedipus sleeping with father’s mistress, or Electra with mother’s lover. Sometimes the family script calls for one or several members to be homosexual, with corresponding variations in the roles, incest between siblings, and later seductions of each other’s partners. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Any deviations from the standard Oedipus (son wondering or dreaming about pleasures of flesh with the mother) or Electra (daughter wondering or dreaming about father) roles will undoubtedly influence the whole life course of the person. The Church condemns any form of incest. Victims of incest often suffer serious trauma. Sometimes victims have feelings of shame or guilt. Victims are not guilty of sin. However, God’s love and the healing of Jesus Christ comes through his Atonement. “And Alma said: If thou believest in the redemption of Christ, thou canst be healed,” reports Alma 15.8. “And in came to pass that when he had thus spoken, all the multitude, with one accord, did go forth with their sick and their afflicted, and their lame, and with their blind, and with their dumb, and with all them that were afflicted any manner; and he did heal them every one as they were brought forth unto him,” 3 Nephi 17.9. In addition to, or beyond, the sexual aspects of the family drama, there are even more poignant ones. A jilted homosexual girl attacked her lover, held a knife to her throat, and cried: “You’ll let me give you these wounds, but you won’t let me heal them.” This perhaps is the motto of all family dramas, the origin of all parental anguish, the basis for youthful rebellion, and the cry of couples not yet ready for divorce. The wounded flee, and the cry above is the Martian translation of the ad: “Mary, come home. All is forgiven.” And that is why children stick with even the most miserable parents. It hurts to be wounded, but it feels so good to be healed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
There can be an honest relationship between mother and her child, real understanding and acceptance of the facts of each other—of each other’s World as it is. The converse of this would be the parent who is not seriously disordered, but who is disordered in a part of his (or her) personality which does involve the child. Then, even living in what we consider very good conditions, the child would be in trouble. This happens often. That statemen could make some parents look into themselves with fear and mistrust. “Is there something wrong with me which is affecting my child?” This is likely to make matters worse. It seems to me a better use of intelligence and energy to accept the fact that none of us is in as good shape as we could be, and work on that. If I move in the direction of being more acceptant of the child’s World as his, and accepting as his World what he says of himself, and being honest with him about my World and my own limitations (accepting myself), then both of us are getting out of whatever degree of trouble we may be in. Children and young people are helpful to me in doing this because they are still somewhat aliens in our World. As aliens, too, they are more likely to see the nonsense of some things we have lived with for so long at we do not notice that they do not make sense. They are more questioning than we are. When I join them in their questioning, I make better sense of myself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
One child helped me in the de-conditioning of myself simply by asking, of all sorts of things I required of him and of myself, “What is the point?” When I investigated this, usually there was not any. A limitation to analytical work is constituted by the prevalence of destructive tendencies, whether they pertain primarily to others or to the self. It should be emphasized that such tendences are not necessarily literally destructive, in the sense of an urge toward suicide, for example. More often they take such forms as hostility or contempt or a general attitude of negation. These destructive impulses are engendered in every severe neurosis. In greater or less degree they are at the bottom of every neurotic development, and they become intensified through the clashing of rigid, egocentric demands and illusions with the external World. Any severe neurosis is like a tight armour that prevents the person from having a full and active life with others. It necessarily engenders a resentment toward life, a deep resentment at being left out which Nietzsche has described as lebensneid. For many reasons hostility and contempt, regarding self and others alike, may be so strong that to let oneself go to pieces appears as an appealing way to take revenge. To say “no” to everything life has to offer remains the only assertion of self that is left. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, already mentioned when discussing the factor of resignation, is a good example of a person in whom destructiveness toward others and self is prevailing tendency. How prohibitive such destructiveness is to self-development depends, as always, on the degree of severity. If a person feels, for example, that triumph over others is far more important than doing anything constructive with his own life, he is not likely to derive much benefit from analysis. If in his mind enjoyment, happiness, and affection, or any closeness to people, have turned into indications of contemptible softness or mediocrity, it may be impossible for him or anyone else to penetrate his armour of hardness. I have been trained in accordance with the strictly orthodox Freudian procedure of analyzing patient while sitting behind him and listening to his associations. This technique of psychoanalysis was modeled alone the lines of the laboratory experiment: the patient was the “object,” the analyst observed his free associations, dreams, et cetera, and analyzed the material produced by the patient. The analyst was supposed to be a distant observer, a mirror, rather than a participant. The longer I worked in this manner, the less did I feel satisfied. First, I often became tired and even sleepy during the analytic work; I often felt relieved when the analytic hour was over. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
However, worse than that, I had less and less the feeling that I really understood the patient. To be sure, I had learned to “interpret,” and I had learned enough to interpret in such a way that usually the patient’s associations and dreams fitted into my theoretical expectations. However, I still was talking about that patient rather than to him—and I felt that much of what I ought to understand was escaping me. At first, I thought, quite naturally, that all these doubts were due to my lack of experience. However, when the doubts grew with my experience instead of decreasing, I began to have doubts about the method I was using. Stimulated and encouraged by colleagues who had has similar experiences, I began to grope about to find a new way. Eventually I found this to be a simple one: instead of being an observer, I had to become a participant; to be engaged with the patient; from center to center, rather than from periphery to periphery. I discovered that I could begin to see things in the patient which I had not observed before that I began to understand him, rather than to interpret what he said, and that I hardly ever felt tired any more turning the analytic hours. At the same time, I experience that one could be fully objective while being fully engaged. “Objective” here means to see the patient as he is, and not as I want him to be. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
However, to be objective is only possible if one does not want anything for oneself, neither the patient’s admiration, nor his submission, nor even his “cure.” If the latter sounds like a contradiction of what I said before, namely, that is precisely the wish to help which fertilizes one’s thinking, I want to stress that, in fact, there is no contradiction. In the genuine wish to help I want nothing for myself, I am neither hurt in my self-esteem when the patient does not improve, nor am I elated about “my” achievement when he gets well. There continues to be much dispute over the human ability to transmit messages to others by thinking about the message with great intensity of concentration, and receive such messages transmitted by others. Disciplined scientific research into Esp has been done under J.B. Rhine, at Duke University Parapsychology Laboratory; by workers at the Menninger Clinic, in Kansas; at Maimonides Dream Laboratory in Brooklyn; and in several European countries. I have not been in any of these laboratories, or seen any demonstrations, but I cannot neglect the reports of findings that I take to be true, written by reputable and competent scientists. I regard it as a reasonable hypothesis that some such capacity for extrasensory communication is an innate human capacity that is but rarely developed because few people believe that it is possible, and perhaps, too, because it is not valued. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Indeed, if persons were capable of “tuning in” on everyone’s thoughts, or of intruding into the thoughts of others, everyday life would be impossible because of the constant inundation of messages. From the perspective of this hypothesis, the known adepts at sending and receiving messages must have been persons who were not trained for it, but who retrained the ability despite their socialization. In short, they could conduct extrasensory communication because nobody in their culture told them it was impossible. If there is one—his family life provides the first scene for his application of philosophy. There his opportunity is plainly visible, the area for the self-judgements of his philosophic conscience plainly marked out. When the family circle prepares the younger members for mature life, it does its duty. However, when it sets itself up as the supreme value of human existence and its loyalties or attachments as the supreme forms of human ethics, it overdoes duty and breeds evil. It stifles individual growth and crushes independent thought. It is nothing more than enlarged self-centeredness. It turns a means into an end. If over-emphasized, thus the influence of a useful institution becomes unhealthy and vicious. Parents who refuse to release their children, even when the latter are fully adult, who constantly fuss around them with over-solicitousness and hover around with over-protectiveness, belong to the patriarchal age. They stifle the children’s development, breed the daughter-in-law’s or the son-in-law’s resentment, and fill their own minds with unnecessary anxieties. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The Sacramento Fire Departments protects life and property through education, excellence, and commitment. The dedicated members serve our community with unwavering passion and professionalism. Thes firefighters provide the highest level of care, selflessly facing adversity every day to keep us safe. “When I arrived, there was a huge hole in the wall of a brick housing project. The main gas line that fed the whole unit was broken, and gas was pouring all over the place. It was not on fire, but the crews were stretching lines to cover, in case it did blow. They were evacuating the building, getting the people out as fast as possible. My brother X was the chief on the scene, and everybody was uptight, because this was the same platoon that had had the big propane explosion just a short time earlier. X was back only a few weeks from his injuries. The tension was pretty high. Well, we got the gas company on the scene, and things settled down. I was standing inside the building by the big hole in the wall. X said, ‘The rescue company is getting the guy out of the car.’ I couldn’t see any car. I looked at him, and said, ‘What car?’ He looked at me like I was slightly nuts. His hand was on the side of his face, and he pointed a finger up toward the ceiling. I looked and saw the rear end of a car sticking through the fire wall up at the ceiling. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
“The guy had come barreling though a parking lot, hit an obstacle and gone up in the air, flew through the wall, broke the gas pipe, plowed through the fire wall, and got stuck in the ceiling. I didn’t see the rescue company because they were in an adjoining room, digging the guy out. So after the emotional tension, it ended up that the guy was drunk as a skunk, and he never even got hurt. The only thing that got hurt in the whole thing was my ego, when I said, ‘What car?’” The Sacramento Fire Department has a crucial mission to protect life, property, and the city’s assets during emergencies. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. To help keep the community save, it is also a good idea to teach your children to love America, to be patriotic, love God and Jesus Christ, buy American cars and other goods and services made in American. To ensure domestic tranquility, please teach your children to respect law and order, treat others is empathy, understanding, and respect. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Wipe every cheek the tear, banish care and silence fear; all things work for the best; teach us the divine behest: Thou shalt rest. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Now, let’s delve into some historical mysteries. Have you ever heard of The Winchester Mystery House? It Is a fascinating mansion in San Jose, California, known for its labyrinthine design, secret passages, and staircases that lead to nowhere. The story behind it is equally intriguing: Sarah Winchester, widow of the firearms magnate William Wirt Winchester, believed that she was haunted by the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles. To appease them, she continuously built and renovated the house for 38 years until her death in 1922. The result? A sprawling, enigmatic mansion with over 160 rooms! 🏰
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Do You Beat Him for that?
The promise of “Holy War” gives a strange, yet pleasant sensation to our American sheep head players when they think others are now willing to shed their blood for us. However, there is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility and dangers of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture; a new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward human and World unity based on the sacredness of each human person and respect for plurality of cultures. There is a growing awareness that equality may not be evaluated in mere numerical terms but is proportionate and analogical. For when equality is equated with interchangeability, individuality is negated and the human person extinguished. We stand at the brink of an age of World in which human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false separation of man and nature, of time and space, of freedom and security, is acknowledged, and we are faced with a new vision of man in his organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of quality and majesty of scope hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom of man’s spirit to the new reality of the World Age, in articulating its thought and belief, men are encouraged to seek a renaissance of hope and pride in their decision as to what his destiny will be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Although the present apocalyptic period is one of exceptional tensions, there is also at work an exceptional movement toward a compensating unity which refuses to violate the ultimate moral power at work in the universe, that very power upon which all human effort must at last depend. In this way, we may come to understand that there exists an inherent independence of spiritual and mental growth which, though conditioned by circumstances, is never determined by circumstances. In this way, the great plethora of human knowledge may be correlated with an insight into the nature of human nature by being attuned to the wide and deep range of human thought and human experience. In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalism, and in spite of the homelessness of moral passions rendered ineffectual by the scientific outlook, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a World-consciousness, man has quickened the unshaken heart of well-rounded truth and is interpreting the significant elements of the World Age now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his communion with the universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
The demand which the quest makes upon his feelings is often a harsh and exacting one. He must see each troubling situation which concerns him without allowing personal emotions to interfere with the truth of vision. He must displace hot resentment, for instance, by calm detachment. It is a battle of self against self and consequently invisible to and unnoticed by other men. No one will help him here. To be detached simply means not letting yourself get into the power of anything or anyone who can hurt, damage, or destroy you inwardly. Those who live in the World but are not if it must work with complete detachment from the fruits and results of their activity. However, how could any aspiring student achieve this? Only the master, the man who has uncovered his identity as Overself could succeed in labouring without caring what rewards he got or what effects he brought into being. It is not a petrifying ascetic coldness but a benevolent inherent calm. The practice of detachment helps in the practice of meditation, while the reverse is also true. It is pure but calm feeling unmixed with the desires, passion, perturbations, and inflammations of the ordinary unawakened and unevolved man. Does this detachment mean that nothing is to make any difference in him? No, it means rather that he may let the different effects produce themselves but only under the check and control of a deeper abiding serenity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
He who can detach himself from emotion even while he continues to feel it, becomes its true master. It would be a mistake to confuse detachment with callousness or to think that the conquest of emotion means the lack of all feeling. He who is possessed by the one and has achieved the other, may still have his sympathies unimpaired, and brought to a greater self-identification with other men than before. However, they will not be uncontrolled. Wisdom and knowledge, ideality and practicality will balance them. The degree of attachment is measurable by the degree of emotional involvement. Therefore, to become detached is to become emotionally detached. The disillusionments which come from personal contact with the defects or deficiencies of human nature will not make him cynical, will not even make him sad. A cold, heavy and death-like apathy is not the indifference, or the detachment, taught here. In the World of artists—using the word broadly to include all who practice any of the arts—one too often notices an easy, careless way of living, a lack of any worthwhile purpose, and consequently a lack of any worthwhile self-discipline. This merely egoistic casualness drifting through the years, is a counterfeit of the true detachment taught by philosophy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
It is not so easy to assume an air of detachment in the deeper levels of one’s being as it is on the surface. To be unattached gives one lighter touch in dealing with the affairs and events of life, takes out some of the unnecessary solemnity and nerve-racking hurry. The emotional results of undergoing a misfortune or an affliction can be made a part of oneself or can be separated out by refusing identification with them. One may seek the real I which never changes and so become detached from them. It is this self whose presence in one makes it possible to be conscious of those results. The wise man had better cast the plaudits of the multitude out of his ears; it is all noise, for the mob does not understand him. He has pleased them for today; but tomorrow, when he displeases them, they will be as ready to destroy him. He should be prepared to receive abuse with the same equanimity with which he is ready to receive praise. It is comparatively easy to be detached from past circumstances, for the feelings they aroused are not quiet or dead; but can he be so detached about present ones? Yet no less an achievement than this is required of him. When detachment is used as an excuse for escape, it is being misused. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
It is not that he is above having admirations and aversions, preferences, and distastes, but that he tries to stand aside mentally even while they register on his feelings. Detachment does not mean that he regards his outer performance in the World and his inner thoughts about the World with the utmost solemnity. No! the day will not pass without a little lightheartedness about it all. Why? Because he knows very well that it is just like a dream into which he is peeping—a passing show, as Shakespeare also knew. We may express our disenchantment with life in exactly opposite ways—either with a grim scowl or with a quiet smile. It is not only a matter of temperament but also of our World-view. The two combine to make the result which we express. In the last and supreme disenchantment—which is death itself—a third factor enters to effect this result. Out of the understanding which ripens and deepens with the philosophical work, he becomes grateful for one result. This is the transmutation of those resentments and bitternesses which follow some experiences into needed instruction and growing detachment. His aim being the contrary of most people’s aims, he tries to depersonalize his attitudes and reactions. What relief he feels with even partial freedom from the burden of self-consciousness! How heavy a load is borne by those who see or react with ego-centered nervousness. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
The eventual aim of human evolutionary experience is to make us learn to love the Overself more than anything else. Therefore, any personal attachments which we continue to hold within the heart must be purified in quality, while at the same time kept subordinate to our larger attachments to the Quest. He must fully understand his situation, both regarding business responsibilities and the duties towards his family—perhaps a wife and mother. It is part of this belief that such responsibilities must be honourably and effectively discharged and truth should be able to help him to do so rather than relieve him from them. “And truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were, and as they are to come; and whatsoever is more or less than this is the spirit of that wicked one who was a liar from the beginning,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 93.24-25. How can we know the truth? People bring with them many customs, traditions, and practices from their earlier beliefs. Not all these practices conform to the will of the Lord. Not only must we teach by Spirit, but we must also receive by the Spirit. “And again, he that recieveth the word of truth, doth he receive it by the Spirit of truth or some other way? If it be some other way it is not of God,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 50.19-20. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
If we do not receive the truth by His spirit, it is not His word. “Pilate therefore said unto him, Art thou a king then? Jesus answered, Thou sayest that I am a king. To this end I was born, and for this cause came I into the World, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Everyone that is of the truth heareth my voice,” reports John 18.37. We must prepare our hearts and our minds with a sincere desire to know the truth. “For behold, my brethren, it is given unto you to judge, that ye may know good from evil; and the way to judge is as plain, that yet may know with a perfect knowledge, as the daylight is from the dark night. For behold, the Spirit of Christ is given to every man, that he may know good from evil; wherefore, I show unto you the way to judge; for everything which inviteth to do good, and to persuade to believe in Christ, is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.15-16. Now that we have explored some of the ways in which the World can be experienced by everyone, we turn to the problem of how persons do experience their World, as function of their culture and individual upbringing. Both Rorschach and Jung called attention to erlebnisty pus (literally, “experience type”). #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Rorschach made inferences about the ways people habitually experience the World from their responses to his famous ink-blot test, whereas Jung inferred “type” based on his psychotherapeutic interviews. The widely used Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator uses Jung’s analysis of consciousness to describe such types. Persons who emphasize thinking and judging, in their usual waking consciousness, as opposed to persons who are more emotional and intuitive in their approach to the World, are examples of types. People become specialists at some kinds of experiencing. For example, creative writers are specialists at imagining and at remembering. Many college professors become specialists at thinking, with diminished or repressed ability to pay perceptual attention to what is going on around them. Eliade points out that shamans, in primitive tribes, are specialists at the self-induction of ecstatic states of consciousness, during which time they can “see” the future, healing illnesses, walking on coals, and other such feats. It may be that such capacities lie within everyone’s capabilities, but up brining and the need to adjust to the specialized environments within which we live prevent us from discovering and cultivating such ecstatic states. The distinction between resistance and limitation is merely one of degree. If strong enough, any resistance can turn into an actual limitation. Any factor that decreases or paralyzes a person’s incentive to come to grips with himself constitutes a possible limitation to self-analysis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
A deep-rooted feeling of resignation constitutes a serious limitation to self-analysis. A person may be so hopeless about ever escaping from his psychic entanglements that he has no incentive to make more than a halfhearted attempt to outgrow his difficulties. Hopelessness is present to some extent in every severe neurosis. Whether it constitutes a serious obstacle to therapy depends upon the number of constructive forces still alive or still to be revived. Such constructive forces are often present even though they seem to have been lost. However, sometimes a person has been so entirely crushed at an early age, or has become caught in such unsolvable conflicts, that he has long since given up expectations and struggles. This attitude of resignation may be entirely conscious, expressing itself in a pervasive feeling of futility concerning one’s own life or in an elaborate philosophy of the futility of life in general. Often it is reinforced by a pride in belonging among the few people who have not blinded themselves to this “fact.” In some persons no such conscious elaboration has taken place; they are merely passive, endure life in a stoical way, and no longer respond to any prospect of a more meaningful existence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
Such resignation may be hidden also behind a feeling of boredom with life, as in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Her expectations are extremely meager. Life should be entertaining now and then, should provide some fun or thrill or excitement, but she expects nothing of positive value. This attitude is often accompanied—as it is in Hedda Gabler—by a profound cynicism, the result of a disbelief in any value in life and in any goal to strive for. However, a profound hopelessness may exist also in persons one would not suspect of it, persons who superficially give the impression of being capable of enjoying life. They may be good at enjoying company, enjoying eating, drinking, pleasures of the flesh. In adolescence they may have been promising, capable of genuine interests and genuine feelings. However, for some reason or other they have become shallow, have lost their ambition; their interest in work has become perfunctory, their relationships with people are loose, easily made and easily terminated. In short, they, too, have ceased to strive for a meaningful existence and have turned to the periphery of life instead. If a neurotic trend is what we might called it, quite a different kind of limitation is set to self-analysis with some inaccuracy, too successful. A craving for power, for example, may be gratified to such an extent that the person would scoff at any suggestion of analysis, even though his satisfaction with his life is built on quicksand. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
If a longing for dependency is fulfilled in a marriage—a marriage, for example, between such a person and one who has an urge for domination—or in subordination to a group, the same holds true. Similarly, a person may successfully withdraw into an ivory tower and feel comparatively at ease by keeping within its precincts. This apparently successful assertion of a neurotic trend is produced by a combination of internal and external conditions. As to the former, a neurotic trend that “succeeds” must not conflict too sharply with other needs. A person is never entirely consumed by just one compulsive striving, with everything else blotted out: no human being is ever reduced to a streamlined machine driving in one direction. However, this concentration may be approximated. And external conditions vary infinitely. In our society, a man who is financially independent can easily withdraw into his ivory tower; but, if he restricts his other needs to a minimum, a person with scant resources can also withdraw from the World. One person has grown up in an environment that allows him to display of prestige or power, but another, though he started with nothing, makes such a relentless use of external circumstances that in the end he attains the same goal. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
However, no matter how such a “successful” assertion of a neurotic trend is achieved, the result is a complete barrier to development by way of analysis. For one thing, the successful trend has become too valuable to be submitted to any questioning. And for another thing, the goal that is striven for in analysis—a harmonious development, with good relations to self and others—would not appeal to such a person because the forces that might respond to the appeal are too enfeebled. We have talked quite a lot about the unfortunate results that may arise from certain pathological pressures in the environment, but these pressures do not necessarily lead to poor mother-child relationships. Even a woman with a neurosis or psychosis may have an extremely healthy relationship with her child. That may surprise some of you; it did me when I first came across it. I once treated a woman in Jerusalem who was quite crazy, and had been for years. She had an unbelievably bad family life. Her husband was in jail at the time. She was his sixth wife, and I do not think he had gotten rid of some of the others. In any case, he was a well-known brigand. This woman brought her child of six to the clinic because she thought he was stealing. He had taken a pencil from school and she considered this stealing. Talking with her, we got a depressing picture. She said the child wet the bed and encopresis; that is to say, he messed himself. And he was overly aggressive. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
However, when we examined the child, and we examined him very carefully because we could not believe our eyes, he appeared to be perfectly normal. He was a little aggressive and noisy, when compared with a child from Paris or London, but by the standards of his own environment, he was perfectly normal. When we asked him about wetting the bed, he explained first, that his mother could not afford to buy blue paint to put around the door; then, that there were ghosts outside and if one did not paint around the door with blue paint the ghosts came inside; and, finally, that in order to urinate at night he would have to go into the night where the ghosts were. It was very logical that he should wet the bed. As his encopresis, as we talked more with the woman, we discovered that this was due to the horrible food she gave him. He had diarrhea most of the time, and the hand-me-downs he wore were exceedingly difficult to undo. By the time he could unbutton his clothes, he would mess himself. Altogether, he seemed a perfectly normal little boy. She told us that she beat him terribly, and was afraid he would get epilepsy as a result. This sounded bad. I asked, “What do you beat him for? Do you beat him when he wets the bed?” She said: “No! What do you expect him to do? Everyone knows that a child wets the bed.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
I asked: “Do you beat him when he messes his pants?” She said, “What do you expect? He can’t take his buttons off. He’s got diarrhea. How would you expect him not to mess his pants. You wouldn’t expect me to beat him for that.” She also told me he masturbated. I asked, “Do you beat him for that?” She said, “No, that’s normal. A little child play with himself.” I asked, “Do you beat him for stealing?” “Oh no,” she said, “after all, that’s hereditary. His father is a brigand. At the moment he’s in jail. I wouldn’t beat him for that. Would beat a child just because his father was a criminal?” Finally, I asked, “What do you beat him for?” And she answered, “I have a severe noise in my head, but I’ve got rheumatism in my hand, so I hit him with a stick. Only I’m afraid if I hit him with a stick he ‘ll get epilepsy.” When I spoke to the child, he did not seem to mind. His mother had always beaten him. He said, “When mother gets nervous, she lets fly with a stick.” The interesting thing here is that the mother-child relationship was successful and extremely healthy. Whatever needs the child had, the woman was fulfilling. She was very warm and protective and she braved the child guidance clinic because the child had stolen a pencil. Here was a woman with frank psychosis, living under terrible conditions. Yet this was a healthy mother-child relationship and had produced a health boy. There was also a twin sister who seemed very normal. All of this showed us that a woman can have a gross disorder of personality and yet, if her relationship with the child does not involve that part of per personality which is disordered, you may get a child with a healthy personality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
An angry fairy says that Briar Rose will prick her finger with a spindle and fall down dead. Another fairy comments this to a hundred years of sleep. When she is fifteen, Briar Rose does prick her finger, and immediately falls asleep. At the same moment, everybody and everything else in the castle also fall asleep. During the hundred hears, may princes try to get her through the briars which have grown up around her, but none succeeds. At last, after the time is up, a prince arrives who manages to get through because the briars let him. When he finds the princess and kisses her, she wakes up and they fall in love. At the same moment, everybody and everything else in the castle takes up exactly where they left off, as though nothing had happened, and no time had passed since they fell asleep. The princess herself is still only fifteen years old, not 115. She and the price get married, and in one version, the live happily ever after; in another, this is only the beginning of their troubles. There are many magic sleeps in mythology. Perhaps the best knows is that of Brunhilde, who is left sleeping on the mountain with a ring of fire around her which only a hero can penetrate, and that is accomplished by Siegfried. In one or another, with slight alterations, almost everything in the story of Sleeping Beauty could happen. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Girls do not prick their fingers and faint, and they do fall asleep in their towers, and princes do wander around in the forest and look for faith maidens. The one thing that cannot happen is for everything and everybody to be unchanged and unaged after the lapse of so many years. This is a real illusion because it is not only improbable, it is impossible. And this is just the illusion on which Waiting for Rigor Mortis (WRM) scripts are based: that when the Prince does come, Rose will be fifteen years old again instead of thirty, forty, or fifty, and they will have a whole lifetime ahead of them. This is the illusion of sustained youth, a modest daughter of the illusion of immortality. It is hard to tell Rose in real life that princess are younger men, and that by the time they reach her age they have become kings, and are much less interesting. That is the most distressing part of the script analyst’s job: in break up the illusion, to inform the patient’s Child that there is no Santa Claus, and make it stick. If there is the patient’s favourite fairy tale to work with, it is much easier for both. If Rose does find the Prince with the Golden Apples, one of the practical problems with WRM is that she often feels out-classed and must find fault and play “Blemish” to bring him down to her level, so that he ends up wishing she would go back in the briars and fall asleep again. On the other hand, if she settles for less—the prince with the Silver Apples, or even ordinary Macintoshes from the grocery store—she will feel cheated and take it out on him, meanwhile always keeping an eye out for the Golden One. Thus, neither the frigid script nor the magic antiscript offers much chance for fulfillment. Also, as in the fairy tale, there is his mother to contend with as well as her witch. This script is important because a great many people in the World, in one way or another, spend their lives waiting for rigor mortis. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Being related, being engaged, means to be concerned. If I am a participant rather than a distant observer, I become interested (inter-esse means “to-be-in). “To-be-in” means not to be outside. If “I-am-in,” then the World becomes my concern. This concern can be one of destruction. The “interest” of the suicidal person in himself is the interest to destroy himself, just as the “interest” of the homicidal person in the World is that of destroying it. However, this latter interest is a pathological one; not because “man is good,” but because it is the very quality of life that it tends to sustain itself; “to-be-in” the World means to be concerned with life and the growth of myself and all other beings. Concerned knowledge, the “being-in” knowledge, then, leads to the desire to help; it is, if we use the word in a broad sense, therapeutically oriented knowledge. This quality of concerned knowledge had found its classic expression in Christian thought. When Jesus Christ saw an old, sick man, a dead man, He did not remain a distant observer; He was moved to think about the question how man can be saved from suffering. It was His concerned to help man which led to the creation of the Ten Commandments, which are guidelines of how man should live and how he can liberate himself from suffering. Once the orientation to the World has become one of passionate concern, all thinking about the World takes different paths. The simplest example for this is offered by medicine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
How many medical discoveries would have been made without the wish to heal? It is the same concern which underlies all Dr. Freud’s discoveries. Had he not been prompted by the wish to cure mental disturbances, how could he have discovered the unconscious in the various disguises in which it appears in symptoms and dreams? Quite obviously, random, and uninterested observation rarely leads to significant knowledge. All questions posed by the intellect are determined by our interest. This interest, far from being opposed to knowledge, is its very condition, provided it is blended with reason, that is, with the capacity to see things as they are, “to let them be.” The detachment which is taught by philosophy is not to be confused with the detachment which is preached by religio-mysticism. The first is a personal lifestyle for coping with the World; the second is an indifference to the World. It comes to this: that we must view our own life’s events in a bifocal manner, both impersonally and personally. The right way to regard possessions and property is to replace the sense of ownership by the sense of trusteeship. When Earthly things or human entities hold our heart to the exclusion of all else, they obscure the Overself’s light and shut out its peace. Such nonchalant detachment is not easy to attain. It is easy to renounce the things which we value lightly but hard to become inwardly aloof to those which we hold precious. Human preferences do exist; it is possible to pretend that they may not be there when they are—but this has to be paid for by self-deception. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to locate, suppress and extinguish fires and maneuver to protect the community by providing medical assistance. “It was on Squad X in Sacramento that I really learned what being a big city fireman was all about, because by that time I had graduated to the point where I was not just a fan who was riding. I was a member of the company and wore a helmet and worked as a fireman. Those experiences never leave you because you were challenged constantly. We had a district that was skid row, slums, and heavy industry. We probably had more fires and extra-alarm fires than any other company in the city. Also, we probably took more causalities than any other company, because of the nature of our district and the amount of heavy fire duty we did. The bond among us was tremendous. One of the things about a fire company, especially a busy, hard-working company, is the bond between you and your brothers on the company. It comes through shared experiences, and one of the great honors of my life is that firefighter I respect would accept me as one of them. That probably is the most gratifying of all—to be accepted as a firefighter by other firefighters. I think the greatest compliment anybody can ever pay to another person is to say simply, “He’s a good fireman.” Often you will hear firemen talk about someone, and they will finally come down to one sentence, “He’s a good fireman.” It says everything about a person. It means that the commitment is there, that they have stood the test, that they have been accepted because of what they delivered when it really counted. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“That was a tremendous influence on my life. The funny thing is that it has been thirty years now, and we all stay in touch. If today I had a problem or needed help, I could pick up the phone and call one of those guys, and, if I need be, they would be on the next plane to wherever I was. I feel the same way about them. Some of the memorable experiences you have on the fire department are not really spectacular fires. One that will always stand out in my mind was a snotty basement fire, in which we held our ground, and that meant all the difference between saving or not saving the building. There was no life hazard involved, and we didn’t have masks in those days. When we first went into that sub-basement we were crouching, then we were down on our knees, and finally we were close to the floor. There was a real bond between the six of us and our officer Lieutenant X, for having stood our ground. It wasn’t a very spectacular fire my most standards, but the fact that all of us stood together really meant something among ourselves. There’s another aspect of the fire life. I mentioned the case of my dad who was adopted by Engine X in Sacramento. I’ve noticed through the years that fire companies will do that with some unfortunate person. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“At Engine X and Squad X, we had a man, who lived in the basement of the firehouse. He was a shell-shocked veteran of World War II, and he couldn’t work or do anything, and there was no place for him. So he lived in the basement of the firehouse. He would take care of the furnace and help clean up the firehouse each day, and in return he got food, a warm place to sleep, and some people who care about him. When he died, it was the firemen who gave him a funeral. At Engine X, there was a “paisan” who was a guy, and apparently his family wouldn’t take care of him. But the firemen of Engine X did, especially a guy by the name of X. “Paisan” lived his entire life at that firehouse, being taken care of and trying to do things to help the firemen. When he died, it was also the firemen who gave him the funeral. I’ve known stories of this happening everywhere. It’s sort of a reflection of the kind of people that firemen are. When the Sacramento Fire Department band went to the Rose Bowl one year, they smuggled “Paisan” onto the plane with them. They took him to the Rose Bowl. One of the newspaper columnists complained that some “illegal people” had gone with the band. It was “Paisan,” and it was the trip of his life for him.” Majority of the people involved in the fire service are really decent people. I thin government tends to take the fire service for granted, because it causes them the least amount of trouble. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“The fire service when I started out as a kid was really a World unto itself, and it operated behind closed doors. They put out fires, and everybody loved the firemen. In the old days, especially in the big cities, the fire service was basically an Irish club, and everybody came predominately from the same background. The Irish dominated the fire service I grew up in. I would say that seventy-five percent of the people I knew as a kid in the fire department were Irish. It was a very cohesive group. Those days are gone. The fire service today is made up of everybody. One of the more tragic things at a fire is when people get out of a building and go back in. We had a fire in an auto body shop on a hot summer day. Everybody got out okay, and this one guy went back in to get a leather jacket. He was burned over 90 percent of his body. I remember a house fire in which a lawyer got out, an intelligent man, an educated man. He got out, and the building was heavily involved in a fire. And he went back in to get some papers or something. He dies in the fire. The things people do are amazing. In the winter time, we were coming down the street, and the whole side of the house was on fire. A guy was out there waving a blowtorch in one hand, and waving his other hand at us. He had been using the blowtorch to thaw pipes that had frozen. He set his whole house on fire.” #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department promotes and protects the health and safety of the community through dynamic programs, professional services, and continuous quality improvement. They focus on key areas such as emergency response, fire prevention, and community education. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Also, it is important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. By following the golden rule, we will attract more of God’s grace into our lives and others will treat with respect. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. Earthly longings bid retire, quench the passions’ baneful fire; to the wayward, sin-oppressed, bring thou the divine behest: Thou shalt rest. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House is one of the most beautiful aristocratic residences in America. It is famous for its excellent architecture and its extravagant owner, Sarah L. Winchester. The palace complex is surrounded by a 150-year-old picturesque Victorian park. The mansion itself is older than the landscaping, as the original 18-room farmhouse was engulfed by this labyrinth in the mid 1800s.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Prince with the Golden Apples
Democrats know how to create the impression that they alone are the protectors of peace. In this way, acting very circumspectly but never losing sight of the goal, they conquer one position after another, at one time by methods of quiet intimidation and at another time by sheer daylight robbery. These tactics are based on an accurate estimation of human frailties and must lead to success, with almost mathematical certainty. Bidenomics, therefore, knows a lot about math. They are cold and calculating and know how to properly manipulate people into believing their lies because they have calculated on the psychological effect. If it does not have to encounter the same kind of terror in a stronger form, intimidation in workshops and in factories, in assembly halls and at mass demonstrations, will always meet with success. Then, of course, Democrats will raise a horrified outcry, yelling blue murder and appealing to the authority of the State, which they have just repudiated. In doing this, their aim generally is to add the general confusion, so that they may have a better opportunity of reaching their own goal unobserved. Their idea is to find among the higher government officials some bovine creature who, in the unenlightened hope that he may win the good graces of these awe-inspiring opponents so that they may remember him in case of future eventualities, will help them now to break all those who may oppose this World pest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
The impression which such successful tactics make on the minds of the broad masses, whether they be adherents or opponents, can be estimated only by one who knows the popular mind, not from books but from practical life. For the successes which are this obtained are taken by the adherents of the Democrats as a triumphant symbol of the righteousness of their own cause; on the other hand, the beaten opponent very often loses faith in the effectiveness of any further resistance. The more I understand the methods of physical intimidation that are being employed, the more sympathy I have for the multitude that has succumbed to it. This experience should allow all who are awake to be enlightened and enable them to distinguish between the false leaders and the victims who have been lead astray. We must look upon the latter simply as victims. If hardworking people are supporting the Democratic party, it is because those decent people do not or cannot grasp the downright infamy of the doctrine taught by the communist agitators. The day is coming when Bidenomics cause great poverty that will gain the upper hand and drive the working class and middle-class into the poor house. Currently, we are not seeing the full effect of the recession because the wealthy are shopping at discount stores like Walmart, and buying these expensive houses that cost millions of dollars less than what they would normally purchase. However, as their taxes increase, the recession will become more visible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The taxpayer and natural resources of America are being stormed and eventually will finally surrender. This defeat will be due to the stupidity of those in power, who have opposed every demand to cut foreign aid, close the border, fortify national security, put more police on the street, send more funding to the fire departments, and invest in the American people. The short-sighted refusal to try towards improving living conditions for the American poor, refusing to improve labour conditions, and refusal to secure the southern border will lead to further exploitation of the American people so the point that no political party will ever be able to repair the damage that has resulted from policies of the Democratic party. When Democrats are asked to explain their incompetency, they instead have sowed the seeds of hatred and violence. The mental Cyclopes of our Democratic parties have done the things that would be inconceivable to anyone who has a working brain. (The Cyclops has one eye; this reference means the parities are functioning on half a brain.) Many people believe that the Democratic party should be disbanded and outlawed. Democrats know they are in danger of losing their power. The selection of Kamala as Vice President was meant as a political tool to be used with the Democratic party to help them maintain power. It was intended so that President Biden could distance himself from the political party, and make it clear that he was a fanatic radical. If he had been anything less, his followers would have abandoned him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Those who want to lock former President Trump away believe absolute suppression will somehow prevent an uprising of law and order, freedom and the Second Amendment and stop anyone from following the same plan again. Suppression is pointless. With the ability to beam information around the World in seconds, there is no such thing. To make him available and explain what is going on, God has resurrected Mr. Trump to explain what we are doing here. “Make American Great Again,” is more than just a catchy slogan. Donald Trump is tapping into the fundamental human concepts of heroism, survival, fear, being the underdog, the promise of a great future. When listening to his speeches, you will find yourself saying frequently “that is certainly true” because much of what he says is true. Some is an oversimplification of history or politics. What make Donald Trump more powerful is the knowledge he shares is real. It is not novel fantasy World or theories of a political philosopher, it is about events and feelings that exist in America, thing an entire nation is living through and suffering under. Many people forget that Donald Trump is a businessman and is used to executing his visions, and does not make empty promises. Rising over 600 feet and 68 stories over Fifth Avenue’s most desirable intersection, Trump Tower has been a staple in the New York skyline for over thirty years. Given the chance, imagine what Donald Trump could do for America. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
People have criticized Donald Trump for his word choices. However, his words are those of a mitigator, or a poet, who is nonjudgmental and knows that inside of every human being, there is God, and therefore, the is good in all of us. This is Mr. Trump’s method and how he keeps his audience’s attention. You must remember that he is speaking to the masses, those in the public working class, those who have not been educated, those who have gone to Harvard and Princeton and own fortune 500 companies. These are the people in his organization. They come from the masses. So, just as Mr. Trump said, he uses his words specifically to these groups. He picks his style so to match his audience. It is quite inappropriate to criticize former President Trump today. These critics do not care about America or the actual ideas that Donald Trump stands for, they only want to criticize the American Dream. They dislike America and what America has done for the World and because of that, many people feel like they should dislike Donald Trump because he truly represents the America Dream. He is someone who has ascended to power and wealth without being a member of the government, or depending on the government which is what capitalism is all about. The Hottentots are afraid that if they do not dislike Donald Trump, that somehow others will see that as approval of his message, “Make America Great Again.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
When we uncover the Democratic ideas, we find that extremely evil intentions are present. In fact, they are openly presented, in full public view, with the boldest insolence. Democrats have wrong ideas of justice and fair play, and Republicans are trying to protect the general interests against the greed and unreason of the corrupt communistic party. For to safeguard the loyalty and confidence of the people is as much in the interests of the nation as to safeguard public health. America has been seriously menaced by dishonourable politicians who are not conscious of their duty as members of the national community. Their personal avidity or irresponsibility sows the seeds of future trouble. To eliminate the causes of such a development is an action that surely deserves well of the country. The individual America is not free at any time to escape from the consequences of the injustice which he has suffered at the hands of the Democratic party, or which he thinks he has suffered. Saying that Americans can leave the country is an argument used as a ruse to detract attention from the issue. It is, or is it not, in the interest of the nation to remove the causes of social unrest? If it is, then the fight must be carried on with the only weapons that promise success. However, the American people are not able to stand up against the might of the Democratic party; for the Democrats have put the people and the nation in so much debt that they can barely survive, and they desperate fear losing their jobs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In these perilous times, it helps to remember that the gospel of Jesus Christ is also know as “gospel of peace.” Romans 10.15 reports, “And how shall they preach, except they be sent? as it is written, How beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace, and bring glad tidings of good things!” Nevertheless, the troubles of the last days—days of wickedness, turbulence, chaos, and fear—can disrupt our sense of peace and security. As wars, financial collapses, and natural disasters surround us, it is easy to become full of fear instead of faith. The Saviour prophesied that in the last days men’s hearts would fail them because of such fear. “Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the Earth: for the powers of Heaven shall be shaken,” reports Luke 21.26. This is truly a time for the faithful in heart, not for the faint of heart. Fear, which can come upon people in difficult days, is a principal weapon in the arsenal the advisory uses to make mankind unhappy. He who fears loses strength for the combat of life in the fight against evil. Therefore, the power of the evil one always tries to generate fear in human hearts. In every age and in every era, mankind has faced fear. Democrats are great liars. They can whisper ideas into our minds that are full of doubt and fear. Darkness, confusion, doubt, and fear certainly do not come from the Lord, who is fully of light and love. Whenever darkness fills our minds, we may know that we are not possessed of the Spirit of God. When we are filled with the Spirit of God, we are filled with joy, with peace and with happiness no matter what our circumstances may be; for it is a spirit of cheerfulness and of happiness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Remember, our Heavenly Father is the epitome of faith, hope, charity, optimism, and kindness. “For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind. Fear comes not of God, but rather from the adversary. The Lord has given us several key doctrines to combat the fears we face. These doctrines become weapons in our arsenal to fight against fear and the author of fear. These key doctrines are faith, hope, and charity. Faith in the Lord Jesus Christ is the first principle of the gospel. Faith is power; faith is strength. Faith is a reward for personal righteousness. The greater the measure of obedience to God’s laws, the greater will be the endowment of faith. “So, then faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God,” reports Romans 10.17. Therefore, if we want to increase our faith, we must read the scriptures, study the teachings of our latter-day apostles and prophets, and follow the direction of the Holy Spirit in our lives. Faith is also a decision. If we want to be immersed and saturated in faith, then we must choose to believe; we must choose to exercise faith. We must supplant our fears with faith. Thinking of the Saviour and remembering Him helps to strength our faith and combat fear. “Look unto me in every thought; doubt not, fear,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 6.36. The Saviour taught also, “And if ye do always remember me, ye shall have my Spirit to be with you,” reports 3 Nephi 18.7, 11. With His Spirit constantly with us, we will have the ability to stay focused, brush off fearful thoughts and worries, and see the World the way Christ would see it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
To have faith means to trust in God and believe in His promises to us. There will be nothing in this World that can defeat us. Fear not. Be of good cheery. The future is as bright as your faith. Learn to choose faith over fear. The philosophical attitude is a curious and paradoxical one precisely because it is a complete one. It approaches the human situation with a mentality as practical as cold-blooded as an engineer’s, but steers its movement by a sensitivity to ideals as delicate as an artist’s. It always considers the immediate, attainable objectives, but is not the less interested in distant, unrealizable ones. Disinterested action does not mean renouncing all work that brings financial reward. How then could one earn a livelihood? It does not mean ascetic renunciation and monastic flight from personal responsibilities. The philosophic attitude is that a man shall perform his full duty to the World, but this will be done in such a way that it brings injury to none. Truth, honesty, and honour will not be sacrificed for money. Time, energy, capacity, and money will be used wisely in the best interests of mankind, and above all the philosopher will pray constantly that the Overself will accept him as a dedicated instrument of service. And it surely will. He will rise above personal emotion into perfect serenity rather than fall below it into dull apathy. To be pure in heart means not only to be separated from terrestrial tendencies, not only from egoistic impulses, but also to be detached from everything and everyone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Thus, we see that the word “pure” is not as simple in connotation as it is short in length, and purity is harder to achieve than newly converted religious enthusiast believes. The act of renunciation is always first, and only sometimes last, an inward one. It is done by thoroughly understanding that the object renounced is, after all, only like a picture in a dream and that, again like a dream, it is ephemeral. Its illusoriness and transitoriness must be not only mentally perceived but also emotionally taken to heart. If we give up our wrong belief about it, we may not have to give up the object itself. Now, this admonition cannot be made to stop with visible things only. To be honestly applied, it must be applied to visible persons also. No matter how fondly we love somebody, we must not flinch from seeing the metaphysical truth about him nor from accepting the consequences of such perception. How can be renounce the attachments to everything and everyone and yet enjoy life, fulfil obligations, or remain in the World? How do this without flight to a monastery? How remain an affectionate husband, a devoted father? In the case of things, the answer has been given earlier. In the case of persons, the answer ought now to be given. We renounce the “materiality” of the loved one and with it the clinging to her material image, her physical possession, her personal ego. We hold on to the concept of her “spirituality,” her essence, her real being. We then know that this true self of hers cannot be separated from our own; the illusory relationship is replaced by a real one, the perishable pseudo-love by an undying essential one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
He may try to keep the illusion that he is a well-fitting part of these surroundings called civilization, a member of the society into which he was born, but in the deepest layer of his heart the reality will deny it. He no longer belongs to a race caught up in appearances, ensnared and hypnotized by them to the point of self-destruction. It may take some time to get familiar with this impersonality of attitude, this detachment of heart, before he can realize how fine it is, how precious its worth and rewarding in result. The first impression may be cold and frightening. The last will be calm and soothing. If indifference and detachment mean that the man has ceases to care, then he has ceased to understand philosophy. Deep within his heart we will strive to depersonalize his relations with his wife, his children, his family, and even his friends. However, in the domain of action we should find him the best of husbands, the most loving of fathers, and most faithful of friends. In the script knows as “Frigid Woman,” or “Waiting for Rigor Mortis” (WRM), the mother keeps telling her daughter that men are beasts, but it is the wife’s duty to submit to their bestiality. If the mother pushes hard enough, the girl may even get the idea that she will die is she has pleasures of the flesh. Usually such mothers are great snobs, and they offer a release of an “antiscript” that will lift the curse. If the daughter marries an especially important person, such as the Prince with the Golden Apples, it is all right for the daughter to have pleasures of the flesh. However, failing that, she tells her erroneously, “all your troubles will be over when you reach a certain age, because then you will not be in danger of feeling amatory anymore.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Now it already appears as though we have three illusions: Orgathanatos, or the fatal pleasures of the flesh; the Prince with the Golden Apples; and Blessed Relief, or the purifying menopause. However, none of these is the real script illusion. The girl has tested Orgathanatos by pleasing herself, and knows it is not necessarily fatal. The Prince with the Golden Apples is not an illusion, because it is just possible that she might find such a man, just as she might win the German Sweepstakes or get four aces in a poker game; both things are unlikely, but not mythical; they do happen. And Blessed Relief is not something her Child really wants. To find the script illusion, we need the fairy tale which corresponds to WRM. Dr. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” Recent research has shown that everyone dreams several times during each night. When people say they never dream, the probability is that they do not recall their dreams. Only when they have been especially intense or dramatic and when we have some special interest in recalling them is when we tend to recall dreams. Busy, extraverted people seldom pay attention to their dreams and would find it a waste of time to write them down. Yet, increasingly, it is being found that recording one’s dreams and thinking about them, seeking hints of new possibilities for personal growth, is an enterprise rewarded by new insight. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Dreaming is a way of being aware of the World, although, paradoxically enough, it is a kind of consciousness that “happens” when we are asleep, when our waking consciousness is suppressed. Laing believes that the dreaming consciousness is active, as a kind of underground or background to our waking consciousness. He calls this underground mode of experiencing fantasy. Fantasy is a form of perception, a way to perceive the World by noting the effect one’s situation is having upon one’s body. Our vocabulary for describing bodily states is scant, and so we employ metaphours, symbols, and analogies to describe the way our situation and the people in it are affecting us. Thus, when a person says, “I have just been stabbed in the back,” she is speaking metaphourically, but she is also talking about a real experience. If one says of another, “You turn me on,” he may be speaking of an enlivening effect that the other person is inducing. These somatic metaphours are effects to describe one’s real condition as a human being. They are attempts to assess whether they are devitalizing and debilitating. Fantasy and dreaming are, in a sense, guardians of one’s existence, because the content of dreams and of somatic experiencing is always found to be related to one’s survival, well-being, and growth. Gestalt therapists and followers of Jung and Dr. Freud have been able to help persons overcome impasses in their lives through serious consideration of dreams. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Careful attention to the way one’s body feels as one lives life can also be useful for growth and wellbeing. One’s body can function as did the canaries that miners used to take into the depths of a mine, where oxygen depletion was a grave danger to life. If the canary stopped singing, the miners would know that the air was becoming unfit for humans, and they would improve ventilation or get out. Vague feelings of being “shafted,” “sucked dry,” “turned on,” “ripped apart,” tell a person something about his or her situation that should be explored by more direct perception. Fantasy, that waking dream that lurks behind our ordinary consciousness as vague feelings metaphorically descried, is a way of knowing. So is dreaming. Resistances provoked by outside factors are particularly common in self-analysis, for reasons that were mentioned above. A person who is in the grip of neurotic trends—or for that matter almost any person—is quite likely to feel offended or unfairly dealt with by a special individual, or by life in general, and to take at face value his reaction of hurt or resentment. In situations it takes a considerable degree of clarity to distinguish between a real and an imagined offense. And even if the offense is real, it need not necessarily produce such reactions: if he is not himself vulnerable to what others may do to him, there are many offenses to which he may respond with pity or disapproval of the offender, perhaps with open battle, rather than with hurt or resentment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
It is much easier merely to feel a right to be angry than to examine exactly what vulnerable spot in himself has been hit. However, even if there is no doubt that the other has been cruel, unfair, or inconsiderate, for his own interests this is the way he should proceed. Let us assume that a wife is deeply disturbed at learning that her husband has had a transient affair with another woman. Even months later she cannot get over it, although she knows it is a matter of the past and while the husband does everything to re-establish a good relationship. She makes herself and him miserable, and now and then goes on a spree of bitter reproaches against him. There are several reasons that might explain why she feels and acts in this way, quite apart from a genuine hurt about the breach of confidence. It may have hurt her pride that the husband could be attached to anyone but herself. It may be intolerable to her that the husband could slip out from her control and domination. The incident may have touched off a dread of desertion, as it would in a person like Clare. She may be discontented with the marriage for reasons of which she is not aware, and she may use this conspicuous occurrence as an excuse for expressing all her repressed grievances, thus engaging merely in an unconscious campaign of revenge. She may have felt attracted toward another man and resent the fact that her husband indulged in a freedom that she had not allowed herself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If she examined such possibilities, she might not only improve the situation considerably but also gain a much clearer knowledge of herself. Neither result is possible, however, if she merely insists upon her right to be angry. If she had repressed her anger, though in that case it would be much more difficult to detect her resistance toward self-examination, the situation would be essentially the same. A remark may be in place about the spirit of tackling resistance. As if it indicated an irritating stupidity or obstinacy, we are easily tempted to be annoyed at ourselves for having a resistance. Such an attitude is understandable because it is annoying or even exasperating to encounter self-made obstacles on our way to a goal that we desire in our best interests. Nevertheless, there is no justification or even any meaning in a person scolding himself for his resistances. He is not to blame for the development of the forces behind them, and, besides, the neurotic trends that they try to protect have given him a means of dealing with life when all other means have failed. It is more sensible for him to regard the opposing forces as given factors. I am almost inclined to say that he should respect them as a part of himself—respect them not in the sense of giving them approval and indulgence but in the sense of acknowledging them as organic developments. Such an attitude will not only be more just to himself but will also give him a much better basis for dealing with resistances. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
If he approached the resistances with a hostile determination to crush them, he would hardly have the patience and willingness necessary for their understanding. If resistances are tackled in the way and in the spirit indicated, there is a good chance that they are no stronger than one’s constructive will. Those that are stronger present difficulties that can at best be overcome only with expert help. However, what really makes my stomach turn over is this picture of love, love, love, and I love everything you do and never say no. That is what the words say to me. It may be wide of the mark to the man who wrote them. When my child bites another child, I do not love that. However, when he explains, “He tore my lei, and I bit him, and he bit me, and (with angry tears) we each had only one bite before the teacher made us stop!” I have a deep feeling for him, and love him. When I discover that my child has forged a letter from her father and presented it at school, I do not love that. However, I recognize that she is in a steam-roller situation and that handling it in this way is necessary, and I love her. My love for my children then is agape—not “adorning,” but very much being with. There is no “pride” (although at other times I am guilty of this). There is humility and humanness. There is a connection between “thought” and “concern.” Both psychology and sociology have as their object man. I can get to know a great deal about man by observing him like any other object. I—the obserber—stand against my “ob-ject” (“ob-ject” and “objection” have the same root; in German, Gegenstand = “counterstand”) to oberse it, describe it, measure it, weigh it—yet I do not understand that which is alive if it remains an “object.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
I understand man only in the situation of being related to him, when he ceases to be a split-off object and becomes part of me or, to be still more correct, when he becomes “me,” yet remains also “not-me.” If I remain a distant observer I see only manifest behaviour, and if this is all I want to know, I can be satisfied with being an observer. However, in this position the whole of the other person, his full reality, escapes me. I have described him from this and the other aspect—yet I have never met him. Only if I am open to him and respond to him, and that is, precisely, if I am related to him, do I see my fellow man; and to see him is to know him. If I am filled with myself, how can I see the other man? To be filled with oneself means to be filled with one’s own image, with one’s greed, or with one’s anxiety. However, it does not mean “being oneself.” Indeed, I need to be myself to see the other. How could I understand his fear, his sadness, his aloneness, his hope, his love—unless I felt my own fear, sadness, aloneness, hope, or love? If I cannot mobilize my own human experience, mobilize it and engage myself with my fellow man, I might come to know a great deal about him, but I shall never know him. To be open is the condition to enable me to become filled with him, to become soaked with him, as it were; but I need to be I, otherwise how could I be open? I need to be myself, that is, my own authentic, unique self, in order to throw out myself, in order to transcend the illusion of the reality of this unique self. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
As long as I have not established my own identity, as long as I have not fully emerged from the womb, from the family, from the ties of race and nation—in other words, as long as I have not fully become an individual, a free man, I cannot throw away this individual and thus experience that I am nothing but the drop of water on the crest of the wave, a separate entity for a split of a second. Justice itself, which has been in a state of pilgrimage and crucifixion and now is being slowly liberated from the grip of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in the West, begins to question its own premises. The modern revolutionary movements which have challenges the sacred institutions of society by protecting social injustice in the name of social justice are here examined and re-evaluated. In the light of this, we have no choice but to admit that the un-freedom against which freedom is measured must be retained with it, namely, that the aspect of truth out of which the night view appears to emerge, the darkness of our time, is as little abandonable as is man’s subjective advance. Thus the two sources of man’s consciousness are inseparable, not as dead but as living and complementary, an aspect of the “principle of complementarity” through which Niels Bohr has sought to unite the quantum and the wave, both of which constitute the very fabric of life’s radiant energy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to provide a safe, professional, and courteous team that strives to exceed the community’s expectations and their organization. Their focus is on preserving the past and protecting the future of those they serve. “I went to X Truck on X Street, which was the second busiest in the city. I spent twenty years up there, and I loved it. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t make lieutenant in that time. I fell in love with the company and the men I worked with. They were great, and we had plenty of action, we were involved in all kinds of fires and rescues. The company had a good name. When you said X Truck, people looked up. I really enjoyed that. Many a time I took the fire department over other personal things that came up. Whether it was a trip with the family or whatever, if the fire department has something to do, I would give up the trip to participate with the department. When it was time for me to go to the National Fire Academy at Emmitsburg, if the family had something planned for that weekend, I tried to talk myself and the family out of it so I could to Emmitsburg. There’s nothing I really dislike about my job, maybe some of the budgetary problems, that’s all. I did shift work all these years, and I like that. I like doing day work and night work, back and forth. Firemen don’t like to show emotion. Rather than show any emotion, you shove everything off with a little humor. Even in tragic situations, in order to protect yourself you kind of bring some humor out. Not that its’ funny, not by a long shot. But you can always find a little bit of humor in it. I could that out when I got injured a couple of years ago. It’s just to protect the way you think we are supposed to be, I guess. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
“We’re getting more EMS calls these days than fire calls. You get a lot of silly calls with those. I remember one of the calls we had, and this was an emergency call, we brought in a medic unit and an engine company, and we have six guys pulling up with their sirens blowing. Here is a guy standing there, and he’s been drinking, and he’s seeing pink elephants. It’s ridiculous that we are even running on these types of calls. There has to be some way to screen the calls, cut them down or educate the people. That’s what I think.” The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to protecting the residents and businesses of the community. Providing aid promptly and efficiently, and enduring the safety and well-being of everyone in Sacramento is what they strive to achieve. Specifically, the desire to prevent the loss of life and property by responding to emergencies in a professional manner. Parents, please be sure to raise your children to love America and make them aware that being patriotic is our duty. Also, it is a good idea to buy American made cars and other products to endure the longevity of this great nation. We also want to respect law and order, love God and Jesus Christ and treat every human being with care and compassion. You can also help save lives and property and protect the future of our community by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, under God, Indivisible with Liberty and Justice for All! Come, O Sabbath-day, and bring peace and healing on thy wing; and to every troubled breast speak of the divine behest: Thou shalt rest. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
As Daily Necessities Become Harder to Afford
Day after day, the American people are witnesses to the phenomenon of spreading poison among the people through the instrumentality of the Democratic party and gutter journalism; and yet they are astonished at the deplorable “moral standards” and “national indifference” of the masses. Many people can only fight for something that they love. They can love only what they respect. And to respect a thing, they must have some knowledge of it and feel that it is something that is protecting them. The social problem is that crime is no longer illegal under the rule of the Democratic party, and several honest Americans believe that they are being penalized through unfair taxes and hyperinflation. When they come home in the evenings for working so hard to pay for handouts that people who are committing crimes unlawfully receive, they are dead tired. Democrats are exploiting the working masses. There is nothing that they do not drag in the mud. During these days of mental anguish and deep meditation, the American people see before their mind the ever-increasing and menacing army of people who can no longer be reckoned as belonging to their own nation. We gaze at the leaders of the Democratic party, watching that enormous human dragon slowly uncoiling itself before the World. This has caused many to feel dismayed and depressed. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
As daily necessities become harder to afford, Americans have amassed $1.14 trillion in credit card debt. That is $27 billion more than credit card debt they carried in the second quarter of 2024. The high tally comes as concerns of an economic recession triggered by modestly rising unemployment, and as soaring costs in food, housing and automobile rates continue to drain household budgets. Americans have increasingly been relying on credit cards to pay the bill, with 60 percent of Americans using credit cards to buy groceries in 2023. As more people are carrying significantly more debt, extended periods of debt are causing more Americans to fall behind on their credit card bills. Approximately 7.18 percent of credit card users have fallen into delinquency in the second quarter, up from 5 percent in the previous quarter. American paid down some of their credit card debt in 2020 using pandemic-related federal stimulus funds. However, beginning in 2021, credit card balances drastically increased by 48 percent, caused by high inflation and high interest rates. Debt owned on mortgages and automobile loans also increased by $77 billion and $10 billion, respectively. Total consumer debt has grown to $18 trillion. And the average rate on a credit card is nearly 25 percent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Last week’s jobless rate increased worries that a recession is here. The numbers included an increase of 114,000 in non-farm payrolls during July, down from 179,000 in June and far below analysts’ forecast of 175,000 gain. And the unemployment rate rose to 4.3 percent, the highest since October 2021. Many have also stated that housing costs are so high because there is a shortage in the supply of houses. However, that is not so. During 2000 and 2020, America had a surplus of 3.3 million homes. This defies conventional wisdom that the nation is facing a housing shortage. Builders over built housing units and in 2024, they are still trying to absorb that enormous over build. There is a shortage of housing that low- and very low-income families can afford. In most cities and small towns, there is an average shortage of 8,000 housing units that low- and very low-income families can afford. For those households, which require government assistance to find housing, the absolute highest they can afford to pay for rent is $550. Building new homes and apartments cannot address the shortage for the absolute poorest. No private developer can build a unit that [$550] price and survive. Just the property taxes, insurance, and utility costs exceed that number. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Many people do not want low-income housing in their communities either. Low-income housing often increases crime rates in good areas as it attracts seedy individuals. Violent crime wreaks a terrible impact not only on individual victims, their families, and friends but also on nearby residents and the fabric of their neighbourhoods. Exposure to violent crime can damage people’s healthy and development, and violence can push communities into vicious circles of decay. However, policing hot spots can be effective. Nonetheless, the 20,000,000 illegal immigrants that President Biden and Vice President Kamla have packed into the cities is drastically increasing costs and putting a burden on the poor and taxpayers. The southern border crisis is costing American taxpayers around $451 billion per year for services provided to a record number of illegal aliens under the Biden administration. When higher taxes are costs are preventing private industry from building affordable housing, Vice President Kalama has expressed support for allowing immigrants residing in American to obtain public health insurance, regardless of legal status. Tax increases and handouts are hurting everyone. This struggle against their own kind, their own nest, their own homeland is as senseless as it is incomprehensible. It is unnatural and we need another political party to represent America and the American people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
The Czarist Democratic administration is corrupt and largely incompetent and, in addition to all this, the Democratic party and the riots of 2020 have bled the American people without bringing them victory. The economic conditions are not able to sustain a capitalistic society. To turn a disciplined working population into a peasant population, and to force the population to accept the higher taxes, illegal immigration and communism, the rapid accumulation of capital has been used to force people to take government subsidies by putting the nation on house arrest and forcing them not to go to work and to accept vaccines and through the threat of terror. This was due to the Democratic party’s mad suspiciousness and their unlimited desire for personal power—a terror which went far beyond what would have been necessary to maintain capitalism, and which, in fact, in many ways weakened their economy and military position. Because the Democratic party is also pushing to take away the second amendment and because of the crime waves caused by illegal immigration and not enforcing the laws, to tend this terror, many people are advocating a police state. While this state does not permit the expression of opinions critical of the system, and even less of corresponding political activity, it is believed that it will free the average citizen from the fright of being a victim of crime in the night and early-morning hours. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The degradation of the Biden administration, finding its completion when President Biden was ruled incompetent to run for reelection in the summer of 2024 and replacing him with the inexperienced Vice president Kamala, has been carried out by the display of confusing phraseology about liberty and human dignity, all promulgated with an air of profound ignorance and disturbing promises; a carelessly-woven glitter of words to dazzle and betwixt the public. The daily Press has inoculated this new doctrine of American degradation in the most brutal fashion. No means have been too base, provided they could be exploited in this campaign of slander. These journalists are virtuous in the art of twisting facts and presenting them in a deceptive form. The theoretical literature was intended for the simpletons of the soi-distant intellectuals belonging to the middle and, naturally, the upper classes. The TV news media propaganda is intended for the masses. However, probing into books and newspapers and studying the doctrines of Democracy should reawaken one’s love for their own people and country. Thus, what at first seems an impassable chasm will become the occasion of a closer affection. Once one understands the working of the colossal system for poisoning the popular mind, only a fool can blame the victims. The American people must learn to become more independent, and this will allow them to understand the inner cause of the success achieved by the American Dream gospel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One will better come to understand why the Democratic party wants to burden taxpayers with debt and make homeowner ship and rent unaffordable. In clear light of the brutal reality, one will see inevitable consequences of high taxes, hyperinflation, and government subsidies. America is headed towards a communistic system under the current administration. Now, the American people’s sensibilities are not so much under the sway of abstract reasoning but are subject to the influence of a vague emotional longing for strength that completes their being, and they would rather bow to propaganda than to see the truth. The masses of people prefer the dictator to being their own leader and earning the American Dream through hard work and determination. They have extraordinarily little idea of how to be strong capitalists and thus they are prone to abandon their freedom and autonomy. They feel very little shame at being terrorized intellectually and they are scarcely conscious of the fact that their freedom as human beings are impudently abused; and thus they have not the slightest suspicion of the intrinsic fallacy of the Democratic doctrine. They do not even see the ruthless force and brutality of its determined utterances, to which they always submit. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
The American citizen knows what he can do and what he cannot do and, provided he moves within these limits, he need not be afraid. The Democratic party sill uses revolutionary and socialist ideas voiced by Marx, Engles, and Lenin as ideologies which give a sense of meaning to the masses. Yet they are unaware that the socialist movements always end on the tragic note of failure. The Democrats are carrying on a campaign of mental terrorism against Americans, who are neither morally nor spiritually equipped to withstand such attacks. The tactics of the Democratic party consists in opening, at a given signal, a veritable drumfire of lies and calumnies against the man whom they believe to be the most redoubtable of their adversaries, until the nerves of the latter give way, and they sacrifice the man who was attacked, simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace. However, the hope will prove always to be a foolish one, for they will never be left in peace. The same tactics will be repeated again and again, until fear of these mad dogs exercises through suggestion, a paralyzing effect on their victims. Through its own experience The Democratic party has learned the value of strength, and for that reason it attacks mostly those in whom it scents stuff of more stalwart kind, which is indeed an exceedingly rare possession. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
However, the Lord can reassure that He is near and that He will lead us through the darkest days of our lives. Life is not always easy to live, but the opportunity to do so is a blessing beyond comprehension. In the process of living we will face struggles, many of which will cause us to suffer and to experience pain. Many people will suffer in personal struggles, while others will suffer as they watch their loved ones in pain. To gain strength in our struggles, we must have an optimistic perspective of the principles in the plan of salvation. We must realize that we have a personal Saviour whom we can trust and turn to in our times of need. We must also learn and live the principles the Lord has given to receive the strength needed during our struggles. “And there stood one among them that was like unto God, and He said unto those who were with Him: We will go down, for there is space there, and we will take of these materials, and we will make an Earth whereon these may dwell,” reports Abraham 3.24. This Earth is the place to prove ourselves worthy and to prepare to return to the presence of the Lord. “And we will prove them herewith, to see if they will do all things whatsoever the Lord their God shall command them,” reports Abraham 3.25. The Lord explains the purpose for which we must be tested during this Earthly experience. “My people must be tried in all things, that they may be prepared to receive the glory that I have for them, even the glory of Zion; and that that will not bear chastisement is not worthy of my kingdom,” report Doctrine and Covenants 136.31. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
Part of the plan is that there is an opposition in all things. We are given the agency to choose between these opposites in the proving process. “For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things. If not so, my firstborn in the wilderness, righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one; wherefore, if it should be one body it must needs remain as dead, having no life neither death, nor corruption nor incorruption, happiness nor misery, neither sense nor insensibility,” reports 2 Nephi 2.11. In our pre-Earth life, we understood and sustained the plan of salvation with the principles of opposition and agency. We knew we would have experience in this life that would cause us to struggle and sometimes to suffer. Some of our struggles involve making decision, while others are a result of the decisions we have made. Some of our struggles result from choices others make that affect our lives. We cannot always control everything that happens to us in this life, but we can control how we respond. Many struggles come as problems and pressures that sometimes cause pain. Others come as temptations, trials, and tribulations. Yet struggles are part of the sacred sanctification process. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
There are no soft or slothful ways to become sanctified to the point that we are prepared to live in the presence of the Saviour. And there can be blessings in the burdens we bear. As a result of these struggles, our souls are stretched, and our spirits are strengthened. Our character becomes more Christlike as we are tried and tested. Even though these experiences may cause pain, suffering, and sorrow, we have absolute assurance. If it be suffered in resignation, and if it be met with patience, no pain suffered by man or woman upon the Earth will be without its compensating effects. “And if thou shouldst be cast into the pit, or into the hands of murderers, and the sentence of death passed upon thee; if thou because into the deep; if the billowing surge conspire against thee; if fierce winds become thing enemy; if the Heavens gather darkness, and all the elements combine to hedge up the way; and above all, if the very jaws of Hell shall gape open the mouth wide after thee, know thou, my son, that all these things shall give thee experience, and shall be for thy good,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 122.7. People respond to struggles in different ways. Some feel defeated and beaten down by the burdens they are called to bear. Many begin to blame others for their difficulties and defeats, and they fail to follow the counsel of the Lord. It is a natural tendency to seek the easy road on life’s journey and to become discouraged, filled with doubt, and even depressed when facing life’s struggles. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
If we follow the revealed eternal principles, we will gain strength during our struggles and will be blessed as we bear our burdens, deal with difficulties, and overcome obstacles in our lives. If we are to gain the strength that we need, we must come to know the Saviour and follow His counsel. “But behold, verily, verily, I say unto you that mine eyes are upon you. I am in your midst as ye cannot see me,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 38.7. When we imagine, we are envisioning possible ways for the World to be. Imagination is play with the possibilities of transforming the World from the way it is now perceived to be to some new form. Of course, it takes action to transform an image of a possible self in a possible World into an actuality that can be perceived by others and by oneself. Imagination is a way of “traveling,” of overcoming one’s present situation, to envision possibilities that might make life more livable, more fulfilling. The free play of imagination, then, is the way in which we experience new possibilities for the World. It is one of our most precious gifts of evolution, because it is only through such vision that we can save ourselves when our situation has become unlivable. Anything that diminishes or makes banal our imagination chains us more tightly to a here and now that may not be viable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Every compelling goal and project, whether projected for five minutes or five years into the future, rests upon our capacity to imagine another way for the World to be, with us in it. Such a vision of transitional utopia may function as an irresistible temptation or invitation that the person may accept, showing this acceptance through action. Just as imagination can enliven us, ordering and directing our life, so it can demoralize us, even kill us. If one imagines oneself to be weak or helpless, it is but a short step from imagination to belief that such is the case. Healthy personality calls for the ability to discriminate among modes of experiencing. Under conditions of intense need or emotion, a person may confuse imagination with perception and with confirmed truth. There is another aspect of imagining, or literally “image-ing,” that when misunderstood can affect a person’s body and action in deleterious ways but that, appreciated, can serve the person’s well-being and growth. When a person engages in imagining, it is done not just with the mind, but with the entire body. Indeed, the art of actin on the stage is a deliberate, imaginative imitation of some other person. One “becomes” the imagined person, acting and experiencing the World as the role requires. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Hypnotists tell subjects that they are tired, or strong, or that they can remember the past so well that they will become three years old again, and the compliant subject “yield.” They fulfill the hypnotists’ suggestions by being as they imagine a tired or strong person is, and they act as they imagine or remember what it was like to by three years old. One’s body image is the way in which one chronically imagines the body to be, whether weak or strong, energetic, or exhausted, vulnerable to disease or resistant. Fisher and Cleveland were able to show that an image of one’s own body as only weakly “bounded” was related to increased susceptibility to diseases and malfunction of the internal organs, such as stomach ulcers; an image of one’s body as rigidly armored against the World—excessively so—was related to diseases of the skin, bones, and muscles, for example, arthritis. I have been so impressed by the influence of imagination upon one’s body and one’s capacities to act that I say to my patients, “Be careful how you imagine yourself to be, because you might become that way.” So-called psychocybernetic and optimistic thinking work in this way, as a kind of self-hypnosis or intense argument with oneself, by saying, “I can do this, I can survive, I can succeed,” and believing the statement. This self-[persuasion can affect a person in beneficial ways, just as imagining oneself as dead, or as a failure, can bring the image of doom to reality. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
When a person becomes aware of an existing blockage, he should drop whatever analytical pursuits he is engaged in and take the resistance as the most urgent problem to be tacked. It is as useless to force himself to go one against the resistance as it would be to try again and again to light an electric bulb that does not burn; one must see where the electric current is blocked, whether in the bulb, in the fixture, in the cord, in the switch. The technique of tackling a resistance is to try to associate it. However, in all resistances occurring during analytical work it is helpful, before associating, to go over the notes that precede the blockage, because there is a fair chance that the clue for it lies in an issue at least touched upon, and that while glancing over the notes the point of departure may become evident. And sometimes a person will not be capable of going after a resistance immediately: he may be too reluctant or feel too uneasy to do so. It is advisable then, instead of forcing himself, merely to make a note that at this or that point he suddenly felt uneasy or tired, and to resume work the next day when he may have a fresh perspective on matters. In advocating that he “associate to a resistance” I mean that he should consider the manifestation of the blockage and let his thoughts run freely along that line. Thus, if he has noticed that no matter what problems are concerned his interpretations always make him come out on top, he should try to take that finding as a point of departure for further associations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
If he has become discouraged at a finding he should remember that the latter may have touched upon the factors that he is not yet able or willing to change, and try to associate with that possibility in mind. If his difficulty is in starting to analyze, though he feels a need for self-examination, he should remind himself that a previous piece of analysis or some outside occurrence may have produced a blockage. One object of script analysis is to fit the patient’s life plan into the grand historical psychology of the whole human race, a psychology which apparently has changed but little from cave days, through the early farming and ranching settlements and the great totalitarian governments of the Middle East, up to the present time. Dr. Freud, Jung, and their followers have demonstrated irrefutably that the logic, the heroes, and the deeds of myth survive into modern times…The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of Forty-Second Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change. While the hero of the myth achieves a World-historical triumph, the hero of the fairy tale achieves merely a small domestic victory. And patients are patients, we may add, because they cannot achieve the victories they aim for and still survive. Hence, they come to the doctor, “the knower of all the secret ways and words of potency. His role is precisely that of the Wise Old Man of the myths and fairy tales whose words assist the hero through the trials and terrors of the weird adventure.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
The way the Child in the patient see it, no matter how his Adult tells the story, it is quite evident that all children, since the beginning of humanity, have had to cope with the same problems, and have had about the same weapons at their disposal. When it comes to cutting, life is the same old wine in new bottles: coconut and bamboo bottles gave way to goatskins, goatskins to pottery, pottery to glass, and glass to plastic, but the grapes have hardly changed at all, and there is the same old intoxication on top and the same old dregs at the bottom. So, there will be found little variation in the shapes of the adventures and the characters involved. Hence, if we know some of the elements of the patient’s script, we can predict with some confidence where he is heading, and head him off before he meets with misfortune or disaster. That is called preventive psychiatry, or “making progress.” Even better, we can get him to change his script or give it up altogether, which is curative psychiatry, or “getting well.” Thus, it is not a matter of doctrine or necessity to precisely find the myth or fairy tale which the patient is following; but the closer we can come, the better. Without such a historical foundation, errors are frequent. A mere episode in the patient’s life, or his favourite game, may be mistaken for the whole script; or the occurrence of a single animal symbol, such as a wolf, may lead the therapist to bark up the wrong tree. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
Relating the patient’s life or his Child’s life plan to a coherent story which has survived for hundreds or thousands of years because of its universal appeal to the primitive layers of the human mind, at least gives a feeling of work from a solid foundation, and at best may give very precise clues as to what needs to be done to avert or change a bad ending. For example, a fairy tale may reveal elements of a script which are otherwise hard to dig up, such as the “script illusion.” The transactional analyst believes that psychiatric symptoms result from some form of self-deception. However, patients can be cured just because their lives and their disabilities are based on a figment of the imagination. The philosopher achieves what is rare—a cool mental detachment from things or persons, united with a tender feeling for them. No man can become philosophical and yet derive complete satisfaction from or attach complete importance to whatever is favourable in his external life. He sees to clearly how transient, how imperfect, and how compensated by disadvantages it all is. Indeed, he outgrows the excessive common interest in and the excessive common preoccupation with the ebb and flow of external life. He finds more and more trivial what he once found—and the generality of men still find—worthy of serious attention. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Is it possible to be inwardly aloof from the pleasurable things of the World and yet be outwardly able to enjoy them? It is possible to love another in a human way yet retain the inner detachment requisite for resting in philosophic peace? Can we make the best of these two Worlds? Just as we can learn by practice to remain inwardly peaceful amid outward turmoil, so we can learn to remain peaceful during outward pleasure. However, this practice is hard to learn, and most beginners fail at it. For a man to train himself in emotional control over the mad loves and insane passions, the recurrent longings, and tormenting desires, is like training himself to die. Let no one underestimate this tremendous task. We plan to gain insight into the meaning of man, who not only is determined by history but who also determines history. History is to be understood as concerned not only with the life of man on this planet but as also including such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our human World. This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that the organization of human communities and the establishment of freedom and peace are not only intellectual achievements but spiritual and more achievements as well, demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of human personality, the “unmediated wholeness of feeling and thought,” and constituting a never-ending challenge to man, emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to be renewed and replenished in the totality of his life. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to the preservation and protection of life, property, and the environment from fire, disaster, and hazardous materials related incidents through emergency mitigation, public education, and code reinforcement. “In every fire station it’s important for everybody to be able to perform at maximum efficiency at all times. We don’t get working fires every day, though lately we’ve been very busy. With applicants of the firefighter job, we use urinalysis. I think it’s a better test than polygraph. I think a lot of people are eliminated unnecessarily because of the polygraph. I’m in favor of a good, lengthy background investigation and urinalysis. We have a lot of young guys in the department. They’re not stereotypically troublesome people. Many of them are married, so there is no drinking or drug abuse problem there. People think that firefighters have a pretty soft job. They don’t see the guys at three in the morning. They don’t see them after one of their fellow firefighters has died or when a child has died in a fire. They don’t see the look on the guys after they come off duty, the total exhaustion from fighting a fire. We have a lot of education to do. At three fires this year that I was in charge of, we lost kids, multiple fatalities. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
“In comparing fire departments, I think what the administrators fail to look at is the types of buildings we have. In cities like Scottsdale, Arizona, or Plano, Texas, where they have sprinkler ordinances, they don’t have the risks in property and people that older cities have. I discuss the job with my wife a lot. She has always been a great support to me, and she always worried about me going to work. That was on her mind. One year we lost seven guys. There was a fire in a garage where they were repairing a propane truck. A water heater was on the floor, and the truck blew. We lost three guys there. Then we had a fire at a metallurgical factor, where manganese dust collected and blew up, and we lost four guys there. So the fact that you could get killed on the job was pretty evident. I never really worried about it. I was always safety-conscious. I became interested in the problems of protective clothing because I saw the need for it. When I got promoted, that was always my prime concern. You want to get through your whole career without having any firefighter who works for you getting killed. When something like that happens, it makes you take a look at things and reassesses your position. We have difficulty convincing the city managers of the need for minimum manning on the fire trucks. Though we don’t have five men on a truck anymore, we feel fortunate that we have been able to maintain four and four, that is, four on a truck and four on an engine. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
“The department has been cut down from twelve hundred men to something like nine hundred ninety. We have had problems where we haven’t had enough truck companies to cover the city. The city administration doesn’t appreciate truck work. They don’t understand the importance of immediate search and ventilation. And if the truck company can’t do its job, it makes it really unsafe for the firefighters. The city was interested in consolidating, closing down stations. So we consolidated three stations into one. About a month later, there was a fire where we lost a lady who ran a restaurant. She was a celebrity in that area. The people in the community were really upset, and the city responded by reopening a single station. It was our busiest engine company. The consolidated station was a long way from the fire site. It took longer to respond. So the single house was reopened. There’s always a debate about whether you’re better to arrive in the fire ground in sixty or so seconds with a single engine company or, say, in three minutes with three companies. It’s more expensive to operate single houses, but I doubt that this house will be closed down again. Computers are certainly not right when it comes to a lot of things, because there are many factors AI technology cannot consider. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
“I can’t say the city hasn’t cooperated as far as protective clothing goes. I can’t think of anything that the present chief or the chief before him didn’t push for us at city hall. I think Sacramento was the first major department to use Nomax turnout coats. But when they combined the two busiest battalions into one superbusy battalion. I know the administrators have a lot of demand put on them, and obviously they are trying to save money. Unfortunately, sometimes it takes a disaster for people to see their mistakes. Right now, I’d like to see more manning on the fire companies. The heavy fire duty makes for better camaraderie. It’s not like having an eight-hour job. You will with these people, you work with them, you die with them. It’s a special feeling. There’s nothing else like it in the World. In the past, it was a very close-knit group in the firehouse. We did a lot of things together. We had a lot of activities with families, with groups. We would have picnics together. We’d have outings together at each other’s houses. There’s a different feeling now, though, because things have to be run differently. We have a serious morale problem, where a lot of members think there’s been unequal treatment. Many houses still have a good feeling of camaraderie, but morale is not what it used to be. So we are conscious of building morale. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
“My best time in the fire department was when I was a captain and a battalion chief. I was five or six years with Truck X, the busiest truck company in the city. We had a super group of guys. I worked with a lieutenant who was older than me. And he was truly a firefighter’s firefighter. He would do anything and go any place. We had a god we had taken in. That dog would climb the aerial ladder. He was fantastic. He went to all the fires with us. This was really a close-knit group of guys who really took pride in the job. You could count on any one of them for anything. You like to see that kind of company. My lieutenant died at fifty-five. He could have retired. He had a heart attack after coming back from a fire in a housing project. That was a very traumatic experience. The man was doing what he wanted to do. He stayed on a busy company until the day he died. It seems that our best companies and the closet companies are the ones that are busiest. Out of five hundred new firefighters, 95 percent are conscientious young guys who really want to do the job. And they do do the job. We have problems, but they’re different problems. During the time of the riots, you felt here was a good change you were going to get injured or killed, maybe not even from a fire. We had incidents where our apparatus was shot at, tires were flattened, hoses were cut. The risks were so great it made the troops come that much closer together. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
“We have had fires where somebody dies, the family is distraught, and they try to blame somebody. And the one they like to blame is the firefighter. We had a fire recently in an apartment house, and two children died. The people complained about our response time. Well, when it was all brought out, from the time we received the call until the time the two victims were in the hospital, it was less than five minutes. That includes getting to the scene and taking the victims out of the building. That’s a pretty tight time span. When you lose kids in a fire, you try to be diplomatic, but people get distraught. They don’t appreciate what you’ve done, and you have to understand them. That’s one of the tough things” The Sacramento Fire Department is a premier public safety organization committed to the safety and welfare of their community. You can help save lives and property by donating. Also, to help preserve our community, please raise your children to love America, be patriotic, love God and Jesus Christ, respect law and order, treat others with dignity and kindness, and to buy American made cars and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. I before Thy greatness stand and am afraid; all my secret thoughts Thine eye beholdeth, deep within my bosom laid. And, withal, what is it heart and tongue can do? What is this my strength, and what is even this, the spirit in me too? However, indeed, man’s singing may seem good to Thee; so I praise Thee, singing, while there dwelleth yet the breath of God in me. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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The Fittest Survived
Many Americans are finding in hard to make it in the economy of Bidenomics because the price of everything is rising and the wages are so low. The fast-food industry received a higher wage, and this has driven up prices and it is making it more difficult for seniors to survive because their cost-of-living increase does not keep up with inflation. Thus, several Americans have found themselves in the same situation as those who have recently migrated to America, even though they have lived here for generations and have been working with a cast-iron determination to support their families and maintain their home. Once liberating from all paralyzing prejudices of class calling, environment and tradition, they are once again finding themselves subject to discrimination because they can no longer able to provide for their families and themselves in the same capacity that they were able to just four years ago. The median income in California is $78,672, the median home price is $786,730, and the median rent is $2,850. The average American spends $475.25 a month on food, $417 on gasoline, and $137 a month on electricity, $147 a month on car insurance, and $477 a month on health insurance. Therefore, many are prices out of the housing market and a significant number of people are having a hard time finding affordable rentals. As a result, people are extra-hand ready to take any second job that turns up by chance, just for the sake of earning their daily bread. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The magic glimmer that once spread over the big cities and suburbs has been replaced by the gloomiest uncertainty of being able to earn a regular daily livelihood under this current administration. In fact, the element of uncertainty in steadily earning one’s daily bread is the bitterest feature of the whole socioeconomic system itself. Some people are even pawning and selling the last of their belongings to make ends meet. Increasing poverty in America has become evident as there is a homeless crisis. Several people have been made to mix up with a class of human beings through whom their minds are now poisoned, in addition to their physical misery. Thus, even a man who is normally of industrious habits grows careless in their whole attitude towards life and gradually becomes an instrument in the hands of unscrupulous people who exploit him for the sake of their own ignoble aim. The democratic party currently seems to be aimed at the destruction of the State, the whole social order and even civilization itself. As citizens see this process exemplified before their eyes, the longer they observe it, the greater becomes their dislike for the mammoth city which greedily attracts men to its bosom, to break them mercilessly in the end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In this current economic crisis, the tie with their own people is broken. They are thrown about so much in life that they feel the effects of it on their own soul. The constant loss of earnings and increase in expenditures has caused their bodies to grow accustomed to vicissitudes of food and hunger, eating heartily in good times, and going hungry in bad. Indeed, hunger shatters all plans for rationing expenditure on a regular scale in betters times when they have paid down some of their bills. Therefore, the moment bills are paid down, he forgets to regulate the expenditure of his earnings but spends them to the full without thinking of tomorrow. This leads to confusion in the little weekly housekeeping budget, because the expenditure is not rationally planned. When the phenomenon first happens, the earnings will last perhaps for give days instead of seven; on subsequent occasions they will last only for three days; as the habit recurs, the earnings will last scarcely for a day; and finally, they will disappear in one night of feasting. Often there are wife and children at home. And in many cases, it happens that these become infected by such a way of living, specially if the husband is good to them and wants to do the best he can for them and loves them in his own way and according to his own lights. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Then the week’s earnings are spent in common at home within two or three days. The family eat and drink together as long as the money lasts and at the end of the week they hunger together. Then the wife wanders about furtively in the neighbourhood, borrows a little, and runs up large debts with pay day loans and credit cards to pull through the lean days towards the end of the week. To outsiders, it appears that a middle-class family in this situation is doing well because they do not talk about how hard they are having it and appear to be keeping of their lifestyle. However, they are worried about how to pay the mortgage, how to pay insurance, how to keep gas in the cars, how to keep the lights on, and are thus hungry as they dream of the plenty that is to come. And so, the children become acquainted with misery in their early years. However, the evil culminates when the husband goes his own way from the beginning of the week and the wife protests, simply out of love for the children. Then there are quarrels and bad feelings and the husband takes to drink and drugs and according as he becomes estranged from his wife. He now becomes drunk every Saturday. Fighting for her own existence and that of the children, the wife must hound him along the road from the office to the tavern to get a few shekels from him on payday. Then finally, he comes home, maybe on the Sunday or the Monday, having partied with his last shekels and pence, pitiable scenes follow, scenes that cry out for God’s mercy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
While some were disgusted and indigent, they have come to recognize the whole tragedy of their misfortune and to understand the profound cases of it. They are the unhappy victims of evil circumstances. For several, housing conditions are unbelievably bad currently. Many live in surroundings of appalling misery. I shudder to think of the woeful dens in which people dwell, the night shelters and the slums, and all the tenebrous spectacles of ordure, loathsome filth, and wickedness. In Minnesota, we have already seen what happens when the hordes of emancipated slaves came forth from their dens of misery and swooped down on their unsuspecting men. However, this other World has not thought about the possibility of this happening on a national level, in several states, hundreds of cities, and thousands of downtowns and suburbs. The democrats have allowed these things to go on without caring and even without suspecting—in their total lack of instinctive understanding—that sooner or later destiny will take its vengeance unless it will have been appeased in time. As a nation, we pray that people will emerge from all this misfortune and misery, from this filth and outward degradation, were not human begins as such but rather lamentable results of lamentable laws. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
We need a president who will create better fundamental conditions of social development by establishing a profound feeling for social responsibilities among the public; second, we need a leader who will combine this feeling for social responsibilities with a ruthless determination to prune away all excrescences which are incapable of being improved. Just ns Nature concentrates it greatest attention, not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding offspring in order to carry on the species, so in human life also it is less a matter of artificially improving the existing generation—which, owning to human characteristics, is impossible in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—and more a matter of securing from the very start a better road for the future. The American mind has become dominated by a self-conscious, willful, iron-mailed philosophy of immoralism under President Biden. In the past, the militarists assured the Americans that they were the elite of mankind, a race of supermen destined to conquer the Americas or the World through Manifest Destiny. They preached that might makes right, that war is a biological necessity, and that conquest is justified by the survival of the fittest. The old churchmen preached of war as a just judgment of God. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
The modern natural scientists see in a war a propitious mode of selection. War is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a truly civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality. Since its decisions rest on the very nature of things, war gives a biologically just decision. It is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and as such, an indispensable factor in civilization. In all directions, the American people see proof that they are the Chosen People. They interpret the doctrine of evolution to draw from it a warrant for their aspirations. Evolution teaches that “the fittest survived.” The champions of the philosophy of supermania lean heavily on biology to support their creed. They have been misled by the phrase “the survival of the fittest.” You might infer, to hear them buzz, that only the fittest survive, or, to put it conversely, the fact that you survive is proof that you are the “fittest.” In the essential circularity of the Darwinian sociology, power and strength are defined in terms of survival, and survival is in turn explained by strength and power. All changes in types of survival and kinds of fitness are considered without relation to ulterior values; there is no value beyond survival itself. Rome conquering the World by force of arms is as good as Greece conquering it by force of ideas or Judea conquering it by force of religious sentiment. Indeed, because of its biological origins, this view shows a strong tendency to favour the cruder and more violent forms of struggle, as being more unmistakably biological. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The Intellectual World and public opinion have accepted Darwinism by almost unanimous consent as an integral part of the theory of evolution. Darwin believes that the “fittest” are those who best adapt to their conditions. However, struggle is often confused with the total death of the vanquished, whereas this selective factor hardly ever operates among men. The entire phenomenon of mutual assistance is ignored by the philosophy of force. It is to this that man owes his dominant position in the Universe. In a large sense, all mankind is an association, and all wars are civils wars; yet the philosophers of force have never advocated civil war as a source of progress. American society sees its own image in the tooth-and-claw version of natural selection, and believes its dominant groups are therefore able to dramatize this vision of competition as a thing good. Ruthless business rivalry and unprincipled politics seem to be justified by the survival philosophy. If the dream of personal conquest and individual assertion motivates the middle-class, this philosophy seems tenable, and its critics remain a minority. This version of Darwinism depended for its continuance upon a general acceptance of unrestrained competition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
However, nothing is so unstable as “pure” business competition; nothing is so disastrous to the unlucky or unskilled competition; nothing is so difficult as to keep the growing number of the “unfit” reconciled to the operations of such a regime. In time the American middle-class shrank from the principle it had glorified, turned in flight from the hideous image of rampant competitive brutality, and repudiated the once heroic entrepreneur as a despoiler of the nation’s wealth and morals and a monopolist of its opportunities. The life of man in society, while it is incidentally a biological fact, has characteristics that are not reducible to biology and must be explained in the distinctive terms of a cultural analysis; the physical well-being of men is a result of their social organization and not vice versa; social improvement is a product of advances in technology and social organization, not of breeding or selective elimination; judgements as to the value of competition between men or enterprises or nations must be based upon social and not allegedly biological consequences; and there is nothing in nature or a naturalistic philosophy of life to make impossible the acceptance of moral sanctions that can be employed for the common good. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The Marxist theory, as well as the socialist movement, was radical and humanistic—radical in the sense of going to the roots, and the roots being man; humanistic in the sense that it is man who is the measure of all things, that his full unfolding must be the aim and the criterion of all social efforts. The liberation of man from the strangle hold of economic conditions which prevented his full development was the aim of all Marx’s thought and efforts. Socialism has become successful, gained power, and in this very process succumbed to its opponent—the spirit of capitalism. This development is not too surprising. Capitalism is successful beyond anything the early socialists could have visualized. Instead of leading to an ever-increasing misery of the works, the progress of technology and of the organization of capitalist society made it possible for the workers to benefit from its advances. True enough, this happened to some extent at the expense of colonial peoples; and furthermore, it happened to some extent through the fight of the socialist parties and trade unions for a greater share in the social product. However, whatever the role of these various factors may have been, the result is that the workers and their leaders were more and more captivated by the spirit of capitalism and began to interpret socialism in accordance with capitalist principles. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
While Marxism had aimed at a humanist society transcending capitalism, a society which would have as its aim the full unfolding of the individual personality, most socialists regarded socialism as a movement to improve the economic and socio-political situation within capitalism; they considered the socialization of the means of production, plus the principles of the welfare of the state as a sufficient criterion of a socialist society. The principles of this type of “socialism” were essentially the same as those of capitalism: maximum economic efficiency, large-scale bureaucratically organized industry, and subordination of the individual under this bureaucratic but economically efficient system. Basically, the majority of socialists in the West and in the East shared this capitalistic interpretation of socialism, but, according to their respective economic and political positions, they arrived at different solutions. The Western leaders began to make their peace with capitalism, the socialist leaders of both camps supported their governments claiming that they were supporting the war for the sake of freedom, because they had the good luck to be fighting the Kaiser and the Czar, respectively. When the imperial system in Germany collapsed as the result of prolonging a virtually lost war far beyond any reasonable consideration, the same leaders formed a secret alliance with the generals to defeat the revolution. They permitted first the growth of the Reichswehr, and of secret and half-secret semimilitary organizations which became the basis of Nazi power—and they virtually capitulated completely before the increasing strength and oppressiveness of the Nazi and nationalistic right-wing forces. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The French socialist leaders followed a similar direction, which led the French socialist party under the leadership of Guy Mollet to the open support of the Algerian war. In England, as in the Scandinavian countries, the situation was somewhat different. In these countries the socialist won majorities, either temporarily or continuously, and used their strength to build a welfare state. A highly developed system of social security and particularly of a social health service, brought to its full fruition the system which had been started by conservatives in Europe in the nineteenth century (Disraeli in England and Bismarck in Germany), and which was started in the United States of America under the leadership of F.D. Roosevelt in the thirties. In addition, The British Labour Party socialized some of the key industries, believing that such socialization of the means of production was the touchstone of true socialism. However, while they satisfied the economic interests of the workers, their brand of socialism ceased to be the vision of a fundamental change of the human condition. They lost one election after another and sought to recoup their losses by giving up almost all radical aims. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The same process occurred in Germany, where the Social Democratic Party not only gave up almost all socialist aims, but also accepted the principles of nationalism and rearmament to such an extent that the social democratic policy is hardly distinguishable from that of their opponents. The growing perception and responsibility of our World Age point to the new reality that the individual person and the collective person supplement and integrate each other; that the thrall of totalitarianism of both left and right has been shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of truth and human totality. Mankind can finally place its trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual property right of history, but in a sacramental brotherhood and in the unity knowledge. This new consciousness has created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets; analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or to the beginning of the new scientific era, the era of the science of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were laid by Galileo in the Renaissance. An important effort of this Series is to re-examine the contradictory meanings and applications which are given today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love, peace, brotherhood, and God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The purpose of such inquiries is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine World history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms of man in relation to God, to himself, his fellow man and the Universe, that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting man’s hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of the basic values of all peoples. The happy ending of the fairy tale is suspect, and does not occur in real life. Fairy tales are told by well-meaning parents, and the happy ending is an intrusion of a benevolent but mendacious Parental ego state; tales made up by children themselves are more realistic, and do not necessarily have happy endings; in fact, they are notoriously gruesome. A resistance that expresses itself is difficult to detect, and it will cause a loss of time. However, if one finds after a while that no progress has been made, or that one is only moving in circles in spite of having worked at the problems concerned, its presence may be suspected. It is important in self-analysis—as in any analysis—not to be deluded about the progress made. Such a delusion may life one’s spirits for a whole, but it easily prevents the discovery of a deep-seated resistance. This possibility of a wrong integration of findings is one of the reasons any an occasional checkup with an analyst is desirable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
For years, when my life was turbulent and others seemed so serene, I thought they had chosen the right way, I the wrong one. I felt that I had been rebellious, not “satisfied as I should have been.” There was one thing that I did not know about my friends: they did not talk about their troubles as I did about mine. It is only in our later life that they are beginning to reveal themselves to me. I have truly no regrets for my life, no bitterness. It would have been nice to be able to do better than I have, but without where I have been I could not be where I am now. When I say this to my friendly puppy friends, they sign. At other times, they express a bitterness, briefly but recurrently, which makes my toes curl to think of living with it. So it seems to me that I have to come off better, and there are intimations that they think so too. When the easter therapist writes “pampered” I am not sure what he means, because who means why by “pampered”? He also wrote, “able to lock what confronts him.” Is that a true statement, or an ideal? A doctor once told me, “If you cannot life it, run.” I ran. Some dragons are too much for any George. In my youth, before I had got so much loused up, and did not need someone else to tell me what to do, I enjoyed licking what confronted me, but some things looked to me like a steamroller, and it seemed a better idea to step aside than tilt with it. If “able to lock what confronts him” included being able to accept the fact that there are some things I cannot lick, then I agree. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Although sometimes it is only for the present that I run away: later, I may be able to return and lick what I could not earlier. That does not mean that I could have done it in the first place. I just had not grown up to that one yet. However, what really makes my stomach turn over is this picture of love, love, love, and I love everything you do and ever say no. That is what the words say to me. It may be wide of the mark to the man who write them. The act of disciplined thinking about one’s World, to make sense of what has been going on and to solve problems, is another way of experiencing the World with the doors of perception temporarily shut. In fact, when people want to reason and argue with themselves to arrive at some conclusion, they seek quiet surroundings. Thinking in a disciplined way, according to rules of logic, is a skill that contributes to effective action. However, we can think wishfully, and fearfully, too, when our needs and passions are aroused. Such autistic thinking may lead us to conclusions that conform to our feelings but misinform us about the way the Worldly really is. Autistic thinking calls for reality testing—a way to review the argument the thinking embodies and to check the conclusions by means of fresh perception. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Compulsive thinking interferes with living; it blocks perception and inhibits effective action. Indeed, one of the functions of meditation is to still one’s chattering mind. Such stilling is akin to learning how to discipline the act of speaking. Compulsive thinking is like a compulsive talking; it does the person no good. Disciplined thinking to solve a problem is illustrated as follows: the person carries on an inner dialogue, saying, “If I act in this way, it is likely to produce these consequences, whereas if I don not, the problem will persist.” Whether or not this type of thinking will lead to effective action can then be tested. Autistic thinking is a kind of reverie where the person’s inner dialogue is deliberately allowed to proceed unchecked by the discipline of reason, and merges into imagination; for example, “I wish I had ten people in love with me at once, would that not be grand?” and so on. Alienated thinking, or chatter, is akin to being in the company of a boring chatterbox who will not allow you to see, hear, or think as you wish because of the constant din of talk. The higher meaning of “Love thy neighbour” as revealed in meditation is to confer a blessing, and identify with his higher self. Total goodwill is, after all, only an ideal because it must be practiced towards our enemies and those we dislike not less than toward our friends and those we like. We can only try to come close to it in difficult cases. The attempt may elicit grace, which will carry us further in the same direction. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department provides all fire suppression, prevention, and education programs in the city as well as paramedic emergency medical services to the residents and visitors of the Sacramento community. “I was an engineer for nine years before I became a captain. I was not really excited about being an officer until my eighth or ninth year, when the captain I was working for at the time sort of pushed me. The responsibility for the lives of others doesn’t weigh too heavily on me. I’m very confident in myself and my abilities. I know the guys I work with feel that way, that I know what I’m doing. Most of the firefighters feel that way. They have a good self-image. They are confident in what they do. It’s a macho image.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to provide excellent service to the community. By donating to the Sacramento Fire Department, you can help save lives and property. And remember parents, raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to buy American cars and American made good, to love God and Jesus Christ, to respect law and order and to treat others with respect and compassion. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. At the dawn I seek Thee, Refuge, Rock subline; set my prayer before Thee in the morning, and my prayer at even time. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
We can’t wait to be decked out in Halloween decorations soon 🎃
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
What I Have is Good and Still I am Unhappy
Our Heavenly Father wants us to love ourselves, to see ourselves as He see us: we are His cherished children. When this truth sinks deep into our hearts, our love for God grows. Berating others does not help them progress; it only discourages them. Along with correction, they also need encouragement. The goal with self-love is never to justify omission, rationalize sin, or slip into complacency. I recognize that certain negative feelings can help me, such as godly sorrow—but I should not wallow in it, because that is not progression. Guilt has an important role as it awakens us to changes we need to make, but there are limits to how far guilt will help us. Guilt is like a battery in a gasoline-powered BMW. It can light up the Ultimate Driving Machines, start the engine, and power the headlights, but it will not provide the fuel for the long journey ahead. The battery, by itself, is not sufficient. Ans neither is guilt. I must be intentional not to slip into negative thinking patterns and should instead focus on loving Jesus as the Christ. I once had an image of myself as a fish. My fish image was that I was a fish, struggling to swim against the stream. I was not able to do that yet. I was held where I was, which gave a chance to learn how to swim against the stream (go the way that I wanted to go) by two shadowy figures on a bridge, each of them holding a line which I was hooked like a fish. This kept me from being swept away by the swiftly moving stream. I know that the two figures were the doctor and Aldous Huxley. Neither of them understood everything, but each of them understood enough to be helpful. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
When I got worse physically, the doctor got me back to some degree of steadiness. When, through experimenting with my mind, I got into something that neither the doctor nor I understood, so I was afraid to go on with it, I wrote to Huxley and he explained it. These two men kept me from being swept away while I thrashed around, learning how to swim against the stream. This was a persistent image that I lived with for about a year. These men were also people to whom I could tell anything and they would not “call the cops.” This meant to me that they would not call men to lock me up. I thought of being “locked up” as being in a madhouse, but it was not a mental hospital that I was afraid of, although I did not know what the “madhouse” was. It meant being pushed back into what I was struggling to get out of. Other people tended very much to do this to me, so I lived more and more alone and when, at last, I was just barely able to travel I went to a place where I knew no one, and kept myself alone, so that I could get together with myself. I wanted desperately to be with someone who understood more than I did about what I was trying to understand, but since I could not do that, I could at least remove myself from people who were confusing me. After all that, some of my present knowings seem small and perhaps ridiculous, but I know now that they are not “unimportant.” I am living near the beach in an apartment which has an outside deck with a railing. When my son was here, he started to throw his damp swimming trucks and towel over the railing, then said, “The management probably wouldn’t like that—I can see why.” I agreed, and his statement was accurate, but whose seeing was the seeing why? When I agreed, in my mind there was an image of the uncluttered railing as described, something that I like. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
However, a few days later when I walked past a building with a railing draped with swimsuits and towels, I knew that I liked this, that to me it looked gay and human, alive with an activity of people. Then I knew how much I missed seeing clothes on lines blowing in the wind, people working untidily in gardens, sweeping sidewalks, dashing out of houses half-dressed to do something that should be done right now, or a woman drying her hair in the sun. When I looked out on the tidy street with no sign that anyone lives behind the curtains in the windows of the houses, it seems so lifeless. The alwaysness of this tidiness tires me the way that hunger does; something is missing from my intake. If no one else feels as I do, this still is the way that I feel, and when I think that I do not, I am not together with myself. If I could deceive myself completely by accepting other people’s values, then there might be an argument for giving up and letting other people tell me what to do. However, my inner valuing does not cease: it just gets buried to my knowing and is forever in conflict with the values that I have accepted from outside. When I had not noticed my own valuing of the street on which I live, there was nothing that I could do about it but be irked without knowing why, and feel that I must be ungrateful because “what I have is good” and still I am unhappy. Now that I have noticed, I feel happy. The conflict in me has been removed. Having accepted myself, I can accept other things too, in a way that is very different from “making the best of it.” It is the way I lived from age 12 to 16, when I wanted to quit school but the law would not let me. So, I lived with what was around me, including school, until the time when I could leave. The circumstances are different now, but the feeling is the same. I do not feel trapped. I do not feel that something has been done to me (victimized). And I do not feel guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Currently in the United States of America there has been a lot of resentment to people who have immigrated illegally. Because of that, anyone who looks like they could be of Hispanic background have been facing a lot of discrimination. However, even if someone has illegally immigrated, it is not right to treat them less than human. If you do not like people being allowed to immigrate illegally, then that that up with your government, stop voting democrat. It is not your place to judge them. All individuals are children of God and part of His divine family. As His children, we all have divine potential and are precious in His eyes/ The scriptures teach that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men,” and “all are alike” unto Him. He does not love one race or culture more than any other. The gospel of Jesus as the Christ is for all of God’s children. The Book of Mormon teaches that the Lord invites “all to come unto Him and partake of His goodness; and He denieth none that come unto Him, black and white, bond and free, male and female.” Our standing with God depends on our devotion to Him and His commandments, not on the colour of our skin, our ethnicity, our citizenship status, or other attributes. Because we are children of God, we are all brothers and sisters. God has commanded us to “love one another.” In the parable of the good Samaritan, Jesus Christ taught that the commandment to love our neighbour transcends ethic, cultural, and religious differences. The Saviour exemplified this teaching. He “went about doing good,” teaching and healing people of all backgrounds. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Manifest Destiny; the belief that it is our duty, as Americans, to settle the continent, conquer the World and prosper. The idealized settlers who reached the promised land of the West were ordained by God to expand the boarders of America from sea to shining sea. The settlers overcame death to reach the American West, bathed in a welcoming golden light. There was a price to be paid, however. Frontiersmen had to be willing to face the risks inherent in migration—but had their parents not faced similar risks in coming to America? They had to be willing to do the backbreaking work required to turn a wilderness into prosperous farms and towns—but had their ancestors not done that as well? They had to be willing to break with the familiar and comfortable, and even face hardship—perhaps even death. They created the blueprint to expand America’s dominion over the entire planet, and perhaps one day there will no longer be any boarder and people can travel freely to whatever part of the World they wish. So many people want to come to America because it does have a lot of freedom and law and order. With Manifest Destiny, this freedom and law and order will spread to other parts of the World. I am grateful that the heart of the gospel revolves around love. The love of God, love of others, and love for myself. It would be a grave error to believe that philosophy is merely the practice of reflection over lofty or lovely thoughts. It is also the shedding of tears over low or unlovely ones, the remorseful weeping over past and present frailty, the poignant remembrance of errors and incapacities. We who practice it must examine ourselves periodically. This means that we should not, at any time, be satisfied with ourselves but should always recognize the need of improvement. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Hence, we should constantly strive to detect and remedy the moral, temperamental, and mental defects which disclose themselves. We will need to look into our hearts more deeply than ever before, and search their darker labyrinths for the motives and desires hiding away from our conscious aspiration. We are called upon to make the most searching criticism of ourselves, and to make it with emotional urgency and even profound remorse. If it meant only looking at our human frailty and mortal foolishness, this advice to look within would be idiotic. A morbid self-obsession, a continuously gloomy introspection and unending analysis of personal thoughts and experience is to be avoided as unhealthy. Such ugly egocentricity does not make us more “spiritual.” However, the advice really means looking further and deeper. It means an introspective examining operation much longer in time, much more exigent in patience, much more sustained in character, than a mere first glance. It means intensity of the first order, concentration of the strongest kind, spiritual longing of the most fervent sort. Although philosophy bids us avoid morbid thoughts of depression, doubt, fear, worry, and anxiety because they are weakening and because they represent only one side—the dark side—of a two-sided situation, this counsel must not be misunderstood. It does not bid us ignore the causes which give rise to such thoughts. On the contrary, it bids us take full note of them, face up to them, frankly, examine them carefully, and understand the defects in our own character which led to them. Finally, we are to adopt the practical measures needed to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
However, this once done, and thoroughly done, we are to turn our back upon them and let them go altogether to keep our serenity and contain our spiritual detachment. In every painful problem which is ultimately traceable to our own wrong-doing, the best way to rid ourself of the worry and anxiety it brings is first, to do what is humanly possible to mend matters in a practical way; second, if others are concerned, to make such reparation to them as we can; third, to unmask our sin pitilessly and resolutely for what it is; fourth, to bring clearly into the foreground of consciousness what are the weaknesses and defects in our own character which have led us into this sin; fifth, to picture constantly in imagination during meditation or pre-sleep, our liberation from these faults through acquiring the opposite virtues; sixth, and last, when all this has been done and not until then, to stop brooding about the miserable past or depressing future and to hand the whole problem with its attendant worries into the keeping of the Overself and thus attain peace concerning it. If this is successfully done, every memory of sin will dissolve and every error of judgment will cease to torment us. Here, in its mysterious presence and grace, whatever mistakes we have made in practical life and whatever sins we have committed in moral life, we need not let these shadows of the past haunt us perpetually like wraiths. We may analyse them thoroughly and criticize ourselves mercilessly but only to lay the foundation in better self-knowledge for sound reform. We must not forget them too soon, but we ought not hug them too long. After the work of self-analysis is well done, we can turn for relief and solace to the Overself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
We have been discussing Clare and her journey through self-analysis. During her period of inner turmoil, she obtained a new lease on life and a renewed incentive to work at the problems she was having in her interpersonal relationships. However, several questions arose. If the loss of her intimate partner, Peter, could still upset her as deeply as it did, what about the value of the foregoing analytical work? Two considerations have a bearing on this question. One is the insufficiency of the previous work. Clare had recognized the fact that she was compulsively dependent, and had seen certain implications of this condition. However, she was far from reaching a real grasp on the problem. If one doubts the value of the work accomplished one makes the same mistake that Clare herself made during the whole period before the climax, underrating the import of the neurotic trend and therefore expecting too quick and easy results. The other consideration is that overall, the final upheaval was itself of a constructive nature. It presented the culminating point of a line of development that runs from a compete ignorance of the problem involved, and the most vigorous unconscious attempts to deny its existence, to a final full realization of its severity. The climax brought it home to her that her dependency was like a cancerous growth which cannot be kept within safe boundaries (compromises) but must be eradicated lest one’s life be gravely jeopardized. Under the pressure of acute distress Clare succeeded, too, in bringing into sharp conscious focus a conflict which had hitherto been unconscious. She had been entirely unaware of being torn between wanting to relinquish her dependency on another person and wanting to continue it. This conflict had been camouflaged by her compromise solutions with Peter. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Now Clare had faced it, and was able to take a clear stand as to the direction in which she wanted to go. In this regard the phase she was now going through illustrates a fact mentioned in the past, that at certain periods in analysis it is necessary to take a stand, to decide. And if through the analytical work a conflict has sufficiently crystallized for the patient to be able to do this, it must be reckoned as an achievement. In Clare’s case the issue, of course, was whether she would immediately try to replace the lost pillar with a new one. Naturally it is upsetting to face a problem in that uncompromising way. And here a second question comes in. Did Clare’s experience produce a greater danger of suicide than it would have without analysis? For consideration of this question, it is relevant that she had indulged in suicidal notations at previous times. She had never, however, been able to terminate them so decisively as she did this time. Formerly they had simply faded out of the picture because something “nice” happened. Now she refunded them actively, consciously, and with a constructive spirit. Also, as mentioned above, her first reaction of gratefulness that Peter had not withdrawn earlier was in part a genuine feeling that she was now more capable of coping with his desertion. It seems safe to assume, therefore, that the suicidal tendencies would have been stronger and more persistent without the analytical work that was done. Human nature is universally frail; Clare’s is no exception. Nevertheless, if she is appalled at her mistakes, of this anguish is doubled because what she has done wrongly is irreparable, is there nothing else left to do than to give herself up to helpless despair? The true answer is more hopeful than that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
I know that if one keeps patient while cultivating humility and silencing the ego’s pride, one shall grow away from old weaknesses and overcome former mistakes. This should be the first stage of her new attitude. For the next one, Clare can at least go over the events of the past and amend them in thought. She can put right mentally those wrong decisions and correct those rash impulsive actions. She can collect the profits of lessons expensively learnt. The first value of self-confession of sin is not so much getting rid of an uncomfortable sense of guilt over a particular episode or series of episodes as getting at the weakness in character responsible for them, and then seeking to correct it. Merely to remove the sense of discomfort and to leave its moral source untouched is not enough. Any priestly rite of forgiveness is ineffective until it is done. If it is to be real, if it is to be successful in purifying her character, it must produce repentance and that in its turn must produce penance. The second value of the confession is to induce the sinner to make amends or restitution to those one has hurt and thus balance one’s karmic account with them. Humans commit many sins and fall into many errors before the failure of their own conduct finally dawns upon them. By raising one’s point of view regarding any grievous situation, whether it involves oneself alone or other persons, one attracts the entry of a higher power into it which will work for one’s benefit and in one’s favour. One will learn to endure the blows of misfortune with a bravery heretofore unknown and a serenity heretofore unexperienced. It is better for one’s real progress that one’s eyes should fill with tears of repentance than with tears of ecstasy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A healthy personality comes from the optimal self, which refers to a person who is functioning at the highest level. There are modes of human fulfillment, or characteristics of the optimal person. Efficiency: functional competence (being able to do things well), effective work autonomy (being able to work independently), and commitment to projects of concern outside of oneself. Creativity: experiences familiar things in fresh ways; openness to the novel, strange, and socially unacceptable; creates new style of life. Inner harmony: likes self; need for some amount of privacy or solitude. Relatedness: compassion, to be genuinely transparent, making self available to receive what others seek to communicate. Transcendence: mystical unity with a larger whole, relationship to some all-encompassing totality, to nature or God. Psychologists have been too timid and guarded in identifying the high-level functioning or healthy personality. We have disguised the true, human image of this person behind language that is so stiff that the person in the description is lost. The healthy personality is a “beautiful and noble person” (BNP). The beauty described here does not refer to physical beauty, although that may sometimes be found in the healthy personality. It more specifically describes someone whose behaviour and work is such that the effect upon self and other is one of producing an essentially aesthetic feeling. Nobility also, of course, does not refer to parentage but to the kinds of behaviour and acts performed by such a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
While some have argued that even psychotic people may sometimes be thought of as healthy, Ted Landsman insists that the BNP must first be normal—perceive reality essentially as it is and to be free of bizarre symptoms (such as hallucinations, grimaces, and so on). The first stage in the evolution of the BNP is described as the passionate self. The passionate self is seen as someone who truly likes, even loves himself or herself, someone who enjoys being alone, and who respects and accepts self. This is not the same as selfishness, but rather is an awareness of self as a worthwhile person. Bragging and possessiveness are avoided. The second stage involves a concept not dealt with in detail by most other writers: the environment-loving person. A passionate caring for the physical environment is seen in the person at this stage. The human relates to mountains, flowers, music, buildings—the entire physical environment—with appreciation and with joy, preserves it, nurtures it, and delights in it. The final stage in the evolution of the BNP is described as the compassionate self. This is a person who deeply loves others, who cares about people who hurt or are in need, and who acts, often at a great personal risk, to help others. The compassionate person does not only feel for others, but acts to alleviate or remedy their pains or injustices. There are major positive experiences that lead to the development of the beautiful and noble personality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
There are experiences that lead to the development of the beautiful and noble personality: Positive experiences in childhood. Experiences of joy, delight, ecstasy at all levels, not just peak. High levels of intense positive feeling. Negative experiences that have been made positive in effect. These are important painful experiences, such as disgrace, failure, death of loved ones, automobile accidents, being fired from a job, which the person has been able to “turn around” and make into significant learning or growth experiences. The following, collected by Smith, is written by a female prisoner: “Coming to prison. Never thought it would happen to me. Anyone else but not me. It happened. I’m glad I’ve stopped and reviewed my life up to age 17. Complete destruction for me. I was destroying myself and going at it at top speed. I’ve met beautiful people here. I’ve learned a lot about me. This experience I would not change if I could. I need this. Now maybe I can be a better person. I can stop and think and reason with myself….Had I not served time I would still be going at top speed I’m sure. Only what would I be into now?” The solitude experience. Instances in which an individual can escape from the immediate pressures—social, job, interpersonal—and explore the self, one’s own feelings, one’s relationship to others, to the World. Opportunities to think freely and clearly are usually accomplished in solitude, in intentional isolation, such as a short walk in the woods, or a year’s living in the desert alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
The authentic dialogue. This, in a sense, is the obverse or “flip side” of the previous experience. You seek the opportunity to converse, deeply, freely, without guile or pretense, with someone you trust totally. Both persons in the dialogue must be committed to authenticity and openness, which differs somewhat from most counseling or psychotherapeutic approaches, where only the silent is the communicator about self. The transcendent experience is one in which you achieve far beyond what you would normally expect of yourself: writing an unusually beautiful open, being far more sensitive than one would expect, performing a physical feat such as lifting a beam from an injured person or winning an athletic contest. These experiences are difficult to predict or create, but when they do occur, they give you the sure confidence that you have possibilities and potential of which you never dreamed. The approach to beautiful and noble personhood stresses openness, relationship to self and to others. It builds up Maslow’s system of peak experiences to suggest the importance of a whole range of experiences, especially the positive, and inserts the importance of the relationship, a passionate one, with the physical environment, music, mountains, flowers, lakes, and so on. When a mane lets go of his ego, all the virtues come submissively to his feet. If he can let it go only for a little while, they too will stay only a little while; but if her can make the parting permanent, then the virtues are his forever. However, this is a high and uncommon state, for it is a kind of death few will accept. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The social character which makes people act and think as they must act and think from the standpoint of the proper functioning of their society is only one link between the social structure and ideas. The other link lies in the fact that each society determines which thoughts and feelings shall be permitted to arrive at the level of awareness and which must remain unconscious. Just as there is a social character, there is also a “social unconscious.” By “social unconscious” I refer to those areas of repression which are common to most members of a society; if the society with its specific contradictions is to operate successful, these commonly repressed elements are those contents which a given society cannot permit its members to be aware of. The “individual unconscious” with which Dr. Freud deals refers to those contents which an individual represses for reasons of individual circumstances peculiar to his personal life situation. Dr. Freud deals to some extent with the “social unconscious” when he talks about the repression of incestuous strivings as being characteristic of all civilizations; but in his clinical work, he mainly deals with the individual unconscious, and little attention is paid by most analysts to the “social unconscious.” The conflict between the unconscious reality within ourselves and the denial of that reality in our consciousness often leads to neurosis, by making the unconscious conscious, the neurotic symptom or character trait can be cured. Dr. Freud believed that this uncovering of the unconscious was the most important tool for the therapy of neurosis, his vision went far beyond this therapeutic interest. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Dr. Freud saw how unreal most of what we think about ourselves is, how we deceive ourselves continuously about ourselves and about others; he was prompted by the passionate interest in touching the reality which is behind our conscious thought. Dr. Freud recognized that most of what is real within us is not conscious, and that most of what is conscious is not real. This devotion to the search for inner reality opened a new dimension of truth. If he says what he knows, the person who does not know the phenomenon of the unconscious is convinced he says the truth. Dr. Freud showed that we all deceive ourselves to a larger or smaller degree about the truth. Even if we are sincere regarding what we are aware of we are probably still lying because our consciousness is “false,” it does not represent the underlying real experience within ourselves. Dr. Freud started out with observation on an individual scale. Here are some random examples: a man may have a secret pleasure in looking at pornographic pictures. He does not admit any such interest to himself but is convinced, consciously, that he considers such pictures to be harmful and that it is his duty to see to it that they are not exhibited anywhere. In this way he is constantly concerned with pornography, looks at such pictures as part of his campaign against them, and this satisfies his desire. However, he has a very good conscience. His real desires are unconscious, and what is conscious is a rationalization which hides completely what he does not want to know. Thus, he is enabled to satisfy his desire without sensing the conflict with his moral judgment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Success in the 21st century will require new ways of doing things. Innovation requires the Sacramento Fire Department to systematically identify changes that have already occurred—in business, in demographics, in values, in technology or science—and then to look at them as opportunities. It also requires them to abandon rather than defend yesterday—something that is most difficult for existing companies to do so. “I worked with the Sacramento Fire Department for seven years. We had an eight-week basic firefighter course. We also attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and earned fire science degrees. They have a rather good fire science program. I was fortunate to have started at a very young age in a quite active fire department and had experience in just about every aspect of the fire service. I remember one of those biggest fires that I had ever seen. I was on the first ladder, second alarm. Two spectators and a fire policeman died. The scene was utter chaos. Conditions were deteriorating rapidly. The building was just being taken. It was beyond anything we could ever control. There was a downwind, the fire created more wind, all the characteristics of a conflagration. The thing was made completely out of wood. Our truck company did a lot of repositioning. We set up our aerial ladder and the ladder pipe at the end of the building, then the fire got hotter and hotter and we had to back out. It was amazing, the progress the fire made. It was self-propagating, and we repositioned three times. Rescues were made from ladders, a lot of people were rescued. Our company was at the scene at least thirty-six hours, but others were there a good three or four days. It taught me that firefighting would never be an easy job. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“Before becoming a firefighter, I was already an emergency medical technician. On a typical day, we start by running several miles and then do a series of, let’s say, eight exercises, moving from one to the other. Then it would be classroom session. Then, in the afternoon, drill tower training, more classroom sessions, or actual fire simulation. What was nice about it is that this was Monday through Friday. On weekends I could ride on one of the busier engines or trucks in town. I had to retake emergency medical service training here as part of the program. We have to maintain our EMT status by taking a new test every two years. We put in hours, do a full day of practical work, and then we take the test. It’s an ongoing process.” Not only does the fire department save lives and reduces property loss, but they also prevent harm. Preventing harm covers many areas, including specialized rescue, health and wellness of citizens, and injury prevention. Protecting property includes protecting community resources—people, property, natural resources, the environment, and the community infrastructure—from harm and loss. Also, protecting property includes mitigation of natural and technological disasters. Simply put, preventing fires, injuries, and disease is the most effective means of “preventing harm.” Public education and prevention is of equal importance to fire suppression in the role of the fire service in the community. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department’s mission by making a contribution. Americans love to see America prosper. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Whether you need more space now or in the near future, the Plan 1 is perfect for growing families. Enjoy the modern main living space that makes family meals or having company over a breeze.
It’s easy to stay organized with ample storage throughout. Upstairs are the owner’s suite, additional bedrooms, and a loft that could be used as a play area or study.
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 