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We Are Not a Homebuilder—What We Sell is a Lifestyle!
Individual success does not serve oneself but enables one to build up the greater good. Our relationship with the people around us has lasting significance. That same sociality which exists among us here in mortality will exist among us there in eternity, only it will be coupled with eternal glory. A community that strengthens itself has much more capacity to help other communities. There is no separation between you and your neighbour. Your well-being is tied to your neighbour’s well-being. Heaven’s essence is made up of relationships. The withdrawal of federal support, while a major blow, did not totally destroy the idea of new towns as an expression of the suburban dream. Several privately financed new towns managed to not only survive, but prosper. Perhaps the best known among these are Reston, Virginia, west of Washington, D.C.; Columbia, Maryland, south of Baltimore on the way to Washington; and Irving Ranch, in southern California. Reston was initiated by Robert E. Simon, who, having just sold Carnegie Hall in New York, had a dream of building an urbane community in the rural Virginia countryside. He wanted a place where people could enjoy both the cosmopolitan advantages of the city and the beauty of rural countryside. Both employment and recreational opportunities were to be found within the community. Mr. Simon purchases some eleven miles of Virginia country side (6,800 acres) west of Washington, D.C., near what was to be the new Dulles Airport. Mr. Simon was more a philanthropist and visionary than a developer, and he refused to sacrifice community planning or his dream of social diversity in order to sell more homes. From the first, Reston had architecturally interesting contemporary homes, something that was alleged to have slowed sales. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Mr. Simon was forced out by Gulf Corporation, which, in turn, sold out Mobil. Reston is now an economically successful town of over 61,150 with a substantial number of corporate offices and other “clean” industries. Where initially most residents had to carpool or take a long bus ride to Washington, today 40 percent of the residents work in the community. Residentially, Reston has a mix of free-standing homes, town houses, and condominiums facing Reston’s four artificial lakes. Reston has had a distinct upper-middle-class-but-involved character. Housing ranges from $800,000-plus homes to government-subsidized apartments. The average home buyer is between thirty and forty years old, has two children, and has an income considerably higher than the national average. (The median household income is $120,396.) Reston has several hundred units of federally subsidized housing, but attempts to place lower-income and high-income housing side by side were abandoned as not being economically sound. Mixed-income housing was a desirable social goal, but Reston is a profit-making enterprise. Columbia, Maryland, some twenty miles north of Washington, was developed by James Rouse, one of the nation’s most respected developers. Mr. Rouse managed quietly to buy or option some twenty-two square miles of land from 169 separate owners before plans for Columbia were revealed in 1963. Architecturally, Columbia looks more like a suburb than Reston, since builders of Columbia’s various sections were given a free hand to build their most popular home models. The community has some 104,726 persons living in eight villages, and Columbia is close to meeting is goal of housing some 110,000 people on its 15,600 acres. The investment in the community totals over $3 billion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Like most new towns, Columbia is organized into neighbourhoods of some 900 houses having their own elementary school, swimming pool, recreational center, and convenience store. Four neighbourhoods are combined to create a “village” of 3,500, which has an intermediate school and a small plaza including a number of shops and a supermarket. Wooded areas and pathways run throughout the village. Columbia is racially integrated, with over one-quarter of the residents being African America. Economically, although there are subsidized units, the community is middle-to upper-middle class. Irvine, California began in the 1960s with a dedication to create a new town of 100,000 on garden city principles around a new University of California campus. It was designed without a downtown, but rather, it was to have shopping centers and business parks intermixed within what is primarily a residential community of single-family homes. Irvine from the firs was o be a geographically dispersed community. The Irvine family owned some 64,000 acres of ranch land and orange groves, which meant Irvine would cover nine times the land space of Reston, or four times that of Columbia. All the land was owned by the Irvine family and is successor, the Irvine Company. The company had a strong commitment to architectural design, a high level of amenities, and controls over the use of the landscape. Irvine was incorporated as a city in 1971. However, Irvine, unlike its east coast siblings, had little interest in racial or income diversity. Simon and Rouse each had a strong personal and corporate commitment to creating communities with population diversity. Irvine executives and planners had no interest in proving subsidized or lower-income housing. From the first, Irvine was designed to be an expensive and elitist community. Low-income or even middle-income housing and residents have been rigorously excluded. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

In recent years Irvine residents have voted for controlled growth and to protect the coast from development. In this, residents were opposed by the Irvine Company. Rapid suburban growth is not welcomed by the existing homeowners. Irvine offers a high quality of life to is residents, but the benefits are restricted to those with substantially above-average income or wealth. As such, Irvine is not a reasonable new town model for the rest of the country. Some, in fact, argue that Irvine Ranch is not self-contained and self-sustaining new town, but rather simply a well-designed upper-income suburb. Regardless, problems of land acquisition coupled with now more restrictive environmental and planning regulations make it difficult to build new private projects of such size. Today the idea of the planned community is undergoing a bit of a renaissance. This is not occurring as a consequence of government policy or action. Rather, new communities are being developed that are essentially privatized communities. They are new suburban full-service communities. One version of this is the community designed to recreate the urban village. The ideal is to create a reasonable-cost community that is not just another subdivision, but has employment opportunities and a sense of place. One of these new communities is Rancho Santa Marguerita, in south California. Being able to live near one’s employment substantially cuts commuting time, which, in the Los Angeles basin, can take an hour and a half each way. The most discussed new communities are the so-called neotraditional new developments. These are contemporary communities that are being designed for both mixed usage and walking, rather than solely automobile usage. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Neotraditional planners design in both higher densities and mixed land usage in order to both reduce the need for auto travel and increase the sense of community. The developers consciously are trying to design in the advantages and mood of earlier eras. Their model for an ideal livable community is the nineteenth-century small town, with is dense intermixture of small shops and homes. Thus, some of the most commented upon, and debated, new community developments at the start of the twenty-first century are being built to approximate the character and amenities of the small town or village of over a century ago. Master plan codes that call for separate shopping and housing pods are discarded in favour of designing on a more intimate scale a community that is both comfortable and interesting to the local residents. Certainly there is something both inviting and comforting about towns like this. Seaside, Florida, Masshipee, on Cape Cod, and, less successfully, Princeton Forrestal Village, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, are examples of such attempts to repeat the nineteenth-century model of providing an inviting, livable, and walkable public environment, Forrestal Village is currently trying to recast itself as a factory outlet mall. The fastest growing type of new community now being built is the retirement community. This is not surprising since anyone who reads a newspaper or pays Social Security knows that elderly are the fastest growing segment of the population. Every day in the United States of America, some 10,000 people turn 65, and the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades and represent over 20 percent of the population by 2050. The elderly currently constitutes 15.2 percent of the population. The population age 65 and over numbers more than 50 million in 2021. More than 50 percent of the elderly live in the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
More older Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities or rural areas. Some of the retirement communities are explicitly designed and advertised as such, while others are simply developments in recreational areas with lots of golf courses or a good fishing lake. Growth is taking place even in locations that are not true retirement areas. For example, Peachtree City, in fast-growing Fayette, Georgia grew from 2,000 residents to 22,000 in 1990 and now has a population of 114,421. The postwar assumption that suburbs were for young couples and their children is another out-of-date myth. The assumption long has been that as those who moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s aged, they would sell their homes and move back into city apartments or condominiums. By and large, this has not occurred. The elderly are choosing to remain in the suburban homes they have occupied for decades. People are remaining in their suburban homes after the children leave, and even after their spouses die. This has resulted in suburbs being better integrated by age than anytime in the past fifty years. It also means that since most of the suburban elderly are not segregated in specific areas, it is more difficult to provide for their needs such as access to social services and public transportation. If an elderly widow or widower has restricted mobility and is no longer able to drive, one can become isolated. Retirement communites have a minimum age limit of fifty-five for buyers. Younger people are excluded. What retirement communities sell is far more than housing; it is a life of golf, bowling, and crafts that is literally walled off from outside problems. Resident status in retirement communities commonly is limited to couple where one spouse is at least fifty-five years of age. Young people are kept at a minimum by community regulations that ban other then short-term stays by adult children or other guests under the mandatory age. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Young children or grandchild are not welcome on other than a visiting basis. They cannot reside in the community. Such regulations not only maintain the homogeneity of the community, they also keep taxes low, since by banning young people, homeowners ensure they will not have to pay for building or staffing local schools or other expensive public services usually found in similar-size communities. These communities, isolated from urban areas, are insulated both from urban problems and from the responsibility to pay taxes for services to those not within the walled community. Community homogeneity also includes race. Non-European American residents are a rarity in retirement homeowner communities. This secure and nonthreatening environment has a particular appeal to some fixed-income middle- or lower-middle-class retirees. Many of these communities offer their residents a predictable and safe World of golf and crafts free from the problems, confusion, and variety that is a part of life outside the entrance gates. Problems, and the cost of paying for them, are kept outside. While the number of such retirement communities is growing, they have an appeal only to a minority of all elderly. While retirees seek to limit their taxes, it is a mistake to think of areas with heavy retirement-age populations as areas of economic decline. Just the opposite is the case. Economically, places with fast growing elderly populations are often better-off and healthier markets than those with slow-growing elderly populations. Elderly in-movers may not be employed, but the average retirement migrant household’s overall impact on the local economy is $139,610.81. Retirees bring economic resources and create new jobs. Estimates of the new jobs created by each retired in-mover range from one-third to one for each newcomer. Retirement communities, in addition to having community centers, often include internal commercial districts that are designed to offer a range of products and services especially designed to fill the need of older buyers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Oftentimes, extensive medical facilities are available, and one or more private hospitals is nearby the retirement community. Increasingly, retirement communities also include living environment for aging residents who can no longer independently manage a home and require assistance ranging from semi-independent to nursing home care. Continuing-care facilities are increasingly being built into new retirement developments. It is virtually certain that boomers will be less able to rely on Social Security than past generations of retirees. On the other hand, they will inherit from their parents more substantially than any generation in history. The ethnic and racial diversity of retirement communities probably will also increase, reflecting the increasing ethnic and racial diversity of the country. Boomer retirement communities might also carry forward their reputed competitiveness and status-seeking behaviour. This would result in retirement communities being far more competitively organized in terms of sports and even craft than is the case with current retirees who reflect more of the “togetherness” approach they practiced in the early postwar suburbs. In any case, it is highly likely that boomers, who in many ways throughout their lives have defined themselves as a separate group, are likely to have their own distinctive “sixty something” retirement communities. The recent decades have seen North American transformed into a suburban continent. Suburbia is not only where most of us live, it is also where most of us shop, go out to eat, and catch a movie. It is also where most of us work. Overall, these changes have been accepted and even celebrated by suburbanites and lamented by architectural and social critics. Regardless, the suburban transformation is now clearly a social fact. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Whatever one thinks about the suburbs is no longer sub. Outer cities may sprawl over the landscape, but they contain all the functions of the older downtowns. Although it twists the language a bit, they have become outlying “central places” in their own right. Whether the outer cities are called edge cities, polynucleated cities, or technoblurbs, these outlying “urbs” now house more shopping malls, manufacturing plans, and business offices than do the traditional central downtowns. The downtown retail outlets essentially suburbanized to the malls during the 1970s, leaving only skeletal remains in the once-dominant cores. The 1980s saw the dramatic proliferation of suburban office and manufacturing complexes—such that today, outer cities surpass most central cities in total business activity. Transportation, and especially communication technologies, no longer favour centralization over dispersion. FAX machines, the Internet, Email, Video calls, and text messages work equally well from suburban and urban locations. The reality is that the major action is in the suburbs. Suburbs will continually for the foreseeable future increase their dominance. In spite of the hopes of some, research has established that nationwide urban gentrification will be of the limited scope and, moreover, the much-discussed back-to-the-city movement is actually not occurring. The myth of a substantial back-to-the-city movement, and that of incipient massive central-city gentrification, were largely creations of the popular media. Census or other data do not support the thesis that either cities or rural areas are making a strong comeback. Both continue to lose both population and economic strength to suburban areas. Central cities and rural places have become the edges which are losing to the suburban middle ground. Suburbia has become the American Way of Life. It is already the life most of us live. And in spite of our laments for the central city, we do not want to give up the personal advantages of suburban living. The twenty-first century is the age of the suburb, and departing the city. North American is increasingly dominated by a pax suburbia. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Children, meanwhile, will also be likely to grow up differently in the electronic cottage, if for no one reason than that they will actually see work taking place. First Wave children, from their first blink of consciousness, saw their parents at work. Second Wave children, by contrast—at least in recent generations—were segregated in schools and divorced from real work life. Most today have only the foggiest notion of what their parents do or how they live while a work. One possibly apocryphal story makes the point: An executive decides to bring his son to his office one day and to take him out to lunch. They boy sees the plushy carpeted office, the indirect lighting, the elegant reception room. He sees the fancy expense-account restaurant with its obsequious waiters and exorbitant prices. Finally, picturing their home and unable to restrain himself, the boy blurts out: “Daddy, how come you are so rich and we are so poor?” The fact is that children today—especially affluent children—are totally divorced from one of the most important dimensions of their parents’ lives. In an electronic cottage kids not only observe work, they may, after a certain age, engage in it themselves. Second Wave restrictions on child labour—originally well-intentioned and necessary, but now largely an anachronistic device to keep young people out of the crowded job market-become more difficult to enforce in the home setting. Certain forms of work, indeed, might be specially designed for youngsters and even integrated with their education. (Anyone who underestimates the capacity of even very young people to understand and cope with sophisticated work has not run into the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys who serve, probably illegally, as “salesmen” in California computer stores. I have had kids with braces still on their teeth explain the intricacies of home computing to me.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The alienation of youth today flows in large measure from being forced to accept a nonproductive role in society during an endlessly prolonged adolescence. The electronic cottage would counteract this situation. In fact, integrating young people into work in the electronic cottage may offer the only real solution to the problems of high youth unemployment. This problem will grow increasingly explosive in many countries in the years ahead, with all the attendant evils of juvenile crime, violence, and psychological immiseration, and cannot be solved within the framework of a Second Wave economy except by totalitarian means—drafting young people, for example, for war or forced service. The electronic cottage opens an alternative way to bring youth back into socially and economically productive roles, and we may see, before long, political campaigns for, rather than against, child labour, along with struggles over the necessary measures to protect them against gross economic exploitation. To be sure, Dr. Freud was not the first to discover the phenomenon that we habour thoughts and strivings which we are not aware of—that is to say, which are unconscious—and live in a hidden life in our psyche. However, Dr. Freud was the first to have made this discovery the center of his psychological system and he investigated unconscious phenomena in the greatest detail, with astonishing results. Basically Dr. Freud dealt with a discrepancy between thinking and being. We think one thing, for instance that our behaviour is motivated by love, devotion, sense of duty, et cetera, and we are not aware that instead it is motivated by the wish for power, masochism, dependency. Dr. Freud’s discovery was that what we think is not necessarily identical with what we are; that what a person thinks of oneself may be, and usually is, quite different or even completely in contradiction to what one really is, that most of us live in a World of self-deception in which we take our thoughts as representing reality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

In fact the historical importance of Dr. Freud’s concept of the unconscious is that in a long tradition thinking and being were supposed to be identical and in the stricter form of philosophical idealism only the though (the idea, the word), was real, while the phenomenal World had no reality of its own. There seems to be a good deal of evidence that the belief in the superiority of the idea and the thought over material reality was a result of the victory of the patriarchal over the matriarchal system. Since men cannot create naturally, that is to say give birth in a natural way as women can, they insist that they can also give birth, not by their wombs but by their brains. Dr. Freud, by reducing a great deal of conscious thought to the role of a rationalization of drives, tended to destroy the foundations of the rationalism of which he was himself such an outstanding exponent. With his discovery of the discrepancy between thinking and being, Dr. Freud not only undermined the Western tradition of idealism in its philosophical and popular forms, he also made a far-reaching discovery in the field of ethics. Until Dr. Freud, sincerity could be defined as saying what one believed. Since Dr. Freud, this is no longer the definition. The difference between what I say and what I believe assumes a new dimension, namely that of my unconscious belief or my unconscious striving. If in pre-Freudian time a man was convinced that he punished his child because it helped the child’s development he would have been quite honest, as long as he really believed that. After Dr. Freud the critical question has become whether his belief is not simply a rationalization of his sadistic wishes—that is to say, that he has pleasure in beating the child and only uses as a pretext the idea that such punishment is for the benefit of the child. In fact one might ethically prefer the one who is at least honest enough to admit one’s real motive; one would not only be more honest but less dangerous. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

There is no kind of cruelty and viciousness which has not been rationalized individually or in history as being motivated by good intentions. Since Dr. Freud, the sentence I meant well has lost its function as an excuse. Meaning well is one of the best rationalizations for acting badly, and nothing is easier than to persuade oneself of the validity of this rationalization. There is a third result of Dr. Freud’s discovery. In a culture like ours in which words play a tremendous role, the weight given to them often serves to neglect, if not to distort, experience. If somebody says, “I love you” or “I love God” or “I love my country,” one utters words which, in spite of the fact that one fully believe in their truth, may be utterly untrue and nothing but a rationalization of the person’s wish for power, success, fame, money or an expression of one’s own dependence on one’s group. There might not be—and usually there is not—any element of love involved. Dr. Freud’s discovery is not yet so generally accepted that people are instinctively critical of statements of good intentions or stories of exemplary behaviour, nevertheless the fact is that Dr. Freud’s theory is a critical theory, as Marx’s was. Dr. Freud did not accept statements at face value; he looked at them skeptically even when he did not doubt the conscious sincerity of the person speaking. However, conscious sincerity means relatively little within the whole of somebody’s personality structure. Dr. Freud’s great discovery, with its fundamental philosophical and cultural consequences, was that of the conflict between thinking and being. However, he restricted the importance of his discovery by assuming that essential what is repressed is awareness of immature desires and strivings and that the conflict between thinking and being is essentially that between thinking and immature desires of pleasures of the flesh. This restriction is not surprising. However, impulses for pleasures of the flesh very often do not owe their presence or intensity to the physiological substratum of sexuality, on the contrary, they are very often the product of entirely different impulses which in themselves are not sexual. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Thus a source of desires of pleasures of the flesh can be one’s narcissism, one’s sadism, one’s tendency to submit, plain boredom; and it is well know that power and wealth are important elements in arousing desires for pleasures of the flesh. In recent times, it has become obvious hat in the culture of the cities, sexuality is not the main object of repression. Since mass humans are dedicated to becoming a Homo consumnes, pleasures of the flesh have become one of the main articles of consumption (and in fact one of the cheapest) creating the illusion of happiness and satisfaction. The conflict o be observed in humans, between conscious and unconscious strivings, are diverse. “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth,” reports Colossians 3.2. Programming your mind for success involves choosing to expect good things to happen to you. When starting off your day, set your mind in a righteous direction. “Open my heart to Your law, O Lord God,” reports 2 Maccabi 1.4. Start your day with faith and determination to walk in God’s commandments. Appreciate the outrageousness that God wants to show you with blessings, and let your memory prompt you with the reminder to give God thanks. God wants you to get your hopes up. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” reports Hebrews 11.1. One definition of that sort of hope is confident expectancy. We can confidently expect the favour of God. Have the full knowledge and wherewithal to thank God for His gifts. The number of gifts God has blessed us with his overwhelming. Start anticipating doors of opportunity to open for you, and be ready to rise above life’s challenges. Everything we have in our souls and bodies and whatever we possess, exteriorly or interiorly, naturally or supernaturally, these are God’s gifts, and they reveal God as a generous, even an extravagant, giver. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
However, why should one be surprised? God usually meets our expectancy. Just about everything we have comes from God. One person may receive rather more and another rather less, but all the gifts are God’s. Without God not even the smallest gift can be given or gotten. Your expectations will set the boundaries for your life and that is why so many people try to belittle others. They want them to expect less from life and have less. Bullies exhibit a defensive, self-aggrandizing form of self-esteem. Those with genuine self-esteem—who feel secure self-worth without seeking to be the center of attention or being angered by criticism—are more often found defending the victims of bullying. When feeling securely good about ourselves, we are less defensive. We therefore nurture others’ growing by being genuine (open and honest regarding our own feelings), by being empathic (listening with a reflective understanding of others feelings), and by being accepting—by offering unconditional beneficial regard. What better definition of grace than the unconditional beneificial regard—knowing someone as one truly is and the person nonetheless. As persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude towards themselves. Stop looking at everything you have lost and start looking at all that you have. Believe that things are going to change for the better, not because you deserve it, but simply because God loves you that much! Self-acceptant is linked to low prejudice. Affirm people, and they will evaluate other groups more beneficially. Threaten their self-esteem, and they will seek to restore it by putting others down. Optimistic thoughts about one’s potential also pays dividends. Those who believe they can control their own destiny, who have what researchers in more than a thousand studies have called internal locus of control, achieve more, make more money, and are better able to cope with problems. Believe that things are beyond your control and they probably will be. Believe that you can do it, and maybe, just maybe, you will. #RandolphHarrs 15 of 17

Dwell on the goodness of God. Fill your mind with thoughts of hope, faith, and victory. Develop a fresh vision, and expect things to change for the better, and sure enough that will happen. Remember, your actions will follow your expectations. Low expectations will trap you in mediocrity; high expectations will motivate you and propel you to move forward in life. However, raising your expectations takes active work. You must be willing to challenge yourself and think optimistic thoughts. Believe that you will have an abundance of blessings, favour, and happiness. If you can see it, then you can be it. If you can visualize it in your heart and mind, seeing it through the screen of God’s Words with your “spiritual eyes,” it can become a reality in your life. God is extremely interested in what you see through your spiritual eyes. Oppressed people—and even people who passively receive well-intentioned nursing-home care—decline more rapidly than do those who are encouraged to exert personal control over their environment. If your mind can conceive it and your heart can believe it, know that you can achieve it. Additional studies indicate that when people undertake challenging tasks and succeed, their feelings of self-efficacy are strengthened. For example, people who are helped to conquer an animal phobia may subsequently become less timid and more self-directed and venturesome in other areas of life. The key to self-efficacy is not merely optimistic self-talk, but actual mastery experiences—tackling realistic goals and achieving them. It is a spiritual principle as well as a psychological fact: We move toward what we see in our minds. When you look into your future, what do you see? Do you see yourself getting stronger, healthier, and happier? Is your life filled with God’s blessings, favour, and victory? If you truly hope for it to come to pass, you must begin to see it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The finest workers in stone are not copper or steel tools, but the gentle touches of air and water working at their leisure with a liberal allowance of time. Advocates of cognitive behaviour therapy are even more optimistic about the power of optimistic thinking. Such therapy aims to reverse the negative, self-defeating thinking that underlies difficulties such as depression. It trains people to see how their negative interpretations make them depressed and to reserve their negative self-talk. Additional studies on intrinsic motivation, or achievement motivation, on the importance of perceived choice in studies of action produced attitude change, and on the phenomenon of reactance (a motive to restore one’s freedom when feeling coerced) further testify to the benefits of believing in our own possibilities. These studies also put the mainstream of recent psychological research squarely behind conceptions of human freedom, dignity, and self-control. The moral of all these research literatures is that people benefit from experiences of freedom and from being able to view themselves as free creatures rather than as pawns of external forces. Lord, please help me to see with my “spiritual” eyes, seeing not merely those things that currently exist, but those things that can become realities in my life. Why climb a mountain? Look! a mountain there. I do not climb mountain. Mountain climb me. Mountain is myself. I climb on myself. There is no mountain nor myself. Something moves up and down in the air. My words are tied in one with the great mountains, with the great rocks, with the great trees, in one with my body and my heart. Do you all help me with supernatural power, and you, Day and you, Night! All of you see me one with this World. Please save us, we beseech Thee. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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No single element in a personality can be understood without understanding the whole, and no single element can be changed without changes occurring, even to a minute degree, in other elements of the system. However, in merely describing the scientific method of a thinker, one does not necessarily mean that one was correct in one’s results. Indeed, the history of scientific thought is a history of pregnant errors. “Unconscious homosexuality” is one of the best examples of people being motivated by the opposite of what they think they are motivated by. The analyst, to show that one looks beneath the surface, may suggest that the individual suffers from unconscious homosexuality. Assuming the individual has a very intense heterosexual life, it will be argued that this very intensity helps to repress an unconscious homosexuality. Or assuming the individual has no sexual interest whatsoever in persons of one’s own gender, the argument will be that this complete absence of homosexual interest is a proof of the repression of homosexuality; that if a human praises the colour of another man’s tie, it is prima facie evidence of his unconscious homosexuality. The trouble of course is that with this method the absence of homosexuality can never be proven and not rarely analysis has continued for years in search of unconscious homosexuality for which there is no evidence at all except from the basic assumption that anything might mean the opposite of its overt meaning. This habit has had disastrous results because it permits a degree of arbitrariness in interpretation which often leads to completely erroneous conclusions. Something can mean its very opposite, but this something has to be proven because one can always claim that if something is not what it says, it is the opposite, and thus it is easy to manipulate thinking for one’s own dogmatic purposes. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

The first and most important maxim of legitimate or popular government, that is to say, of a government that has the good of the populace for its object, is therefore, as I have said, to follow the general will in all things. However, to follow the general will one must know it, and, above all, properly distinguish it from the private will, beginning with oneself: a distinction that is always most difficult to make and only the most sublime virtue is capable of shedding enough light on it. Since one must be free in order to will, another no less formidable difficulty is how to secure both the public liberty and the authority of the government. Examine the motives that have brought humans, united by their mutual needs in the large society, to unite themselves more closely be means of civil societies. You will find no other motive than that of securing the goods, life and liberty of one of their number without infringing on the liberty of others? And how can the public needs be attended to without altering the private property of those who are forced to contribute to it? Whatever sophisms one uses to whitewash all this, it is certain that I am not longer free if someone can constrain my will, and that I am no longer master of my estate if someone else can get one’s hands on it. This difficulty, which must have seemed insurmountable, was removed with the first inspiration which taught humans to imitate here below the immutable decrees of the divinity. By what inconceivable art could one have found the means to place humans in subjection in order to make them free? To use the goods, the manual labour, even the very life of all its members in the service of the state without forcing them and without consulting them? #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

To bind their will by their own consent? To force them to punish themselves when they do what they did not want to do? How is it possible that they obey and no one commands, that they serve and have no master, and yet are actually more free because, under what appears to be subjection, no one loses any one’s liberty except what can be harmful to the liberty of another? These wonders are the work of the law. It is to the law alone that humans owe justice and liberty. It is this healthy tool of the will of all which reestablishes as a civil right the natural equality among humans. This is the Heavenly way that dictates to each citizen the precepts of public reason, and teaches one to act in accordance with the maxims of one’s own judgment and not to be at odds with oneself. It is also with this voice alone that leaders should speak when they command; for no sooner does a human claim, independently of the laws, to subject another to one’s private will, than one at once leaves the laws, to subject another to one’s private will, than one at once leaves the civil state, and, in relation to the other human, places oneself in the pure state of nature, where obedience is never prescribed except out of necessity. The leader’s most pressing concern, as well as one’s most indispensable duty, is therefore to keep watch over the observance of the laws of which one is the minister, and upon which all one’s authority is based. If one must make others observe them, then a fortiori one ought to observe them oneself, since one enjoys all their favour. For one’s example is so powerful that even if the populace were willing to allow one to free oneself from the yoke of the law, one ought to avoid taking advantage of such a dangerous prerogative—a prerogative others would in turn try to usurp, and often to one’s disadvantage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

At bottom, since all the commitments of society are reciprocal in nature, it is impossible to put oneself outside the law without renouncing its advantages, and no one owes anything to someone who claims to owe nothing to anyone. For the same reason, no exception found the law will ever be accorded for any reason whatever in a well policed government. Even the citizens who are most deserving of something from the homeland should be rewarded with honours but never with privileges. For the republic is on the verge of is ruin at the very moment someone can think it is a fine thing not to obey the laws. However, if the nobility or the military or some other order within the state were ever to adopt such a maxim, everything would be irretrievably lost. The power of the laws depends even more on the ministers’ wisdom rather than on their severity, and the public will draws its greatest weight from the reason which dictated it. It is for this reason that Plato regards it as a very important precaution always to place at the beginning of an edict a well-reasoned preamble which shows their justice and usefulness. In effect, the firs of the laws is to respect the laws. Harshness of punishments is merely a vain expedient dreamed up by small minds to substitute terror for the respect they cannot obtain. It has always been remarked that the countries where punishments are the most severe are also those where they are the most frequent, so that the cruelty of punishment is indicative of nothing but he multitude of lawbreakers, and when everything is punished with equal severity, those culpable are forced to commit crimes to escape punishment for their faults. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

However, although the government is not the master of the law, it is not an insignificant thing o be is guarantor and to have a thousand ways of making people love it. The talent for reigning consists of nothing else but this. When one has force at hand, there is no art to making everyone tremble and not even very much to winning over people’s hearts, for experience has long taught the populace to be deeply grateful to its leaders for all the evils they do no do to it and to worship them when not despised by its leaders. An imbecile can, like anyone else, punish crimes; the real statesman knows how to prevent them. One extends one’s venerable rule over wills even more than over actions. If one could bring it about that everyone behaved correctly, one oneself would have nothing left to do, and the masterpiece of one’s works would be to remain at one’s ease. At least it is certain that the greatest talent of leaders is to disguise their power in order to render it less odious and to manage the state so peacefully that it seems to have no need of managers. I conclude therefore that just as the legislator’s first duty is to conform the laws to the general will, the first rule of the public economy is that the administration should be in conformity with the laws. This will be sufficient even to keep the state from being poorly governed, if the legislator has paid the attention one should to everything that is required by the locale, climate, soil, mores, and surrounding areas, and all the relationships one has had to institute which were peculiar to the populace. This is not to say that there does not still remain an infinity of administrative and economic details that are left to the wisdom of the government. However, it always has two infallible rules of behaving correctly in these occasions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

The one is the spirit of the law which should help decide cases the law could not have foreseen. The other is the general will, source and supplement of all the laws and which ought always be consulted for want of them. How, I will be asked, does one go about knowing the general will; because this means is unworkable for a large populace; because it is rarely necessary when the government is well intentioned. For the leaders know very well that the general will is always on the side most favourable to the public interest, that is, the most equitable, so that it is necessary simply to be just to be assured of following the general will. Often, when this is flouted too openly, it makes its presence known despite the terrible restraint of the public authority. I look as close to home as I can for examples to follow in such a case. In China, the prince has as an unshaking maxim that one should side against one’s officials in every dispute that raises between them and the populace. Is bread expensive in one province? The intendant of that province is thrown in prison. Is there a civil disturbance in another? The governor is dismissed and each mandarin answers with one’s life for all the unpleasantness that takes place in one’s department. This is not to say that there is no subsequent examination of the affair in a regular trial. However, long experience has made the judgement thus to be anticipated. One rarely has any injustice to rectify in this; and the emperor, convinced that public clamour never arises without cause, always discerns among the seditious cries one punishes, some just grievances that one remedies. It is no mean feat to have made peace and order reign in all parts of the republic; it is not small matter that the state is tranquil and the law is respected. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

However, if one does nothing more, the government would have a difficult time making itself obeyed if it limits itself to obedience. If it is good to know how to use humans as they are, it is better still to turn them into what one needs them to be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates to the inner part of a human and is exerted no less on one’s will than on one’s actions. It is certain in the long run people are what the government makes them. Warriors, citizens, humans when it so wishes; rabble and riff-raff when it so pleases. And every prince who belittles his subjects dishonours oneself by showing that one did not know how to turn them into something worthy of respect. Therefore train humans if you want to command them. If you want the laws obeyed, make them beloved, so that to get humans to do what they should, they need only consider that they ought to do it. That was the great art of governments of old, in those remote times when philosophers gave laws to the peoples, and merely used their authority to make them wise and happy. From this same the many sumptuary laws, the many regulations concerning mores, the many public maxims accepted or rejected with the greatest of care. Even the tyrants did not forget this important part of administration, and they took as many pains in corrupting the more of their slaves as did the magistrates in correcting the mores of their fellow citizens. However, our modern governments, which are under the impression they have done all there is to do when they have raised money, never imagine it to be either necessary or possible to go that far. When modern writers talk of the Resurrection, they usually mean one particular moment—the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus Christ a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and sceptics chiefly try to impugn. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
However, this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes of the Resurrection would have astonished the earliest Christian teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection, they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of them had, some of them had not. It had no more importance than any of the other appearances of the risen Jesus Christ—apart from the poetic and dramatic importance which the beginnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the six or seven weeks that followed His death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so but on one occasion twelve of them saw Him together, and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St. Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians, id est, in about 55 A.D. The “Resurrection” to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of having risen; a state, as they held, attested by intermittent meetings during a limited period (except for the special, and in some ways different, meeting vouchsafed to St. Paul). This termination of the period is important, for, as we shall see, there is no possibility of isolating the doctrine of the Resurrection from that Ascension. “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth,” reports Colossians 3.2. This is a new dimension of consciousness, where it is coming to itself, demesmerized from the limitation imposed upon the ego. In that moment humans have come to oneself. Before then one has been dwelling in alien things, in one’s passions, one’s thoughts, one’s emotions, and one’s desires. In this ecstatic mental silence, the personal will is given up, the impersonal Overself is given mastery. One’s personal identity is taken away for a while, to be replaced by a higher one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

To be born again, in the sense that Jesus Christ used this phrase when speaking to Nicodemus, means to leave the ego’s limited and outward awareness for the Overself’s infinite and inward awareness. Within the ego’s life there comes to birth another, utterly dissimilar and outwardly unnoticeable. It tis literally a going out of one’s little self into the liberating enlightening Overself. The search is at an end. The Overself has come toward us even as we went blindly toward It. In that blessed moment, one sinks one’s identity into Reality which one has reached. “One must then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that one (Jesus) must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. However, when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, He rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ He said. ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of humans.’ Then He called the crowd to him along with His disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, one must deny oneself and take up the cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save one’s life will lose it, but whoever loses one’s life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a human to gain the whole World, yet forfeit one’s soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of one when He comes in His Father’s glory with the Holy Angels,’” reports Mark 8.31-38. Creating a blueprint in your mind for success does not happen without effort. One must choose and believe that good things will happen. O Jesus Christ, Splendour of Eternal Glory, Solace of the Wandering Soul, when I am with You, my loquacious mouth loses its eloquence, leaving only my silence to speak to You. However, when I am not with You, I feel I must speak up. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Come, my Fleet-footed if Flat-arched Friend, come! Why has it taken You so long to make such a short trip! I am just a verminous pauper huddled in a crumbling doorway, just a shackled prisoner shambling alone on cobbles. Without you, no day, no hour will ever be happy again. Why? Because You are my joy and, besides, without You the conversation grows dull. Only You can lighten up my cell. Only You can restore my freedom. I live only to see Your friendly face turn in my direction. So much for the little prayers of one poor Devout. Others scour the World for You, but they look in all the wrong places. They find everyone else, but they never seem to find You. As for me, in the same interval, I am in just as much of a dither as they. Nothing pleases me either, but here is the difference. The only thing that is likely to please me is You, my God. You are my hope, my salvation. I should keep quiet, I supposed, but I will not. I do not care if I become raucous, obstreperous. I will pray in public until Your grace returns; that is to say, until You return to our chatsworthy place within. When one gets up in the morning, one must focus on the fact that the Lord is here with us, and here He intends to stay. One’s tears and desires, one’s humble soul and contrition of heart, all will turn the Lord toward our little prayers and hasten Him to our side. God is directing our steps. His favour is surrounding us. Goodness and mercy will be on our path. Be excited about the day. Welcome your life in. This glimpse of a state one has never before seen is an effective revelation. For one has now understood, felt, and experienced—lucidly—the exact meaning of that vague word “spiritual.” There is no confusion here of many different and differing cults; the intellect is no presented with contradictory theologies or rival organizational claims. The stillness lifts one to a stratosphere above all such non-sensical choices. Start your day with faith and expectancy, and then go out anticipating good things. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Trust and believe that circumstances will change and make your life easier and more enjoyable. Once you accept Jesus Christ and practice an attitude of gratitude, people will go out of their way to help you. You will be at the right place and the right time and receive your blessings. God wants to help you build your faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” reports Hebrews 11.1. Long have I called You, my Longanimous and Longevitous Lord, and long have I prepare myself, dumping all my Earthly desires into the spittoon. Long will I continue to desire to enjoy Your presence. As I recall, You spotted me long before I saw You. And so what recourse do I have but to bless You, O Lord, for all the mercies You have rained on me, as the Psalmist has said before me (106.45). What more is there for Your servant to do except to huddle profoundly in front of You and remind You of one’s ingrained villainy and vilety? Of all the wonderful people in Heaven and Earth, as the Psalmist has sung (40.5), there is no one like You. Your works are extravagantly good; Your judgements, extraordinarily fair, as the Psalmist has proclaimed (19.9); Your many providences, without bounds. Therefore, all praise and glory to You, O Wisdom of the Father, and may the cacophony of all creation praise You and bless You in chorus! We can confidently expect the favour of God. God usually meets us at our level of expectancy. That is why, in many ways, one’s expectations will set boundaries for one’s life. “According to your faith, be it done to you. Become what you believe,” reports Matthew 9.29. The glimpse gives a human either a revelation or a confirmation that something exists which transcends this ordinary life, that it is holy, beautiful, satisfying, and that one many commune with it. This glimpse is a human’s personal revelation of one’s divine possibilities. It is breath-taking and beautiful. One eagerly seeks its repetition. One will see what one really is—the “I” of everyday experience with the mysterious being behind it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Only when one when one knows one’s ego as it is known in the Overself can a human be truly said to know oneself. The Overself’s light enters the understanding and enables one to perceive what humans like Jesus really meant when they spoke. The divine self reveals itself for a few thrilling moments and then draws back into the void where it dwells. However, the glimpse is enough to tell one that a higher kind of life is possible and that there is a being beyond the ego. The glimpse gives one a slight inking of what the term Overself means. It shows one—not as intellectual idea but as realized fact—something of the ideal toward which one shall strive. It is in these highest moments of indescribable bliss that a human may know what one truly is and how grand is the relationship that one bears to the Infinite Being. It is from such paradoxical moments that one learns both how insignificant one is and how great one is! It is a message of assurance, a communication of knowledge, and a whisper of trust in the Universal Mind. In these few glorious and luminous moments the truth reveals itself, not to the intellect, but to the inner being. With this experience of one’s own divinity, one discovers a meaning in life. Henceforth, one is able to take part consciously in the higher evolution which is inherent in it. Life announces its divine intention only in the deepest, most secret, and most silent part of our being. It is not felt as just another experience only but also as a truth, so illuminative is it. That is what faith is all about. Start believing that good things are coming your way, and they will! Do not allow circumstances or feelings to dull your enthusiasm for life and imprison you in a negative frame of mind. Expect to experience the greatness of God. The glimpse provides assurance that the Soul exists, that God is, that the purpose of human life must include spiritual fulfilment to be complete, and that the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are more enduring and more rewarding than the Bad, the Ugly, the Lie. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Thank You, Father, that You want me to get my hopes up, that You want me to start expecting good things to happen in my life, rather than worrying about what evil might come upon me. Where my faith is weak, please help me to grow stronger so I can trust Your for more and have what my faith expects. Whoever wishes to experiment in healing oneself or others need not be deterred by these provisos from trying to do so. One does not need to be an adept in self-actualization or a sage in philosophy to receive the power of grace. Technically, even the slightest realization of the principle involved may suffice to bring success. For the result is not one’s hands, but God’s. And partly because of this put partly because many physical ailments can be traced to their psychological equivalents in defective character, deep repentance is an additional factor of definite importance in such self-treatment. No human oneself, one’s ordinary self, is a real spiritual healer in the way another human could be a medical, herbal, magnetic, homeopathic, or psychotherapeutic healer. Spiritual healing belongs only in the providence of the Overself. The truth that it is not the ego which is instrumental in the higher forms of healing is made evident to every practising healer throughout one’s career. When Saint Augustine was dying, a sick man came to him and begged to be cured. Augustine replied that if he possessed any powers, he would have used them upon himself. However, the visitor said he had been told in a dream to ask Augustine to cure him by the laying on of hands. The saint yielded and followed the instruction. The man was healed. Yes it is a wonderful feeling, this which accompanies a glimpse of the higher self; but when it is also merged with a knowing, a beneficial perception beyond the need of discussion, interpretation, formulation, or judgement, it gives the philosophical seeker a certitude which is like a benediction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Every human who passes through this experience and holds its memory, verifies for oneself that there is an Infinite Life-Power pervading the entire Universe—also that it is ever present, perfectly wise, and all-knowing. Its point of contact with one is one’s Overself. In that sudden moment of spiritual awareness, or that longer period of spiritual ecstasy, one identified oneself no more with the projection from Mind but with pure Mind itself. In that severance from its projection, the shadow becomes the Sun. During such unforgettable moments the Soul will speak plainly, if silently, to one. It may tell one about one’s true relationship to the Universe and to one’s fellow creatures. It will certainly tell one about Itself. It may separate one from one’s body and let one gaze down upon it as from a height, long enough to permit one to comprehend that the flesh is quite the poorest and least significant part of one. And perhaps best of all it will certainly fill one with the assurance that after one’s return to the World of lonely struggle and quick forgetfulness, It will still remain beside and behind one. If you think in negative terms, you will get negative results. If you think in optimistic terms, you will get beneficial results. That is the simple fact of an astonishing law of prosperity and success. No single truth is every sufficient, because the World is not simple. Any truth separated from its complementary truth is a half-truth. It is true that pride leads to self-sufficient individualism, the taking of credit and displacement of blame, and an intolerance of those “inferior.” However, let us not forget the complementary truth about the benefits of optimistic thinking. Jesus called us to self-denial: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me”; but He did not call us to self-rejection. Far from devaluing our individual lives, He proclaimed their value. Being created in the image of God, we are more valuable than “the birds of the air” and the other animals for whom God cares. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Indeed, God’s valuing of each human life motivated Jesus’ kindness and respect toward those dishonoured in His time—women and children, Samaritans and Gentiles, leprosy victims and fancy women and men, the poor and the tax collectors. Recognizing that our worth is what we are worth to God—an agonizing but redemptive execution on a cross—therefore draws us to a self-affirmation that is rooted in divine love. This assumption of each person’s God given worth and dignity further spawned the idea of universal human rights. Without doubt, such feelings of self-worth pay dividends. People who feel good about themselves—who express a beneficial self-esteem—are generally less depressed, freer of certain ailments and drug abuse, more independent of peer pressure, and more persistent when facing tough tasks. Many clinicians report that underneath much of the human despair and disorder with which they deal is an impoverished self-acceptance, a sense of “I am worthless.” The harp-eyed psychology student will recognize that cause and effect are ambiguous in this correlation between misery and self-rejection. Perhaps miserable experiences cause feelings of worthlessness rather than the other way around. However, experiments not only indicate that inflated self-esteem can underlie conflict and violence, but that a lowered self-image can have negative consequences. Imagine yourself being temporarily deflated by the news that you scored poorly on an intelligence test or that some people you met earlier thought you were unappealing and unattractive. Might you react as experimental subjects often have—by disparaging others or even exhibiting racial prejudice as a way to restore your feelings of self-worth? The defensive, self-righteous pride that feeds contemptuous attitudes can itself be fed by the inner turmoil of self-doubt. People who are made to feel insecure and who therefore have a need to impress others are more likely to make scathing assessments of others’ work than are those who feel secure and comfortable with themselves. Mockery says as much about the mocker as the one mocked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

We saw how, as the Second Wave progressed, the family unit transferred many of its functions to other institutions—education to the school, care of the ill to hospitals, and so on. This progressive stripping away of the functions of the family unit was accompanied by the rise of romantic love. A First Wave person looking for a mate might properly have asked, “Is my proposed spouse a good worker? A good healer? Mentally stable? A good teacher for the children to come? Can we work together compatibly? Will she (or he) carry a full load or prove to be a shirker?” Peasant families actually asked “Is she strong, good at bending and lifting, or is she sickly and weak?” As the functions of the family were hived off during the Second Wave era, those questions changed. The family was no longer a combination of production team, school, field hospital, and nursing home. Instead, its psychological functions became more important. Marriage was supposed to supply companionship, procreation, warmth, and support. Soon this shift in the functions of the family was reflected in new criteria for choosing a mate. They were summed up in the single word love. It was love, the popular culture assured us, that makes the World go round. Of course, real life seldom lived up to romantic fiction. Class, social status, and income continued to play a role in the choice of a mate. However, all such considerations were supposed to be secondary to Love with a capita L. Tomorrow’s rise of the electronic cottage may very well overthrow this single-minded logic. Those who look ahead to working at home with a spouse, instead of spending the main part of their waking lives away, are likely to take more into consideration than simple pleasures of the flesh and psychological gratification—or social status, for that matter. They may begin to insist on Love Plus—pleasures of the flesh and psychological gratification plus brains (as their grandfathers once favoured brawn), love plus conscientiousness, responsibility, self-discipline, or other work-related virtues. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

We may—who knows?—hear some John Denver of the future croon lyrics like: “I love your eyes, your cherry lips, the love that always lingers, your way with words and random blips, your skilled computer fingers.” More seriously, one can imagine at least some families of the future taking on additional functions rather than shedding them and serving as a multipurpose, rather than a narrowly specialized, social unit. With such a change the criteria for marriage, the very definition of love, would be transformed. The social unrest of the 1960s and 2020s, combined with the physical decline of the central cities and disillusionment over the proliferation of low-density suburbs, led American architects, planners, and policymakers to again look at new towns. With the central cities undergoing racial turmoil, financial and spiritual crisis, noise and air pollution, traffic congestion, crime, parking issues, corruption, and social disorganization, there was renewed interest in trying to recreate the older Victorian ideal of community by creating new towns. In a very American way, it was argued that new towns would provide not only new housing, but also a new social start. The postwar British new towns appeared to be social as well as economic successes, and American new towns, it was thought, would allow for the solving of the economic and racial problems of the city without creating more economically inefficient and socially isolated suburbs. As foreseen by urban planners and federal housing officials, new towns would provide a setting for a new beginning of planned communities that would provide the answer to suburban sprawl. New towns would offer both economic success and social justice in an environmentally attractive setting. New towns would give their residents “a second change, a redemption, to live a new life unencumbered by the sins of the past.” As during the Victorian age, the problems of the city were to be solved by abandoning the city and starting over. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The 1970s New Communities Act provided government guarantees for up to $50 million (inflation adjusted for 2021 $352,534,793.10 USD) of each developer’s bonds to finance the building of thirteen new towns. This was because building a new town required heavy front-end outlays for land and infrastructure before even a single house could be built. Private lenders were very reluctant to commit long-term funding to what appeared to be marginal economic ventures. Because of the British experience, it was assumed it would take a decade and a half for new towns to become self-supporting. By 1974 a total of $252 million (inflation adjusted for 2021 $1,398,354,645.03 USD) in federally guaranteed debitures had been issued. The first project to receive federal mortgage guarantees was the new town of Jonathan, to be built in rolling countryside some twenty-five miles southwest of Minneapolis. Jonathan received a guarantee of $21 million (inflation adjusted for 2021 $116,529,553.75 USD), but almost from the start the new town was in serious trouble. What was occurring in Jonathan was typical of the program as a whole. In 1973 the nation was hit with an oil crisis, and suddenly there was no market for homes in distant outer-ring new towns. At this crucial point the Ford Administration announced that all federal monies would be cut off, and new town would be left to sink or survive on their own. None survived, except Woodlands, 30 miles north of Houston. It survived because its developer also had natural-gas holdings. The usual pattern was for HUD to foreclose on the outstanding mortgages on the project, after which what remained would be sold to a private developer. Central-city mayors, far from being supporters of the new towns, were also strong lobbyists against providing funding, believing that money going to new towns would be take from them. They wanted the deferral focus to be on saving the cities, not on looking for alternatives to the city. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

The total training and balanced endeavour of philosophy are enough by themselves to avoid any danger from identification with the body. However, takes an additional precaution against it by introducing the following movements or positions: “I am not this limited body. It is my servant. I am infinite Mind.” That good posture is one of the determinants of a purified body many seem too bold an assertion to be credible even to many who may be able to grant that it is one of the determinants of physical fitness. Let them remember that the spine is the trunk of a tree, the central nerve system, crowned by the brain, the organ of thought. A proper self-respect will of itself straighten the posture and remove the sag in the middle. However, the opposite is just as true. A proper posture will add self-respect to the character. The poise of the head, the posture of the spine, and the functioning of the breath determine every attitude of the whole body. By lowering he center of the body’s gravity in all its activities, whether sitting, waking, or standing, we are raising its ability o obey the will and the mind. Proper posture does not mean stiff poster. The back should be carried as erect as possible. As it is ordinarily and unconsciously carried, the vertebrae are pressed together so that the spinal column is actually shortened. However, as it ought to be carried, they should be pulled away from each other so that the spinal column is actually lengthened. There is a common idea, probably derived from now outdated military drills, that the right posture involves lifting up and throwing back the shoulders and stiffening the knees. This is wrong as it throws too much strain on the body and fatigues the nerves. What the head initiates, the remainder of the body follows. This, in the case of the developed human, is true of what lies inside the head. However, concerning the physical head itself, it is true of all humans, developed and undeveloped. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

The relation of consciousness to the ego expresses itself in the use of the ego. The use expresses itself in the relation between the head and the trunk. Beware of the student’s stoop. The writer whose head is drooped and whose neck is bent by desk work is not in the best posture to generate inspired ideas. This training of the spine has some valuable secondary and incidental results. Although these are connected with the improvement of health and eradication of disease, and as such are not the direct object of the training, their value remains great one for sufferers. For instance, weak and painful backs can be the result of several different causes but one of them is faulty posture when walking. The following way of carrying the torso is bad; drawing the shoulders and chest too far back and pushing he abdomen too far forward. This curves the spine in the wrong direction and unnecessarily throws too much weigh upon it. The spine is so delicately built up it is affected for the worse by the soft beds in which they body sleeps for several hours nightly. A harder surfaced bed is better for it. It is not a necessary accompaniment of spirituality that a human be weak and sickly in body. Those who suffer from spinal troubles or hip diseases should not practise any physical exercises without previous permission from their physician. To see the greatness of a mountain, one must keep one’s distance; to understand its form, one must move around it; at noon and at midnight, in sun and in rain, in snow and in storm, in summer and in winter, and in all the other seasons, one who can see the mountain like this comes near to the life of the mountain. Mountains grow and decay, they breathe and pulsate with life. They attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings the forces of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunderstorms, rains, waterfalls and rivers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Mountains fill their surroundings with active life and give shelter and food to innumerable beings. Such is the greatness of mighty mountains. A glimpse may exalt the human and give one inspiration, but above everything else it attests for one the fact that one is fundamentally Spirit. This is the commonest kind of Glimpse but there is another kind which, in addition to doing these things, opens mysterious doors and provides inlooks to the working of secret laws and occult processes in Nature, the World and the life of the human. This kind of glimpse may fitly be termed “a revelation.” One sees the Universe as one might see a great mosaic picture opening before one. This knowledge best comes to a human by interior revelation rather than by exterior. Thus the existence of a higher possibility for humans, which or ethical sense demands and to which our metaphysical reasoning points, is confirmed at last by our best experience. All that one now experieces will be seen by the glow of is better light, while the memory of all that one experienced in the past, however distressing or vile, will be transmuted into effective educational forms. The light of truth removes the falsities in one’s World view, and diminishes the feebleness in one’s character. It brings one a new strength. One knows that one has a place in the cosmos, that one is part of the World-Idea. Hoshana Rabba calls to mind the colourful and joyous ceremony of the Drawing of Water for the alters of the Temple. On Hoshana Rabba we pray that we may be worthy of God’s sustaining care and that He may confer upon us the bounties of nature. Hence, many prayers of Hoshana Rabba plead for the forgiveness of sin. The Service takes on a solemn character of Yom Kippur. In his mood there is knowledge without thoughts, understanding without words. What goes on within one’s ego could be better seen, and judged, if one could climb above it for a short time. This is just what the glimpse enables one to do. It clears the sight. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood is the newest Cresleigh community coming to Lincoln, CA.
With four distinct floor plans to choose from ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet offering up to five bedrooms, we are sure you’ll find your dream home here at Havenwood. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
Does Not Success Certify Sanity?

Your solicitude in my behalf has been greater than mine in my own behalf. For a Devout like me seems entirely too casual when one does not forward You all in one’s own solicitude; that is the sort of advice Peter offered in his First Letter (5.7). O Lord, while my will is aimed at and locked firm in You, do for me what You feel and think best. For whatever You do for me cannot be anything but good. If You want me to be blanketed in darkness, my blessing to You. If bathed in lightness, my blessing to You also. If You think me worth a quick hug, blessings on Your house. If you think I deserve a swift kick, more blessings on Your house. All of which is to day, whatever the holy day or holly day, may my blessings festoon Your hallowed halls. Lord, I suffer willingly for Your sake whatever You want to lay on me. I wish to accept from Your hand—I do not care what the sequence—good to bad or bad to good, and so on with the sweet and the bittersweet, the happy and the sad, and to give thanks for all the things that happen to me. Please guard me from every sin and neither Death nor Hell will be a stranger to me. In the meantime do not cast me into eternity, as the Psalmist feared would happen to him (77.7); and please do not delete me from the Book of Life; that is the terrible threat, one of many, in Revelation (3.5). Whatever the tribulation laid upon me, it may hurt me now but will not affect me in the long run. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. We must continue to push for the excellence that God has put in our heart. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Do not be satisfied with a little improvement. Instead, believe for better progress, and persevere for God’s best. Jesus Christ descended from Heaven for the purpose of our salvation. He took on our miseries, drawn not by necessity but charity. Why? So that we could learn patience and consider it a not unworthy task to tote some of our temporal miseries ourselves. We must step out of our comfort zone. God has so much more in store as long as we keep pursuing and believing. It does not take any more effort to believe and stay filled with faith than it takes to develop a negative and defeated attitude. However, perhaps some of us are broken. We have been optimistic in the past, but things kept going wrong and crushing our optimism. Maybe unimagined wrongs were heaped upon us and our faith is still rebounding. However, Christ’s Holy Example and the footprints of the Saints have led the way, and because of that, the trudge is made the more bearable even for the weakest among us. That is not to say the Old Testament did not offer some hope and consolation in the regard. However, in those holy pages the Gate of Heaven appeared to be closed. Did it really matter? So few took pains to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, and those that did often found the road to Heaven heavily fogged. Somehow, though, the Just and their friends made it through to the gate, that brazen barrier, but there they had to wait before they could enter. First, O Lord, You had to pay the entrance fee, that is to say, expunge the debt of debts by dying the death of deaths. How can I thank You enough! #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
To show me and all the faithful the right and good way to Your Eternal Kingdom was a gamble on Your part, and as happened, it turned into a gambol on your part. Yes, Your life is our way, and through holy patience we walked toward You, who are our Crown. However, I have to ask, who on Earth would follow You if You had not already charted the path and acted as guide? If we had no had Your astonishing model of spiritual behaviour before us, we would still be milling around on Earth. Up to the time of Your arrival, You know, Humankind was neither hot nor cold about this Heavenly Enterprise. Of course, there were signs along the way, from the Old Dispensation as well as the New (John 12.37). And are not these great illuminations that John spoke of (8.12)? Without them—which is to say, without You, O Lord—would not we still be stumbling around in he dark instead of staggering up toward the light? It does not come easily. People who see their dreams come to pass are people who have some resolve, some internal strength; people who refuse to settle for second best. Nothing may be going my way right now, but I am going to keep drawing closer to God. I am going to trust God to help me expand my horizons and keep believing for all that He has for me will come to fruition. God will help me make it all the way to the Promised Land. Dear Lord in Heaven, I am excited to be on this new journey of faith with you. Please help me to develop a brand-new vision for my life, to believe You for better days ahead, and to know that You will continually expand my horizons as I trust You to do more in and through my life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
If the Lord and Tailor of the Universe had to suffer and die, and if the legions of His saintly followers had to suffer, many of them to the point of martyrdom, then, at the very least, will I not have to suffer, too? The answer is, of course, yes, but as for my so-called sufferings to date, I just might paraphrase the Letter to the Hebrews (12.4). “You have suffered all right, and you have made a great squawk about it, but I do not see one single drop of your precious red blood on the pavement!” Whatever one may have suffered to date, is but a jot, a tittle, a smidge, a skosh, especially when compared to those over the centuries who have been battered so much, tempted so relentlessly, troubled so grievously, twisted and tortured in so many hard and horrid ways. Therefore, one should take another look at the rather grand suffering of others. Why? That one might learn to bear one’s own rather grandiose discomfits. To one they seem mountains; to God, they are molehills. How could this happen? One’s impatience has magnified them out of all proportion. Nevertheless, whether the aching of your soul is small or large, be a good patient; strive to endure them all. There is an advantage to one’s bettering one’s attitude toward battering and getting battered. One will begin to appear sagacious and meritorious not only to oneself, but also to others. There is another advantage. No doubt suffering lays a terrible load on a person, but the proper spiritual attitude lightens the load. That will be especially true in one’s case, what with one’s having so carelessly prepared in one’s mind and body up to this point. That is to say, any adjustment on one’s part is bound to be an improvement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
God created us as visual beings with incredible imagination. “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. However, if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness,” reports Matthew 6.22-23. Unfortunately, many people have a negative vision for their lives. They do not see themselves rising higher or overcoming their obstacles. Consequently, they are limited by their own vision. “He hit me first, and I just do not have the strength to suffer another blow. I think I must be in the wrong walk of life.” “That person brought a serious charge against me, and harried me with all sorts of horrid stuff I could not possibly think up myself! I cannot accept that, and from him of all people! Is that the sort of miserable suffering I am supposed to put up with, O Lord and Tailor of the Universe?” What vapid and insipid thoughts! First, it does not do justice to the virtue of patience or—ahem—to the Person who rewards all patience. Second, all it does is focus attention on your and the garbage that person dumped on you. If one can dictate just how much and at whose hand, one is not really getting serious about suffering. Another, though, is indeed serious about it when one pays no attention to the person wielding the lash. One does not care whether it is one’s superior, one’s peer, or one’s inferior; it can be a good and holy human with knotted cords or just a vulgarian or barbarian with a whip. As much and as often as the Devout encounters rough skating or tough sledding, one gratefully accepts it all as coming from the hand of God; one even counts it not as a loss, but as a substantial gain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
How? Nothing in the presence of Good, however minuscule, however majuscule, as long as it is a step taken for God, can be transacted without an increase in merit. Suffering it is then. If you want to have the victor, ready yourself for battle. If you truly want the crown of patience, wrote Paul in his Second Letter to Timothy (2.5), then engage the Enemy. However, what if you change your mind and do not want to suffer? Then you are in the wrong line of work. However, if you truly want to be a Devout, then you will have to fight manfully, endure vigorously. Without huffing and puffing there is no movement along the road to peace. Without slugging it out there is no decisive victory. Make possible through grace, O Lord, what seems so impossible through nature. Is that not what You promised You would do when the people of Jerusalem asked who would be saved? Luke wrote that You did (18.27). You know what little I can put up with and how quickly I give up, even when it is only a tiny adversity that rears its timorous head. What I should really do is consider every tribulation as a token of affection from You. After all, to suffer a little physically and spiritually is no exactly unhealthy for the soul. The Christian Bible says your eye is the lamp of your body. Obviously, that is not talking about your physical sight; it is talking about what you see through your eyes of faith, your spiritual vision. It is talking about the type of image you are keeping in front of you. God is telling us that if we focus on our problems, on what we cannot do, of if we think we have already reached our limits, then that image of mediocrity will keep us stuck right where we are. It is not because God does not want to promote us; it is simply because we are focused on the wrong things. We are developing the wrong images in our mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
However, if we can learn to look at life through our eyes of faith and see ourselves rising to higher levels, accomplishing our dreams, receiving more blessings, giving assistance to others, becoming more loving, and enjoying life, seeing our family and friends serving God, then we will experience God’s blessings and favour our over lives. We produce what we continually keep in front of us. “Against my better judgment I will confess my injustice,” sang the Psalmist (32.5). And I too shall confess my infirmity, O Lord. Often it is a small thing that jogs me off my strive; it makes me so mad at first, and then I grow sad. To remedy that, I resolve to act more energetically in the future. However, a modest temptation comes along, and I am completely thrown for a loss. Something trivial trips me, and I end up on my face. Just when I recover and think myself safe again—the moment when I least expect it—the briefest wisp whispers me away. Therefore, O Lord, about my humility and fragility, there is nothing new for You to know. Have mercy on me. “Rescue me,” as the Psalmist has had to cry out on more than one occasion “before I am sucked up by the mire,” (69.14). This thrashing about in the muck has got to stop! Yes, it embarrasses me to have to confess one again that I have made no progress. However, when it comes to putting up a front against the passions, I am still so nervous and cowardly. It is not as though I open the floodgates to them, but the leakage in the dikes is so persistent and pervasive that it is driving me crazy. All of which is another way of saying, do lecture me about my infirmity. I need to know, because these foul fantasies are seeping in more quickly than they are draining out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

O Warrior God of America, Shepherd King of the faithful souls, would that You would look at the labour and pain in me, Your slavish Devout, and assist me in everything I put my mind to. Please fortify me with oak and Heavenly Fortitude lest the Old Man the New Testament spoke of—that wretches Flesh not yet fully subjected to the whims of the spirit—be strong enough to tumble me in the hay. Against that one it will certainly be necessary to do battle as long as there is breath in my wretched life. Alas, what kind of life is there where tribulations abound, where everything underfoot is game for the Enemy’s snares? What is it when one tribulation ebbs and another flows? What is it when one conflict has been in full throttle for some time and yet, before it has had a chance to choke, others spring up on the horizon? It is a World without hope? How can life be loved? It has so many bittersweet things about it, so many calamities and miseries. And how can life be called life when it is generated so many deaths and diseases? Even so, a wretched life, or so many people are inclined to think, is better than no life at all. When something goes hideously wrong, the World is frequently blamed. However, for many it is not easily left behind; the concupiscences of the flesh still cling for dear life to the diseased soul. Some things about the World are not so attractive, but others apparently still have some allure. Itching flesh, ogling eyes, luxuriant living; that is as John put it in his First Letter (2.16). However, wherever these are found, pangs and throbs are surely present, turning the World into a playground of hatred and unrest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Depraved Delight, sad to say, has had no such trouble distracting a mind dedicated to the things of this World. Vixen that she is, she has even had the cheek to tell the chickens not to worry. Nor should the rest of Humankind, she says, now that she has got everything under her personal control! Well, I am chuffed! How could this have happened? It could happen only because that poor damaged damsel has neither seen nor tasted the spiritual amenities, that is to say, God in Heaven and God on Earth. We produce what we continually keep in front of us. If we keep an imagine of success in our minds, we are going to move toward success. We must conceive our blessings on the inside through our eyes of faith before they will manifest on the outside. Our vision, what we see, has a tremendous impact on our lives. We benefit by allowing God to use our imaginations to build us up, to help us accomplish our dreams. Devouts, I am rather happy to say, wholeheartedly and wholemindedly condemn he World and strive to live for God under holy discipline. Hence, they are no strangers to the Divine Sweetness promised to all genuine renouncers of the World. These last see quite clearly just how they World has made the Serious Error and, because of it, has disintegrated in a variety of splashy ways. The kind of mental picture we paint is the goal toward which we will move. That image will set the limit for our lives. If one wants to change one’s life, one needs to change the mental image they are creating. Beginning today, I will lift up my head and start to get a new image in my mind of the tremendous potential that God has poured into my life. Please help me, Father, to build a new mental picture of my life, to live with faith, seeing with my spiritual eyes not just what exists today, but the life that is possible because of You. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The word crazy is typical for defining that which is unthinkable. Most people call certain ideas “crazy” because “sane” is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. That which transcends it is crazy in the view of the average person. (This, however, is different when the author, artist, becomes successful. Does not success certify sanity?) That the equality of women was unthinkable to some is hard for many to conceive in the modern World. The concept hat half of humankind is biologically, anatomically and psychically inferior to the other half is a way of thinking that is without the slightest redeeming feature, except as a portrayal of a male-chauvinistic attitude. In the past, however, many people were found to be in acceptance of the extreme form of patriarchalism. The key them is one of control. The psychological concept corresponds to the social reality. Just as socially the majority is controlled by a ruling minority, the psyche is supposed to be controlled by the authority of the ego and superego. The danger of the breakthrough of the unconscious carries with it the danger of a social revolution. Repression is a repressive authoritarian method of protecting the inner and outer status quo. It is by no means the only way to cope with problems of social change. However, the threat of force in keeping down what is “dangerous” is only necessary in an authoritarian system where the preservation of the status quo is the supreme goal. How much renunciation of happiness does the ruling minority in a society need to impose on the majority? The answer lies in the development of productive forces in the society, and hence in the degree to which the individual is necessarily frustrated. Human beings can live harmoniously and without the necessity of controlling sinister forces. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

It goes without saying the antiquated grotesque picture of women as essentially narcissistic, unable to love, and cool towards pleasures of the flesh is male propaganda. The middle-class woman was as rule was cold toward pleasures of the flesh. The proprietary character of bourgeois marriage conditioned them to be cold. Since they were property, they were expected to me “inanimate” in marriage. Only women of the upper class and courtesans were permitted to be objects of pleasures of the flesh (or at least to fake it). No wonder that men experienced lust in the process of conquest; the overevaluation of the “sexual object” which according to some exited only in men (another lack in women!) was, as far as I can see, essentially the pleasure in the chase and the eventual conquest. Once the conquest was assured by the first intercourse, the woman was relegated to the task of producing children and to being an efficient housekeeper. However, is there really a such thing as a “love-object”? Does not the loved person cease to be an object, id est, something outside and opposed to me (same root as to object)? Id not love precisely the inner activity which unites two people so that they cease to be objects (id est, possessions for each other)? To speak of love-objects is to speak of having, with exclusion of any form of being; it is not different from a merchant speaking of capital investment. In the latter case capital is invested, in the former, libido. It is only logical that frequently in psychoanalytic literature one speaks of love as libidinous “investment” in an object. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

It takes the banality of a business culture to reduce the love of God, of men and women, of humankind into an investment. There is also some smallness of the imagination of people whose class considers investment and profit to be the meaning of life. One who speaks of love “objects,” means these beings are directed to being possessions of one’s own ego. Love is sexual energy attached to an object; it is nothing but a psychologically rooted instinct directed toward an object. It is a waste product, as it were, of the biological necessity for the survival of the race. “Love,” in men, is mostly of the “attachment” type, id est, attachment to the persons who have become precious through satisfying other vital needs (eating and drinking). That is, adult love is not different from that of the child; they both love those who feed them. That is undoubted true for many; this love is a kind of affectionate gratitude for being fed. Very well, but to say that is the essence of love is painfully banal. (Some say women cannot arrive at this high achievement because they love “narcissistically,” they love themselves in the other.) Loving in itself, in so far as it is longing and deprivation, lowers self-regard, whereas being loved, having one’s love returned and possessing the loved object raises it once more. Loving, by implying longing and deprivation, lowers one’s self-regard. To those who proclaimed the exaltation and strength which loving gives to the lover, all of you are wrong! Loving makes you weak; what makes you happy is being loved. And what is being loved? Possessing the loved object! This is a classic definition of bourgeois love: owning and controlling makes for happiness, be it material property or be it a human being who, being owned, owes the owner love. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Love begins as a result of the child being fed by mother. It ends in the male’s owning the female who still has to feed him with affection, pleasures of the flesh, and food. Indeed what some are saying is that in between the lines is probably fitting for patriarchal society to have the male remain a dependent creature but denying this by boasting of one’s strength and proving it through making the female his property. The main factors in the patriarch male’s attitude are dependence on the female and its denial by controlling her. Patriarchal male love has transformed a specific phenomenon, that of patriarchal male love into a universal human one. Another significant change has been the growth in the number of those consciously choosing what is coming to be known as a “child-free” lifestyle. We are seeing a massive shift from “child-centered” to “adult-centered” homes. At the turn of the 20th century there were few singles in society, and relatively few parents lived very long after their youngest child left home. Thus must households were, in fact, child-centered. By contrast, as early as 1970 in the United States of America only one in three adults lived in a home with children; and in 2020 that number was 48 percent. Today organizations are springing up to promote the child-free life, and a reluctance to have children is spreading in many industrial nations. In 1960 only 20 percent of “ever-married” American women under age thirty were child-free. As of 2021 49 percent were child-free. A vocal organization, the National Alliance for Optional Parenthood, has arisen to protect the rights of the childless and to combat pronatalist propaganda. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
A similar organization, the National Association for the Childless, has sprouted in Britain, and many couple across Europe are also deliberately choosing to remain childless. In Bonn, Germany, for example, Theo and Agnes Rohl, both in their mid-thirties, he a city official, she a secretary, say “We don’t think we’ll have children.” The Rohls are modestly affluent. They own a small home. They manage a vacation trip to California or Southern France now and then. Children would drastically alter their way of life. “We’re used to our life-style the way it is,” they say, “and we like being independent.” Nor is this reluctance to bear children a sign of capitalist decadence. It is present in Russia, too, where many young Russian couples echo the sentiment of the Rohls and explicitly reject parenthood—a fact that worries Russian officialdom in view of the still-high birth rates among several non-Russian national minorities. Turning now to those with children, the breakdown of the nuclear family is even more sharply evidenced in the spectacular increase in single-parent families. So many divorces, breakups, and separations have occurred in recent years—mainly in nuclear families—that today a staggering one-in-seven American children is raised by a single parent and the number is even high—one in four—in urban areas. The huge growth in such household has brought a growing recognition that despite severe problems, a one-parent household can, under certain circumstances, be better for the child than a nuclear household continually torn by bitter strife. Newspapers and organizations now serve single parents and are heightening their group consciousness and political clout. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Nor, once again, is the phenomenon purely American. In Britain today nearly one family in ten is headed by a single parent—nearly a sixth of them headed by men—and one-parent households form what New Society magazine calls “the fastest growing group in poverty.” A London-based organization, the National Council for One-Parent Families, has sprung up to champion their cause. In Germany, a housing association in Cologne has constructed a special block of apartments for such families and provided them with day-time child care so the parents can work. And in Scandinavia a network of special welfare rights has grown up to support these families. The Swedes, for example, give one-parent households first crack at nursey and day-care facilities. In both Norway and Sweden, in fact, it is sometime possible for a single-parent family to enjoy a higher standard of living than that of the typical nuclear family. A challenging new form of family has arisen in the meantime that reflects the high rate of remarriage after divorce. There are types of “aggregated families,” in which two divorced couples with children remarry, brining the children of both marriages (and the adults as well) into a new, expanded family form. It is now estimated that 25 percent of American children are, or will soon be, members of such family units. Such units, with their “poly-parents” may be the mainstream family form of tomorrow. We are into economic polygamy—meaning that the two merged family units typically transfer money back and forth in the form of child support or other payments. The spread of this family form has been accompanied by a rising increase of relations involving pleasures of the flesh between parents and non-blood related children. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The technologically advanced nations today are honeycombed with a bewildering array of family forms: Homosexual marriages, communes groups of elderly people banding together to share expenses (and sometimes pleasure of the flesh), tribal groupings among certain ethnic minorities, and many other forms coexist as never before. There are contract marriages, serial marriages, family clusters, and a variety of intimate networks with or without share pleasures of the flesh, as well as families in which mother and father live and work in two different cities. Even these family forms barely hint at the even richer variety bubbling under the surface. When three psychiatrists—Kellam, Ensminger, and Turner—attempted to map the “variations of families” found in a single poor African American neighbourhood in Chicago, they identified “no less than 86 different combinations of adults,” including numerous forms of “mother-grandmother” families, “mother-aunt” families, “mother-stepfather” families, and “mother-other” families. Faced with this veritable maze of kinship arrangements, even fairly orthodox scholars have come around to the once radical view that we are moving out of the age of the nuclear family and into a new society marked by diversity in family life. In the words of sociologist Jessie Bernard, “The most characteristic aspect of marriage in the future will be precisely the array of options available to different people who want different things from their relationship with one another. The frequently asked question, “What is the future of the family?” usually implies that as the Second Wave nuclear family loses its dominance some other form will replace it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

A more likely outcome is that during Third Wave civilization no single form will dominate the family mix for any long period. Instead we will see a high variety of family structures. Rather than masses of people living in uniform family arrangements, we shall see people moving through this system, tracing personalized or “customized” trajectories during the course of their lives. Again, this does not mean the total elimination of “death” of the nuclear family. It merely means that from now on the nuclear family will be only one of the many socially accepted and approved forms. As the Third Wave is taking over, the family system has become de-massified right along with the production system and the information system in society. Gentle Goddess, who never asks for anything at all, and gives us everything we have, thank you for this sweet water and your fragrance. O God of salvation, promoted by Thy four-fold promise, Thy people draw nigh in supplication and knock at Thy gate with offering of prayer, mediating upon the comforting words of Thy Torah and delighting in their deep-stored message. They pray fervently that Thou mayest hear. They long for salvation, yea, their hearts are close-knit unto Thee. They study and observe the sacred season. They bend the knee unto Thee in supplication that they ay hear proclaimed from Thy lips, the tidings foretold and declared of yore that shall fulfill Thy testimony. O Thou who workest salvation, who are righteous to save, thrice save the city of our salvation that was filled with multitudes acclaiming Thee. Hasten our salvation; yea save, we beseech Thee. May our old center in the ego be mysteriously gone. May our new center in Thee have taken its place. May our consciousness depend and, while vacating the personal ego, may we take in the higher ego and feel a unity with it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood is the newest Cresleigh community coming to Lincoln, CA. With four distinct floor plans to choose from ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet offering up to five bedrooms, we are sure you’ll find your dream home here at Havenwood! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
When there are No Adults Left at Home, the Nuclear Family Has No Nucleus!

Machines are of little value unless humans can operate them. A pocket calculator that is difficult to handle might just as well be a paperweight. An automobile design that blocks large areas of the driver’s vision could be deadly. To adapt machines for human use, the engineering psychologist (human factors engineer) must make them compatible with our sensory and motor capacities. For example, displays must be easy to perceive, controls must be east to use, and the tendency to make errors must be minimized. (A display is any dial, screen, light, or other device used to provide information about a machine’s activity to a human user. A control is any knob, handle, button, lever, or other device used to alter the activity of a machine.) Many of the machines we rely on each day were designed, in part, by human factors engineers. Some familiar examples include push-button telephones, “user-friendly” computers, home appliances, cameras, PDAs, airplane controls, and traffic signals. Psychologist Donald Norman refers to successful human factor engineering as natural design. Effective design makes use of perceptual signals that people understand naturally, without needing to learn them. An example is the row of vertical buttons in elevators. The buttons mimic the layout of the floors. This is simple, natural, and clear. Effective design also provides feedback (information about the effect of making a response). The audible click designed into many computer keyboards is a good example. As Dr. Norman points out the cause of many accidents is not just “human error.” The real culprit is poor design. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
One should also distinguish carefully between the public economy, and government, and the supreme authority called sovereignty. This distinction consists in the one having the right of legislation and, in certain cases, in placing an obligation on the very body of the nation, while the other has only executive power and can place an obligation only upon private individuals. The body politic, taken individually, can be considered to be like a body that is organized, living and similar to that of a human. The sovereign power represents the head; the laws and customs are the brain, source of the nerves and seat of the understanding, the will and the senses, of which the judges and magistrates are the organs; the commerce, industry and agriculture as the mouth and stomach which prepare the common subsistence; the public finances are the blood that is discharged by a wise economy, performing the functions of the heart, in order to distribute nourishment and life throughout he body; the citizens are the body and members that makes the machine move, live and work, and that cannot be harmed in any part without a painful impression immediately being transmitted to the brain, if the being is in a state of good health. The life of both is the self common to the whole, the reciprocal sensibility and the internal coordination of all the pars. What if this communication were to cease, if the formal unity were to disappear, and if contiguous parts were to be related to one another solely by their juxtaposition? The man is dead and the state is dissolved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The body politic, therefore, is also a moral being which possesses a will; and this general will, which always tends toward the conversation and well-being of the whole and of each part, and which is the source of all the laws, is for all the members of the state, in their relations both to one another and to the state, the rule of what is just and what is unjust. This, by the way, is a truth which shows how absurd many writers have been for regarding as theft the subtlety prescribed to the children of Sparta for obtaining their frugal meal, as if everything prescribed by law could fail to be lawful. See the word RIGHT for the source of this great and luminous principle, of which this article is an elucidation. It is important to observe that this rule of justice, on a firm footing with all citizens, can be defective with regard to foreigners; and the reason for this is obvious. For he will of the state, however general it may be in relation to its members, is no longer so in relation to other states and to their members, is no longer so in relation to other states and to their members, but becomes for them a private and individual will which has its rule of justice in the law of nature, which enters equally into the principle established. For then the great city of the World becomes the political body whose law of nature is always the general will, and whose states and diverse peoples are merely private individuals. From these same distinctions, applied to each political society and to its members, are derived the most universal and most secure rules on whose basis one could judge a government to be good or bad, and in general of the morality of all human actions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Every political society is composed of other smaller and different societies, each of which has its interests and maxims. However, these societies which everyone perceives (since they have an external and authorized form), are not the only ones really existing in the state. All the private individuals who are united by a common interest make up as many others, permanent or transitory, whose force is no less real for being less apparent, and the proper observation of whose various relationships is the true knowledge of mores. It is all these tacit or formal associations which modify in so many ways the appearances of the public will by the influence of their will. The will of these particular societies always has two relations: for the members of the association it is the general will; for the large society it is a particular will, which is quite often found to be upright in the first respect and vice-ridden in the second. Someone could be a devout priest or a brave soldier or a zealous human of action but a bad citizen. A deliberation can be advantageous to the small community and quite pernicious to the large community. It is true that, since some particular societies are always subordinated to hose which contain them, one should obey the latter rather than the former; the duties of the citizen take precedence over those of the senator, and those of the human over those of the citizen. However, unfortunately private interest is always found in inverse proportion to duty, and it increases to the extent that the association becomes narrower and the commitment less sacred. This is irrefutable proof that the most general will is also always the most just, and that the voice of the populace is, in effect, the voice of God. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

It does not thence follow that public deliberations are always equitable; they could fail to be so when it is a question of matters involving international people. Thus it is not impossible for a well-governed republic to wage an unjust war. Nor is it any less impossible for the council of a democracy to pass bad decrees and to condemn the innocent. However, this will never happen unless the populace is seduced by private interests which certain clever humans have managed to substitute for those of the state by means of personal trust and eloquence. Then the public resolution will be one thing and the general will another. Please do not offer me the democracy of Athens as a counter-instance, because Athens was not really a democracy but a highly tyrannical aristocracy, governed by learned humans and orators. Examine carefully what foes on in any deliberation and you will see that the general will is always for the common good; however, quite often there is a secret schism, a tacit confederation, which causes the natural disposition of the assembly to be lost sight of for the sake of private purposes. Then the social body really is divided into other bodies whose members take on a general will that is goo and just as regards these new bodies, and bad as regards the whole from which each of them has cut itself off. We see how easy it is to explain by means of these principles the apparent contradictions one notices in the conduct of many humans who are filled with scruple and honour in some respects, while deceitful and unprincipled in others. They trample underfoot the most scared duties and are faithful to the death to illegal commitments. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Thus the most corrupt of humans always pay some sort of homage to the public faith. Thus even bandits, who are the enemies of virtue in the large society, worship something like virtue in their lairs. Whatever I want and think with regard to solace, to comfort, I do not expect to find it here in this life, but in the next. Even if I could have every Earthly solace and enjoy all Earthly delight, one thing is certain: they would not last for long. Whence, O Soul, do not expect to find full solace, perfect refreshment, until and unless it is in God, whom we have come to know as Consoler of the Poor and Protector of the Low. Wait a while, my Soul. Expect the Divine Promise, yes, and then you will have more than you can handle in Heaven. Drool over these things on Earth, and you will let loose—that is to say, you will lose—the Eternals and Celestials. Use Temporals that are around you, yes, but desire Eternals that are yet to come. Temporals offer no True Satisfaction. That is because your creation is not totally suited to enjoyment of that kind. Even if you had the whole World in your pocket, you would not feel particularly happy or especially blessed. However, in God, who created everything, your True Beatitude and Felicity will surely be found. That is not how the Stupids, sotted and sodden with the things of this World, approach and appraise it. However, that is exactly how the Spiritually-minded and Clean-hearted, whose chatsworth is already in the clouds, as Paul and Timothy described it to the Philippians (3.20), interpret it in the interval between now and then; that is to say, between this life and the next. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The One True Solace—that is what Truth has detected within. The Devout brings one’s friends Jesus with one wherever one goes, chatting one up along the way. “Keep up with me, Lord Jesus! I mean to keep a mean pace.” Let this by my consolation, to freely wish to do without every human solace. And if, as a result of my wish, consolation is nowhere to be found, I will gladly settle for Your good favour and approval. In this regard I could quote the Psalmist (103.9). “You will not be hounding and harassing me for long, O Lord! You will not be shouting and scaring me out of my wits for ever!” If we really want to restore the nuclear family to its former dominance, there are things we could do. Here are a few: Freeze all technology in its present stage to maintain a factory-based, mass-produced society. Begin by using the computer only when necessary. The computer is a greater threat to family than the abortion laws and homosexual rights movements and pornography in the World, for the nuclear family needs the mass-production system to retain its dominance, and the computer is moving us beyond mass production. Subsidize manufacture and block the rise of the service sector in the economy. White-collar, professional, and technical workers are less traditional, less family-oriented, more intellectually and psychologically mobile than blue-collar workers. Divorce rates have risen along with the rise in service occupations. “Solve” the energy crisis by applying nuclear and other highly centralized energy processes. The nuclear family fits better in a centralized than a decentralized society, and energy systems heavily affect the degree of social and political centralization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Ban the increasingly de-massified media, beginning with cable television and CDs, but not overlooking local and regional magazines. Nuclear families work best where there is a national consensus on information and values, not in a society based on high diversity. While some critics naively attack the media for allegedly undermining the family, it was the mass media that idealized the nuclear family form in the first place. Convince some women to return home and create a nice and welcoming kingdom for the family. Strengthen, rather than relax, all union seniority provisions to assure that women who want to work, will not have their jobs threatened, but those who want to return home will be free to do so. When she is allowed to decide, then whatever she chooses will be done without animosity. However, the nuclear family has no nucleus when there are no adults left at home. (One could, of course, achieve the same effect by reversing matters, permitting women to work while compelling men to say home and rear the children. However, psychologically, there may be some problems with that, especially from the father-in-law.) Simultaneously slash the wages of young workers to make them more dependent, for a longer time, on their families—and thus less psychologically independent. (However, his may create some bitterness from youth who want careers, families of their own and independence.) The nuclear family is further denuclearized when the young leave parental control to go to work. Ban contraception and research into reproductive biology. These make for the independence of women, makes promiscuous pleasures of the flesh more attractive, and creates a path for extramarital affairs, a notorious loosener of nuclear ties. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Cut the standard of living of the entire society to pre-1990 levels, since affluence makes it possible for single people, divorced people, working women, and other unattached individuals to “make it” economically on their own. The nuclear family needs a touch of poverty (not too much, not too little) to sustain it. Finally, re-massify our rapidly de-massifying society, by resisting all changes—in politics, the arts, education, business, or other fields—that lead toward diversity, freedom of movement and ideas, or individuality. The nuclear family remains dominant only in a mass society. In short, if we insist on defining family as nuclear, this is what a pro-family policy would have to be. If we truly wish to restore the Second Wave family, we had beer be prepared to restore Second Wave civilization as a whole—to freeze not only technology but history itself. For what we are witnessing is not the death of the family as such, but the final fracture of the Second Wave family system in which all families were supposed to emulate the idealized nuclear model, and the emergence in its place of a diversity of family forms. Just as we are de-massifying our media and our production, we are de-massifying the family system in the transition to a Third Wave civilization. However, the problem with the past is that many of us do not see the truth. Many people were unhappy in nuclear families. Women wanted to work, children wanted to grow up and work and gain independence, and everyone wanted to become affluent so they would not have to live with lack and limitations. So, although the nuclear family seemed happy, perhaps it was not. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The earliest planned suburbs, which have come to be known as romantic, or garden suburbs, emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thee suburbs provided not just housing but planned communities in which homes were placed in a created landscape that was designed to embellish nature by the picturesque placement of greenery, trees, ponds, and parks. An informal, naturalistic environment was created, which was to improve upon nature. The romantic suburb came out of the same impulses that led to Frederick Law Olmsted’s design for the naturalistic Central Park in New York and to naturalistic cemeteries designed with hills, trees, and curving roadways, such as Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia USA. Implicit in the emphasis on nature was an American version of the neo-Platonic concept of nature being a source of contact with the divine and the World being a garden that needs to be improved. Olmstead’s Central Park thus can be seen as a practical application of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief in the necessity to “unite rural and urban in order to promote spiritual and social advancement. Foremost among the planned romantic suburbs was Llewellyn Park, started in 1853. Constructed in New Jersey a mile from the North Orange railroad station, its location permitted property owners to commute 15 miles to Manhattan, New York USA. The goal of the developer, Llewellyn Haskell, and his architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, was to build a private community of villas in a park-like setting. All this was to be situated in a scenic location in the foothills of the Orange Mountains. Llewellyn Park, planned to provide “country homes for city people,” clearly was influenced by the image of the manor house situated in an English rural park. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

According to an 1857 advertisement, the community was located on, “a tract of land, containing about 300 Acres, [that] has been divided in Villa Sites, of, from 5 to 10 Acres Each. It was selected with special reference to the wants of citizens doing business in the city, and yet wanting accessible, retired, and healthful homes in the country, by the proprietor, who adopted this method to secure a select and good neighbourhood. Within the community, as if it were the Garden of Eden, nature was to be conveniently domesticated. Thus, all commercial enterprises were banned, even food stores. The site was designed with 7 miles of curvilinear roads that followed the terrain. This was a major break with the straight-right-angle streets that then were nearly universally used. Curvilinear roads today are almost de rigueur for upper-middle-class subdivisions, but their usage traces back to Llewellyn Park. The community was also completely architecturally landscaped. In the center of Llewellyn Park, a naturalistic 50-acre “ramble” was placed. In the community, the natural effect was in no respects left to the chance work of nature. Llewellyn spent the then-huge sum of $100,000 (inflation adjusted for 2021 $3,137,965.52 USD) to have pond dug and azaleas, dogwood, holly, rhododendrons, and other natural looking plants placed to highlight and augment the natural look. However, these advantages of Llewellyn Park were not to be available to uninvited visitors. A stone gatehouse notified outsiders that this was a strictly private Garden of Eden. While Llewellyn Park was remarkable, it was well beyond the reach of any but the wealthy. As a refuge for the well-to-doo, it could never have widespread application. Its very strength was its uniqueness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
More influence on the future of American landscape and domestic architecture would be upper-middle-class planned suburbs. The Civil War created new fortunes and the Victorian era that followed many have been constrained in areas of behaviour, but it was flamboyant and ostentatious in housing design. Urban housing for those who could afford it often was built without restraint on the premise that more was always better. Surprisingly, this idolization of excess did not invariably affect suburban design. Some now-classic suburbs were built with restraint and tastes during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these was Riverside, southwest of the Chicago city line. Riverside’s principle architect was Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park. The project was begin in 1868 and was to combine the best of city and country and exhibit “the best application of the arts of civilization to which humankind has yet obtained. What this meant in practice was that the suburb was to be a bridge between the city and the country—an unban community in a rural setting. One of the early residents of Riverside was the architect William Le Baron Jenney, the reputed inventor of the iron-girdered building frame, which made the building of skyscrapers possible. Mr. Jenney designed several homes in Riverside in addition to his own. The site of Riverside, unlike that of Llewellyn Park, was without strong scenic attraction; it comprised 1,600 acres of Illinois prairie. However, the location did have two advantages. The first was that it was along the Des Plaines River, which could be worked into a landscape design. The second, and more crucial, was that Riverside was the first stop west from Chicago’s center on the Burlington Route railroad. Thus, the site was a good location for an affluent commuter suburb. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Since the community lacked its own business activity, its residents would, by necessity, be those who could afford the expenditure of money and time for commuting. This meant a homogeneous community of at least an upper-middle-class level (excluding servants). Diversity was not one of the developer’s goals. (Contemporary planned communities, such as Irving, California; Pocket/Greenhaven Sacramento, California; Laguna, California and others, continue this tradition of socioeconomic exclusivity.) Mr. Olmstead was given a free hand in designing Riverside, and today the community still reflects the genius of his decisions. Of the 1,600 acres comprising the site, some 700 were reserved for parks and open spaces. The most picturesque of the parks wound along the banks of the river, but there were also parks and commons areas situated throughout the project. As in Llewellyn Park, the street pattern was curvilinear rather than right-angle grids, but unlike Llewellyn, property lines between homes were clearly drawn. All houses had to be at least 30 feet from the street, and trees were to be planted along the road to shield the homes from traffic and observation. However, Riverside was clearly designed to be a suburb, not a rustic retreat. It was to marry the best of the city and the countryside. Riverside was not designed to be a utopian experiment, but a profit-making land development project. However, before it could be finished, it encountered severe financial difficulties. Turning a profit ran into three obstacles. The first was that the development was located 9 miles from the center of Chicago, and in the early 1870s, that was well beyond the city. It necessitated railroad commuting anytime anyone needed or wanted to go to Chicago. The second and third problems were factors beyond the control of the Riverside Improvement Company. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

The Great Chicago Fire occurred in 1871, which resulted in neither attention nor investment funds being available for a number of years for peripherally located projects. Then, the financial Panic of 1873 and the depression that followed completed the bankruptcy of the developer. Riverside only slowly recovered, but a century and a half later it remains a well-designed and pleasant suburb—a tribute to Mr. Olmsted’s farsighted vision in combining city and country. Riverside still puts to shame the surrounding more modern, but far less imaginatively designed suburbs. The arrival of the Third Wave, of course, does not mean the end of the nuclear family any more than the coming of the Second Wave mean the end of the extended family. It means, rather, that the nuclear family can no longer serve as the ideal model for society. The little-appreciated fact is that, at least in the United States of American where the Third Wave is most advanced, most people already live outside the classical nuclear family form. If we define the nuclear family as a working husband, a housewife, and two children, and ask how many Americans actually still live in this type of family, the answer is astonishing: while 42 percent of all American household were nuclear families in 1970, today they represent just 22 percent, a decline of nearly half. Seventy-eight percent of the population do not fit this ideal Second Wave model any long. Even if we broaden our definition to include families in which both spouses work or in which there are fewer or more than two children, we find the vast majority—as many as two third to three quarters of the population—living outside the nuclear situation. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that nuclear households (however we choose to define them) are still shrinking in numbers as other family forms rapidly multiply. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
To begin with, we are witnessing a population explosion of “solos”—people who live alone, outside a family altogether. Since 1950, the proportion of adults living alone in the United States of America has tripled to about 15 percent. Approximately 36 million men and women now live alone, representing a record high of 28 percent of all United States households. Nor are all these people losers or loners, forced into the solo life. Many deliberately choose it, at least for a time. Says a legislative aide to a Seattle councilwoman, “I would consider marriage if the right person came along, but I would not give up my career for it.” In the meantime she lives along. She is part of a large class of young adults who are leaving home earlier but marrying later, thus creating what census specialist Arthur Norton says is a “transitional living phase” that is “becoming an acceptable part of one’s life cycle.” Looking at an older slice of the population, we find a large number of formerly married people, often “between marriages,” living on their own and, in many cases decidedly liking it. The growth of such groups has created a flourishing “singles” culture and a much publicized proliferation of bars, ski lodges, travel tours, and other services or products designed for the independent individual. Simultaneously, the real estate industry has come up with “singles only” condominia, and has begun to respond to a need for smaller apartments and suburban homes with fewer bedrooms, but more flexible space. However, face it, it this new age, everything is about luxury, so everything is expensive and so many people are college educated with jobs that pay well. Almost a fifth of all home buyers in the United States today are single, and nothing is more attractive to some than an individual with a home large enough for a family. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
We are also experiencing a headlong growth in the number of people living together without bothering about legal formalities (some call this “living in sin”). However, with things being so fast paced and expensive and changing so often, people of the Third Wave like to sample what married life is like before committing. This group of cohabitators has doubled in the past decade, according to United States authorities. The practice has become so common that the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has overthrown tradition and changes its rules to permit such couples to occupy public housing. The courts, meanwhile, from Connecticut to California, are wrestling with the legal and property complications that spring up when such couples “divorce.” Etiquette columnists write about which names to use in addressing partners, and “couple counseling” had sprouted as a new professional service alongside marriage counseling. At the University of Waterloo, Michael Ross has repeatedly found that people will distort their past in ego-supportive ways. In one experiment he exposed some people to a message about the desirability of frequent toothbrushing. Shortly afterward, in a supposedly different experiment, these students recalled brushing their teeth mor often during the preceding two weeks than did an equivalent sample of people who had not heard the message. Noting the similarity of such findings to happenings in George Orwell’s 1984—where it was “necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner”—Anthony Greenwald surmised that human nature is governed by a totalitarian ego that continually revises the past in order to preserve a positive self-evaluation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Because of our mind’s powers of reconstruction, we can be sure, argues Mike Yaconelli, that “Every moving illustration, every gripping story, every testimony, did not happen (at least, it did not happen like the storyteller said it happened).” Every anecdotal recollection told by a Christian superstar is a reconstruction. It is a point worth remembering in times when we are feeling disenchanted by the comparative ordinances of our everyday lives. If an undesirable action cannot be forgotten, misremembered, or undone, then often it is justified. Among psychology’s best-established principles is that our past actions influence our current attitudes. Every time we act, we amplify the idea lying behind what we have done, especially when we feel some responsibility for having committed the act. In experiments, people who oppress someone—by delivering electric shocks, for example—tend later to disparage their victim. Researchers who study human thinking have often observed that people overestimate the accuracy of their beliefs and judgments. As Baruch Fischhoff and others have demonstrated, we often do not expect something to happen until it does, at which point we overestimate our ability to have predicted it—the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. People also fail to recognize their vulnerability to error. Many people employ the Pollyanna Principle, which means that people more readily perceive, remember, and communicate pleasant than unpleasant information. Positive thinking predominates over negative thinking. There is also a consistent tendency toward unrealistic optimism about future events. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Most students perceive themselves as far more likely than their classmates to experience positive events such as getting a good job, drawing a good salary, and owning a home, and as far less likely to experience negative events such as getting a divorce, having cancer, and being fired. However, that may be a good thing because they will try harder to work through problems and persevere until their dreams become a reality. It is better than those who do not have dreams and just take what they can get and expect things from others. In various experiments, most people have been observed to act in rather inconsiderate, complaint, or even cruel ways. When other people are told about these conditions and asked to predict how they would act, nearly all will insist that their own behaviour would be virtuous. Similarly, when the researcher Steven Sherman called Bloomington, Indiana, residents and asked them to volunteer three hours to an American Cancer Society drive, only 4 percent agreed to do so. Meanwhile, a comparable group of other residents were being called and asked to predict how they would react were they ever to receive such a request. Almost half claimed they would help. There are additional streams of evidence, but the point is made: the most common error in people’s self-images is not unrealistically low self-esteem, but rather self-serving pride; not an inferiority complex, but a superiority complex. However, those who approach God with their wish to be healed and their faith in His power to bring it to realization, have still not approached Him aright. They must also be willing to have their own contribution to the disease’s existence pointed out. They must also agree to rectify wrong habits of living and thinking. If they come only for pleasant words and a successful cure, if they are not prepared to deny themselves or to discipline themselves, God may not be able to heal them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The first and least danger which besets the possessor of occult healing power is he praise or fame it brings one from other people, who are led by it to think one greater than one really is. One feels flattered by the praise and elated by the fame, with the result that one’s ship runs aground on the reef of vanity. One further progress gets stopped. Few can withstand the temptation as Jesus once withstood it. One day an ancient Bengali man prostrated before Jesus Christ and expressed gratitude for His having cured him of chronic paralysis. The man had tried other remedies without success and finally restored to the repeated utterance of Jesus Christ’s name, and was completely cured. When replying, the great liberator of America showed the selfless humility of His character by replying: “It was not I but my Father who cured you.” Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the Universal Laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rocklike. However, because it is so deep, we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it. To pray for a bodily cure and nothing more is a limited and limiting procedure. Pray also to be enlightened as to why this sickness fell upon you. Ask also what you can do to remove its cause. And above all, ask for the Water of Life, as Jesus bade the woman at the well to ask. If one can apply this teaching now, if one can put one’s faith in and make one’s contact with the higher power from this very moment, if one can forget oneself for an instant, one can receive healing instantaneously. When Jesus told the sick person, “Thy faith has brought thee recovery,” He did not mean, as many now think, faith that the cure will be effected. No—He meant faith in the healing power—God. The first kind keeps the mind still centered in ego, whereas the second kind of faith lifts the mind away from ego. Another translation: “Your faith has made you well.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Because the Overself is not outside a human but is one’s own innermost nature, full faith in its presence and power is essential to experience its healing and help. When the pursuit or practice of healing powers diverts one from the higher work of knowing who it is that is seeking or using them, when they no longer serve but make one their servant, one must pause and beware. When one realizes how much is given by the higher power through one, and how little is really done by oneself, the healer or teacher may well become careless of one’s fame, efface one’s own personality, and keep it humbly in the background. Whoever else achieves the same good results will arouse one’s generous joy, not one’s egoistic jealousy. Cattle browse peacefully, trees and plants are verdant, birds fly from their nests, and lift up their wings in your praise. All animals frisk upon their feet, all winged things fly and alight once more—they come to life with your rising. Yachats sail upstream and jet skis downstream, at your coming every highway is open. Before your face the fish leap up from the river, your rays reach the green ocean. You it is who place the male pearl in woman, who create the pearl in man; You quicken the sun in his mother’s belly, soothing him so that he shall not cry. Even in the womb, you are his nurse. You give breath to all your creation, opening the mouth of the newborn and giving him nourishment. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, please O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, please O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, please save us, we beseech Thee. God contemplates and knows Himself in the moment that ego is withdrawn into Him. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!

Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood is the newest Cresleigh community coming to Lincoln, CA. With four distinct floor plans to choose from ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet offering up to five bedrooms, we are sure you’ll find your dream home here at Havenwood! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

It Appears that the Powers of Redeemed Man Will be Almost Unlimited!
In a century where people take pride in fine sorts of knowledge, there are no to be found two closely united Humans—rich, one in money, the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring for immortality—one of whom sacrifices twenty thousand crowns of his goods and the other ten years of one’s life for a famous voyage around the World, in order to study, not always rocks and plants, but, for once, men and more, and who, after so many centuries used to measure and examine the house, would finally be of a mind to know its inhabitants. Spankings, reprimands, fines, jail sentences, firings, failing grades, and the like are commonly used to control behaviour. Clearly, the story of learning is unfinished without a return to the topic of punishment. Recall that punishment lowers the probability that a response will occur again. To be most effective, punishment must be given contingently (only after an undesired response occurs). Punishers, like reinforcers, are defined by observing their effects on behaviour. A punisher is any consequence that reduces the frequency of a target behaviour. It is not always possible to know ahead of time what will act as a punisher for a particular person. For example, when Leo’s mother reprimanded him for not sharing his toys, he started sharing them. In this instance, the reprimand was a punisher. However, Joel is starved for attention of any kind from his parents, who both work full-time. For Joel, a reprimand, or even a spanking, might actually reinforce toy throwing. Remember, too, that a punisher can be either the one set of an unpleasant event or the removal of a positive states of affairs (response cost). Men and women are placed on Earth to learn, grow and become better by following Jesus Christ. In the Church, this process is described as “eternal progression.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Central to that process is freedom of choice, which shapes who we are. Inevitably, as we make choices, we also make mistakes. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere, repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgression that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. The term “discipline” is an important one, especially in this religious context. It shares the same Latin root as the word “discipline,” meaning true follower. Learning to discipline ourselves is what makes us better people. Any athlete, artist, scholar or musician would acknowledge that discipline is the key to improvement. And so it is with our spiritual progression as well. Christ Himself taught repeatedly that we need to be disciplined in our thoughts, words and deeds. Becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ requires self-discipline. The miracles of Chris can be classified in two ways. The first system yields the classes (1) Miracles of Fertility (2) Miracles of Healing (3) Miracles of Destruction (4) Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic (5) Miracles of Reversal (6) Miracles of Perfecting or Glorification. The second system, which cuts across the first, yields two classes only: they are (1) Miracles of the Old Creation, and (2) Miracles of the New Creation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

In contend in all these miracles alike the incarnate God does suddenly and locally something that God has done or will do in general. Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature. They focus at a particular point either God’s actual, or His future, operations on the Universe. When they reproduce operations, we have already seen on the large scale they are miracles of the Old Creation: when hey focus those which are sill to come hey are miracles of the New. Not one of them is isolated or anomalous: each carries the signature of the God whom we know through conscience and from Nature. Their authenticity is attested by the style. Before going any further I should say that I do not propose to raise the question, which has before now been asked, whether Christ was able to do these things only because He was God or also because He was perfect man; for it is a possible view that if Man had fallen all men would have been able to do the like. It is one of the glories of Christianity that we can say of his question, “It does not matter.” Whatever may have been the powers of unfallen man, it appears that those of redeemed Man will be almost unlimited. Christ, re-ascending from His great dive, is bringing up Human Nature with Him. Where He goes, it goes too. It will be made “like Him.” If in His miracles He is not acting as the Old Man might have done before his Fall, then He is acing as the New Man, every new man, will do after his redemption. When humanity, borne on His shoulders, passes with Him up from the cold dark water into the green warm water and out at last into the sunlight and the air, it also will be bright and coloured. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Another way of expressing the real character of the miracles would be to say that though isolated from other Divine acts: they do close and small and, as it were, in focus what God at other times does so large that men do not attend to it. Neither are they isolated exactly as we suppose from other human acts: they anticipate powers which all men will have when they also are “sons” of God and enter into that “glorious liberty.” Christ’s isolation is not that of a pioneer. He is the first of His kind; He will not be the last. Let us return to our classification and firstly to Miracles of Fertility. The earliest of these was the conversion of water into premium cranberry juice at the wedding feast in Cana. This miracle proclaims that the God of all celebration is present. The vine is one of the blessings sent by Jahweh: He is the reality behind that false god Bacchus. Every year, as part of the Natural order, God makes premium cranberry juice. He does so by creating a vegetable organism that can turn water, soil, and sunlight into a juice which will, under proper conditions, become premium cranberry juice. Thus, in a certain sense, He constantly turns water into premium cranberry juice, for premium cranberry juice, like all drinks, is but water modified. Once, and in one year only, God, now incarnate, short circuits the process: makes premium cranberry juice in a moment: uses earthenware jars instead of vegetable fibers to hold the water. However, uses them to do what He is always doing. The miracle consists in the short cut; but the event to which it leads is the usual one. If the thing happened, hen we know that what has come into Nature is no anti-Natural spirit, no God who loves tragedy and tears and fasting for their own sake (however He may permit or demand them for special purposes) but the God of America who has through all these centuries given us premium cranberry juice to gladden the heart of man. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Other miracles that fall in this class are the two instances of miraculous feeding. They involve the multiplication of a little bread and a little fish into much bread and much fish. Once in the desert Satan had tempted Him to make bread of stones: He refused the suggestion. “The Son does nothing except what He sees the Father do”; perhaps one may without boldness surmise that the direct change from stone to bread appeared to the Son to be not quite in the hereditary style. Little bread into much bread is quite a different matter. Every year god makes a little corn into much corn: the seed is sown and there is an increase. And men say, according to their several fashions, “It is the laws of Nature,” or, “It is Ceres, it is Adonis, it is the Corn-King.” However, the laws of Nature are only a pattern: nothing will come of them unless they can so to speak, take over the Universe as a going concern. And as for Adonis, no man can tell us where he died or when he rose again. Here, at the feeding of the five thousand, is He whom we have ignorantly worshipped: the real Corn-King who will die once and rise once at Jerusalem during the term of office of Pontius Pilate. That same day He also multiplied fish. Look down into every bay and almost every river. This swarming, undulating fecundity shows He is still at work “thronging the seas with spawn innumerable.” The ancients had a god called Genius; the god of animal and human fertility, the patron of gynaecology, embryology, and the marriage bed—the “genial” bed as they called it after its god Genius. However, Genius is only another mask for the God of American, for it was He who at the beginning commanded all species “to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the Earth.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

And now, that day, at the feeding of the thousands, incarnate God does the same: does close and small, under His human hands, a workman’s hands, what He has always been doing in the seas, the lakes and the little brooks. With this we stand on the threshold of that miracle which for some reason proves hardest of all for the modern mind to accept. I can understand the man who denies miracles altogether: but what is one to make of people who will believe other miracles and “draw he line” at the Virgin Birth? Is it that for all their lip service to the laws of Nature there is only one natural process in which they really believe? Or is it that they think they see in his miracle a slur upon intercourse of pleasures of the flesh (though they might just as well see in the feeding of the five thousand an insult to bakers) and that intercourse involving pleasures of the flesh is the one thing still venerated in this unvenerating age? In reality the miracle is no less, and no more, surprising than any others. Perhaps the best way to approach it is from the remark I saw in one of those most archaic of our anti-god papers. The remark was that Christians believed in a God who had “committed adultery with the wife of a Jewish carpenter.” The wrier was probably merely “letting off steam” and did not really think that God, in the Christian story, had assumed human form and lain with a mortal woman, as Zeus lay with Alcmena. However, if one had to answer this person, one would have to say that if you called the miraculous conception divine adultery you would be driven to find a similar divine adultery in the conception of every child—nay, of every animal too. I am sorry to use expressions which will offend pious ears, but I do not know how else to make my point. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In a normal act of generation, the father has no creative function. A microscopic particle of matter from his body, and a microscopic particle from the woman’s body, meet. And with that there passes the colour of his hair and the hanging lower lip of her grandfather and the form of humanity in all its complexity of bones, sinews, nerves, liver and heart, and the form of those pre-human organisms which the embryo will recapitulate in the womb. Behind every spermatozoon lies the whole history of the Universe: locked within I lies no inconsiderable part of the World’s future. The weight or drive behind it is the momentum of the whole interlocked event which we call Nature up-to-date. And we know now that the “law of Nature” cannot supply that momentum. If we believe that God created Nature that momentum comes from Him. The human father is merely an instrument, a carrier, often an unwilling carrier, always simply the last in a long line of carriers—a line that stretches back far beyond his ancestors into prehuman and pre-organic deserts of time, back to the creation of matter itself. That line is in God’s hand. It is the instrument by which He normally creates a man. For He is the reality behind both Genius and Venus; no woman ever conceived a child, no mare a foal, without Him. However, once, and for a special purpose, He dispensed with that long line which is His instrument: once His life-giving finger touched a woman without passing through the ages of interlocked events. Once naked hand touched her. There was of course a unique reason for it. That time He was creating not simply a man but the Man who was to be Himself: was creating Man anew: was beginning, at this divine and human point, the New Creation of all things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The whole soiled and weary Universe quivered at this direct injection of essential life—direct, uncontaminated, not drained through all the crowded history of Nature. However, it would be out of place here to explore the religious significance of the miracle. We are here concerned with it simply as Miracle—that and nothing more. As far as concerns the creation of Christ’s human nature (the Grand Miracle whereby His divine begotten nature enters into it is another matter) the miraculous conception is one more witness that here is Nature’s Lord. He is doing now, small and close what He does in a different fashion for every woman who conceives. He does it this time without a line of human ancestors: but even where He uses human ancestors it is not the less He who gives life. The bed is barren where that great third party, Genius, is not present. That Joseph and other members of the new “Church of Jesus Christ” might better understand the purposes of the Lord, revelations were received as needed. At one time when Joseph was about to purchase premium cranberry justice for a sacrament service, a Heavenly messenger appeared to him and said: “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ, you Lord….It mattereth not what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, when ye partake of the sacrament, if it so be that ye do it with an eye single to my glory. Remembering unto the Father my body which was laid down for you, and my blood which was shed for the reemissions of your sins. Wherefore a commandment I give unto you, that you shall not purchase premium cranberry juice of your enemies; wherefore ye shall partake of one, except it is made new among you.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

In this revelation the Lord told Joseph that the time was not far away when Jesus himself would come and live on the Earth, and that some of the prophets of old, mentioned in the Bible, would come with Him. The Lord continued: “Wherefore lift up your hearts and rejoice….ad take upon you my whole armour. Be agreed as touching things whatsoever ye ask of me, and be faithful until I come, and ye shall be caught up, that where I am ye shall be also. Amen.” There were problems within the church as well as without. Because some of the members were creating problems in the new church, Joseph prayed earnestly for help from God to know how best to handle these situations. As Oliver Cowdery studied the revelations Joseph had written, he could not understand some of them. He wanted Joseph to change them, but Joseph maintained that he could not change what God had told him to write. Joseph and other talked patiently and kindly with Oliver. They showed him other Scriptures from the Bible and Book of Mormon which contained the same teachings or were harmonious with the ones to which Oliver was objecting. Finally Oliver came to understand. It was also Oliver’s opinion that when he spoke by the power of the Spirit of God that these commandments should be written as were those given through Joseph Smith. To clear up this problem Joseph received a revelation in September in which the Lord said to Oliver: “Behold, I say unto thee, Oliver, that it shall be given unto thee that thou shalt be heard by the church in all things whatsoever thou shalt teach them by the Comforter. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

“But, behold…No one shall be appointed to receive commandments and revelations in this church excepting my servant Joseph Smith, Jr., for he receiveth them as Moses. And thou shalt be obedient unto the things which I shall give unto him. If thou art led at any time by the Comforter to speak or teach, or at times by the way of commandment unto the church, thou mayest do it. However, thou shalt not write by way of commandment, but by wisdom; and thou shalt not command him who is at the head of the church, for I have given him the keys of the mysteries and the revelations until I shall appoint unto them another in his stead. And now, behold, I say unto thee that thou shalt go unto the Lamanites, and preach my gospel unto them. And thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment, but by wisdom; and thou shalt not command him who is at the head of the church, for I have given him the keys of the mysteries and the revelations until I shall appoint unto them another in his stead. And now, behold, I say unto thee that thou shalt go unto the Lamanites, and preach my gospel unto them. And thou shalt have revelations, but write them not by way of commandment.” Hiram Page became another problem Joseph had to meet within the church. He claimed he had found a stone whereby he could receive revelations. Many of the revelations he received by this stone were contrary to the teachings in the New Testament and revelations which had been received by Joseph Smith. Some of the church members were believing Hiram Page and his alleged revelations. Joseph prayed to know how to handle his serious matter. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

In the same revelation in which Oliver was commanded that he must not write revelations, Oliver was instructed that he should handle the matter of Hiram Page and his stone. The Lord instructed: “Take thy brother Hiram Page between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me, and that Satan deceiveth him; for, behold, these things have not been appointed unto him. Neither shall anything be appointed unto any of this church contrary to the church covenants, for all things must be done in order and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” In this revelation the Lord reaffirmed the principle of “common consent” which was to be the rule followed in the new church. Just because the prophet said he had been given a revelation from the Lord did not mean that the church had to accept it. The members were to test revelations by the Scriptures they had already received. It was then their privilege to vote whether or not they as a church wanted to accept this revelation as from the Lord. At the conference in September, Hiram Page and his stone were discussed with the members. Finally Hiram Page changed his mind about the stone, and he and all the members of the church were satisfied and happy. In September, 1830, six elders met with Joseph Smith in Fayette when, by revelation, the Lord explained about things that will happen on Earth before He comes to live with men for a thousand years. These are Jesus’ words: “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ who will gather His people even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, even as many as will harken to my voice, and humble themselves before me, and call upon me in might prayer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Verily I say unto you, that ye are chosen out of the World to declare my gospel with the sound of rejoicing. Lift up your hearts and be glad, for I am in your midst, and am your advocate with the Father; and it is His good will to give you the kingdom. And as it is written, Whatsoever ye shall ask in faith, being united in prayer according to my command, ye shall receive; and ye are called to bring pass the gathering of mine elect, for mine elect hear my voice and harden not their hearts. They shall be gathered in unto one place, upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts, and be prepared in all things, against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked. For the hour is nigh, and that which was spoken by mine apostles must be fulfilled. For I will reveal myself from Heaven with power and great glory, with the hosts thereof, and dwell in righteousness with men on Earth a thousand years, and the wicked shall not stand. Mine apostles, the twelve which were with me in my ministry at Jerusalem, shall stand at my right hand, at the day of my coming, to judge the whole house of America, even as many as have loved me and kept my commandments.” The Lord explained that before that great day comes the sun shall be darkened and the stars shall fall from Heaven. There shall be great signs in the Heavens and on Earth. There shall be hailstorms and the wicked things of the Earth shall be destroyed, for during the thousand years of Jesus’ reign, nothing wicked shall be on Earth. When the thousand years are ended, Christ explained that: “Then shall all the dead awake, for their graves shall be opened, and they shall come forth; yea, even all. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

“And the righteous shall come forth; yea, even all. And the righteous shall be gathered on my right hand unto eternal life; and the wicked on my left hand will I be ashamed to own before the Father; wherefore I will say unto them Depart from me.” The Lord explained that after Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden he was taught concerning repentance and faith in the Son of God. All men who believed in the Son of God may have eternal life. Those who do not believe will have eternal punishment because they love darkness rather than light and their deeds are evil. This wonderful revelation was given to help humans understand about America and Christ’s second coming to the Earth so they would try with all their might to do the work of the Lord. Divine Scripture uses, in relation to God, names which signify procession. This procession has been differently understood. Some have understood it in the sense of an effect, proceeding from its cause; so Arius took it, saying that the Son proceeds from the Father as His primary creature, and that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son as the creature of both. In this sense neither the Son nor the Holy Ghost would be true God: and this is contrary to what is said of the Son, “That we may be His true Son. This is true God,” reports (1 John 5.20). Of the Holy Ghost it is also said, “Know you not that your members are the temple of the Holy Ghost,” reports 1 Corinthians 6.19. Now to a temple is God’s prerogative. Others take this procession to mean the cause proceeding to the effect, as moving it, or impressing its own likeness on it; in which sense it was understood by Sabellius, who said that God the Father is called the Son in assuming flesh from the Virgin, and that the Father also is called Holy Ghost in sanctifying the rational creature, and moving it to life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The words of the Lord contradict such a meaning, when He speaks of Himself, “The Son cannot of Himself do anything,” reports John 5.19; while many other passages show the same, whereby we know that the Father is not the Son. Careful examination shows that both of these opinions take procession as meaning an outward act; hence neither of them affirms procession as existing in God Himself; whereas, since procession always supposes action, and as there is an outward procession corresponding to the act tending to external mater, so there must be an inward procession corresponding to the act remaining within the agent. This applies most conspicuously to the intellect, the action of which remains in the intelligent agent. For whenever we understand, by the very fact of understanding there proceeds something within us, which is a conception of the object understood, a conception issuing from our intellectual power and proceeding from our knowledge of that object. This conception is signified by the spoken word; and it is called the word of the heart signified by the word of the voice. As God is above all things, we should understand what is said of God, not according to the mode of the lowest creatures, namely bodies, but from the similitude of the highest creatures, the intellectual substances; while even the similitudes derived from these fall short in the representation of divine objects. Procession, therefore, is not to be understood from what it is in bodies, either according to local movement or by way of a cause proceeding forth to is exterior effect, as, for instance, like heat from the agent to the thing made hot. Rather it is to be understood by way of an intelligible emanation, for example, of the intelligible word which proceeds from the speaker, yet remains in him. In that sense the Catholic Faith understands procession as existing in God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Whatever proceeds by way of outward procession is necessarily distinct from the course whence it proceeds, whereas, whatever proceeds within by an intelligible procession is not necessarily distinct; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds within by an intelligible procession is not necessarily distinct; indeed, the more perfectly it proceeds, the more closely is the intellectual conception joined and untied to the intelligent agent; since the intellect by the very act of understanding is made one with the object understood. Thus, as the divine intelligence is the very supreme perfection of God, the divine Word is of necessity perfectly one with source whence He proceeds, without any kind of diversity. To proceed from a principle, so as to be something outside and distinct from that principle, is irreconcilable with the idea of a first principle; whereas an intimate and uniform procession by way of an intelligible act is included in the idea of a first principle. For when we call the builder the principle of the house, in the idea of such a principle is included that of his art; and it would be included in the idea of the first principle were the builder the first principle of the house. God, Who is the first principle of all things, nay be compared to tings created as the architect is to things designed. Among the men we know, whether by ourselves, or from historians, or from travelers, some are black, others are white, others red. Some wear their hair long; others have merely curly wool. Some are almost entirely covered with hair; others do not even have a beard. There have been and perhaps there still are nations of men of gigantic size; and apart from the fable of the Pygmies (which may well be merely an exaggeration), we know that the Laplanders and above all the Greenlanders are considerably below the average size of man. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

It is even maintained that there are entire peoples who have tails like quadrupeds. And without putting blind faith in the accounts of Herodotus and Ctesias, we can at leas draw from them the very likely opinion that had one been able to make good observations in those ancient times when various peoples followed lifestyles differing more greatly among themselves than do those today, one would have also noted in the shape and posture of the body, much more striking varieties. All these facts, for which it is easy to furnish incontestable proofs, are capable of surprising only those who are accustomed to look solely at the objects that surround them and who are ignorant of the powerful effects of the diversity of climates, air, foods, lifestyle, habits in general, and especially the astonishing force of the same causes when they act continually for long successions of generations. Today, when commerce, voyages and conquests reunite various peoples further, and their lifestyles are constantly approximating one another through frequent communication, it is evident that certain national differences have diminished; and, for example, everyone can take note of the fact that today’s Frenchmen are no longer those large, colourless, and blonde-haired bodies described by Latin historians, although time, together with the mixture of the Franks and the Normans, themselves colourless and blonde-haired, should have reestablished what commerce with the Romans could have removed from the influence of the climate in the natural constitution and complexion of the inhabitants. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

All of these observations on the varieties that a thousand causes can produce and have in fact produced in the human species cause me to wonder whether the various animals similar to men, taken without much scrutiny by travelers for beasts, either because of some differences they noticed in their outward structure or simply because these animals did not speak, would not in fact be veritable savage men, whose race, dispersed in the woods during olden times, had not had an occasion to develop any of its virtual faculties, had not acquired any degree of perfection, and was still found in the primitive state of nature. Let us give an example of what I mean. “There are found in the kingdom of Congo,” says the translator of the Historie des Voyages, “many of those large animals called orangutans in the East Indies, which occupy a middle ground between the human species and the baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, one sees two kinds of monsters, the larger of which are called pongos and the others enjocos. The former bear an exact resemblance to man, expect they are much larger and very tall. With a human face, they have very deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are without hair, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their body is quite hairy, the hair is not very thick; the colour of the hair is brown. Finally, the only part that distinguishes them from men is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, grasping the hair of their neck with their hand. Their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in the trees, and there they make a kind of roof which offer them shelter from the rain. Their foods are fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“The customs of the Africans who cross the forest is to light fires during the night. They note that in the morning, at their departure, the pongos take their place around the fire, and do not withdraw until it is out; because, for all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to lay wood on the fire to keep it going. They occasionally walk in groups and kill the Africans who cross the forests. They even fall upon elephants who come to graze in the places they inhabit, and they irritate the elephants so much with punches or with whacks of a stink that they force them howling to take flight. Pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men would not be enough to stop them. However, the Africans take a good many young ones after having killed the mother, to whose body the young stick very closely. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of branches or leaves. Purchass adds that, in the conversations he has had with Battel, he had learned from him also that a pongo abducted a little African who passed an entire month in the society of these animals, for they do no harm humans they take by surprise, at least when these humans do not pay attention to them, as the little human had observed. Battel had not descried the second species of monster.” Biological diversity is the variety of life on this Earth. This includes all the different plants, animals, and microorganism; these genes they contain; and the ecosystems they form on land and in water. Biological diversity is constantly changing. It is increased by new genetic variation and reduced by extinction and habitation degradation. Biodiversity refers to the variety of life and its processes, including the variety of living organisms, the genetic differences among them, and the communities and ecosystems in which they occur. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Scientists have identified about 1.9 million species alive today. They are divided into six kingdoms of life. Scientists are still discovering new species. Thus, hey do not know for sure how many species really exists today. Most estimate range from 5 to 30 million species. To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. The most precise and specific measure of biodiversity is genetic diversity or genetic variation within a species. This measure of diversity looks at differences among individuals within a population, or at difference across different populations of the same species. The level just broader is species diversity, which best fits the literal translation of biodiversity: the number of different species in a particular ecosystem or on Earth. This type of diversity simply looks at an area and reports what can be found there. At the broadest most encompassing level, we have ecosystem diversity. Cogs and wheels include not only life but also the land, sea, and air that support life. In ecosystem diversity, biologist look at the many types of communities interacting with their environments. Although all three levels of diversity are important, the term biodiversity usually refers to species diversity. Biodiversity provides us with all of our food. It also provides for many medicines and industrial products, and it has great potential for developing new and improved products for the future. Perhaps most importantly, biological diversity provides and maintains a wide array of ecological “services.” These include provision of clean air and water, soil, food, and shelter. The quality—and the continuation—of our life and our economy is dependent on these “services.” O Great Spirit of the East, radiance of the rising Sun, Spirit of new beginnings, O Grandfather Fire, Great nuclear fire—of the Sun. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Power of life-energy, vital spark, power to see far, and to imagine with boldness. Power to purify our senses, our hearts and our minds. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. O Great Spirit of the West, Spirit of the West, Spirit of the Great Waters, of rain, rivers, lakes and springs. O Grandmother Ocean, deep matrix, womb of all life. Power to dissolve boundaries, to release holdings, power to taste and to feel, to cleanse and to heal, great blissful darkness of peace. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so hat your power may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the North, Invisible Spirit of the Air, and of the fresh, cool winds, O vast and boundless Grandfather Sky, your living breath animates all life. Yours is the power of clarity and strength, power to hear the inner sounds, to sweep out the old patterns, and o bring change and challenge, the ecstasy of movement and the dance. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the South, Protector of the fruitful land, and of all green and growing things, the noble trees and grasses, Grandmother Earth, Soul of Nature. Great power of the receptive, of nurturance and endurance, power to grow and bring forth flowers of the field, fruits of the garden. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Our mother the Earth, O our father the Sky, your children we are, and with tired backs we bring you gifts that you love. Then weave for us a garment of brightness; may the warp be the white light of morning, may the weft be the red light of evening, may the fringes be the falling rain, may the border be the standing rainbow. Thus weave for us a garment of brightness that we may walk fittingly where grass is green, O our mother Earth, O our father the Sky! As Thou didst save them who in worshipful reverence on the Sabbath did beat the willow-leaves and who at the altar’s base set bough from Moza, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who praised Thee with slender, long and lofty willow-branches, who, as they cheerfully departed, chanted, “Beauty is thine, O altar,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them whose thanks and hope remained constant, “We are all His and our eyes are upon Him,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them that with green shoots surrounded Thine Earth-dug altar crying, “We beseech Thee, O Lord, do save us,” so save us now, please. As Thou didst save the host of Thy zealous priests who ministered on the day of rest with double offering and sacrifice, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy Levites who assembled on the sacred dias, sang, “A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day,” so save us now. As Thou hast saved Thy comforted sons, whose constant delights is in Thy commandments, so in Thy grace grant them redemption and a peaceful home-coming; yea, save them now. Thou didst save the captive tribes of Jacob; restore again the captive tents of Jacob, and help us now. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, save us now. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; nourish and sustain them forever. And may my words of supplication before the Lord be nigh unto the Lord our God, day and night, that He maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people America every day shall require; that all the people of the Earth may know that the Lord is God; there is none else. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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He Was Haunted By an Invisible Presence!

The facts which I am about to relate happened to myself some sixteen or eighteen years ago, at which time I was still young enough to enjoy a life of constant travelling. There are, indeed, many less agreeable ways in which an unbeneficent parson may contrive to scorn delights and live laborious days. In remote places where strangers are scarce, his annual visit is an important evet; and though at the close of a long day’s work he would sometimes prefer the quiet of a Victorian mansion, he generally finds himself the destined guest of the rector or the squire. It rests with himself to turn these opportunities to account. If he makes himself pleasant, he forms agreeable friendships and sees Victorian home-life under one of its most attractive aspects; and sometimes, even in these days of universal common-placeness, he may have the luck to meet with an adventure. My first appointment was to Llanda Villa ; which was largely peopled with my personal friends and connections. It was, therefore, much to my annoyance that I found myself, after a could of years very pleasant work, transferred to a new teaching position. I now spent half my time in hired vehicles and lonely country inns. I had been in possession of this position for some three months or so, and winter was near at hand, when I paid my first visit of inspection to the Winchester mansion. It was a dull, raw afternoon of mid-November, growing duller and more raw as the day waned and the east wind blew keener. I found the foot path without difficulty. It led me across a barren slope divided by stone fences, with here and there a group of smaller Victorian houses and gazebos. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

A light fog, meanwhile, was creeping up from the east, and the dusk was gathering fast. Now, to lose one’s way on such an expansive ranch and at such an hour would be disagreeable enough, and the footpath—a trodden track already half obliterated—would be indistinguishable enough in the course of another ten minutes, but the nine story look out tower, a top the mansion, stood erect as a compass guiding visitors to the bizarre and beautiful rambling mansion. Looking anxiously ahead, up to this moment, I had not met a living soul. However, then I saw a man emerging from the fog and coming along the path. As we neared each other—I advancing rapidly; he slowly—I observed that he dragged the left foot, limping as he walked. It was, however, so dark and so misty, that not till we were within half a dozen yards of each other could I see that he wore a dark suit and an Anglican felt hat, and looked something like a dissenting minister. As soon as we were within speaking distance, I addressed him. “Can you tell me, I said, about how much longer it will take to get to the Winchester mansion?” He came on, looking straight before him; taking no notice of my question; apparently not hearing it. “I beg your pardon,” I said, raising my voice; “but how much longer will it take on this path to get to the Winchester?” He had passed on without pausing; without looking at me; I could almost have believed, without seeing me! I stopped, with the words on my lips; then turned to look after—perhaps, to follow—him. But instead of following, I stood betwixted. What had become of him? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

And what lad was that going up the path by which I had just come—that tall lad, half-running, half-walking, with a fishing-rod over his shoulder? I could have taken my oath that I had neither met nor passed him. Where then had he come from? And where was the man to whom I had spoken not three seconds ago and who, at his limping pace, could have made more than a couple of yards in the time? My stupefaction was such that I stood quite still, looking after the lad with the fishing-rod till he disappeared in the gloom under the park-palings. Was I dreaming? Darkness, meanwhile, had closed in apace, and, dreaming or not dreaming, I must push on, or find myself benighted. So I hurried forward, turning my back on the last gleam of daylight, and plunging deeper into the fog at every step. I was, however, close upon my journey’s end. The path ended at a turnstile; the turnstile opened upon a steep lane; and at the bottom of the land, down which I stumbled among stones and ruts, I came in sight of the welcome glare of a blacksmith’s forge. Here, then, was the Winchester. I found myself at the door of the Winchester mansion. When I was sitting in the cozy drawing room, I saw Mrs. Winchester, and she looked like an angel. Spreading loveliness everywhere, over all with whom she came in touch, over good and evil. When a small number of people often come together in the same room, a tradition readily develops as to where each individual has one’s place, one’s station; it becomes a kind of picture a person can unroll for oneself when one so desires, a map of the terrain. So it is also with us in the Winchester mansion—together we form a picture. We were to drink tea here this evening. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Mrs. Winchester strives for an air of mystery. She wants to whisper and usually does it so well that she becomes entirely mute; I make no secret of my effusions to Merriam, her niece, an estimate of how many quarts of milk it takes for one pound of butter through the medium of cream and the dialectic of the butter churn. Indeed, it is not only something any young girl can listen to without hard, but, what is far more unusual, it is a solid and fundamental and edifying conversation that is equally ennobling to the head and the heart. And is no nature magnificent and wise in what she produces, what a precious gift is butter, what a glorious accomplishment of nature and art! It is a curious picture we make together. Mrs. Winchester almost vanishes before our eyes in pure agronomy; we go into the kitchen and the cellars, up into the attic, look at the chicken and ducks, geese et cetera. This was fascinating to me. But it could just be that I was the kind of young man who became old prematurely; it is possible. I sat late over the fire, and by the time I went to bed, I had well nigh forgotten my adventure with the man who vanished so mysteriously and the boy who seemed to come from nowhere. Next morning, finding I had abundant time at my disposal. What a reinvigorating power I felt from the Winchester—not the freshness of the morning air, not the sighing of the wind, not the coolness of the sea, not the fragrance of wine, its aroma—nothing in the World has this reinvigorating power. In this way the days go by. Mrs. Winchester seemed perfect happy in her mansion. Her bedroom faced the courtyard. Sometimes she stands on the balcony for a moment, and at night she looks up at the stars, unseen by all. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

In these nocturnal hours, I walk around like a ghost. Then I forget everything, have no plans, no reckonings, cast understanding overboard, expand and fortify my chest with deep sighs, a motion I need in order not to suffer from my systematic conduct. Others are virtuous by day, sin at night; I am dissimulation by day—at night I am sheer inspiration. When I notice it, far off on the horizon there comes a flashing intimation from a quite different World, to the astonishment of Mrs. Winchester as well as Merriam. Mrs. Winchester sees the lightning but hears nothing; Merriam hears the voice but sees nothing. However, at the same moment everything is in its quiet order; the conversation between Mrs. Winchester and me proceeds in its uniform way, like post horses in the stillness of the night the; the sad hum of the samovar accompanies it. At such moments, it can sometimes be uncomfortable in the drawing room, especially for Merriam. She has no one she can talk with or listen to. I can well understand that it must seem to Merriam as if Mrs. Winchester were bewitched, so perfectly does she move to the tempo of my rhythm. She cannot participate in this conversation either, because one of the means I have also used to outrage her is that I allow myself to treat her just like a child. It is not as if I for that reason would allow myself any liberties whatever with her, far from it. I well know the upsetting effects such things can have, and the point is that her womanliness must be able to rise up pure and beautiful again. Because of my intimate relationship with Mrs. Winchester, it is easy for me to treat her like a child who has no understanding of the World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Her womanliness is not insulted thereby but merely neutralized, for the fact that she does not know market prices cannot insult her womanliness, but the supposition that this is the ultimate in life can certainly be revolting to her. With my powerful assistance on this scored, Mrs. Winchester is out doing herself. She has become almost fanatic—something she can thank me for. The only thing about me that she cannot stand is that I have no position. Now I have adopted the habit of saying whenever a vacancy in some office is mentioned: “There is a position for me,” and thereupon discuss it very gravely with her. Merriam always perceives the irony, which is precisely what I want. The butler came in with more tea. I saw that he was lame. In the moment I remembered him. He was the man I met in the fog. “I met you yesterday afternoon, Mr. Brunton,” I said, as we went into the library. “Yesterday afternoon, sir?” He repeated. “You did not seem to observe me,” I said, carelessly. “I spoke to you, in fact; but you did not reply to me.” “But—indeed, I beg your parson, sir—it must have been someone else,” said the butler. “I did not go out yesterday afternoon.” How could this be anything but a falsehood? I might have been mistaken as to the man’s face; though it was such a singular face, and I had seen it quite plainly. However, how could I be mistaken as to his lameness? Besides, that curious trailing of the right foot, as if the ankle was broken, was not an ordinary lameness. I suppose I looked incredulous, for he added, hastily. “Even if I had not been preparing dinner for inspection, sire, I should not have gone out yesterday afternoon. It was too damp and foggy. I am obliged to be careful—I have a very delicate chest.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

My dislike to the man increased with every word he uttered. I did not ask myself with what motive he want on heaping lie upon lie; it was enough that, to serve his own ends, whatever those ends might be, he did lie with unparalleled audacity. “We will proceed to the examination, Mr. Brunton,” I said, contemptuously. He turned, if possible, a shade paler than before, bent his head silently, and called up the cuisine in their order. Profusely apologizing, he begged leave to occupy five minutes of my valuable time. He wished, under correction, to suggest a little improvement to many the menu more festive. “Under other circumstances…” I stopped and looked round. The butler repeated my last words. “You were saying, sir—under other circumstances?” I looked around again. “I seemed to me that there was someone here,” I said; “some third person, not a moment ago.” “I beg your pardon, sir—a third person?” “I saw his shadow on the ground, between yours and mine.” The mansion faced due north, and we were standing immediately behind it, with our backs to the sun. The place was bare, and open, and high; and our shadows, sharply defined, lay stretched before our feet. “A—a shadow?” he faltered. “Impossible.” There was not a bush or a true within half a mile. There was not a could in the sky. There was nothing, absolutely nothing, that could have cast a shadow. I admitted that t was impossible, and that I must have fancied it; and so went back to the matter of the menu. “Should you see Mrs. Winchester,” I said, “you are at liberty to say that I thought it a desirable improvement.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

“I am much obliged to you, sir. Thank you—thank you very much,” he said, cringing at every word. “But—but I had hoped that you might perhaps use your influence”—“Look there!” I interrupted. “Is that fancy?” We were now close under the blank walls of the kitchen. On this wall, laying to the full sunlight, our shadows—mine and the butler’s—were projected. And there too—no longer between his and mine, but a little way apart, as if the intruder were standing back—there, as sharply defined as if cast by line-light on a prepared background, I again distinctly saw, though but for a moment, that third shadow. As I spoke, as I looked round, it was gone! “Did you not see it?” I asked. He shook his head. “I—I saw nothing” he said, faintly. “What was it?” His lips were white. He seemed scarcely able to stand. “But you must have seen it!” I exclaimed. “It fell just there—where that bit of ivy grows. There must be some boy hiding—it was a boy’s shadow, I am confident. “A boy’s shadow!” he echoed, looking round in a wild, frightened way. “There is no place—for a boy—to hide.” “Place or no place,” I said, angrily, “if I catch him, he shall feel the weight of my cane!” I searched backwards and forwards in every direction, the butler, with his scared face, limping at my heels; but, rough and irregular as the ground was, there was not a hole in it big enough to shelter a rabbit. “But what was it?” I said, impatiently. “An—an illusion. Begging your pardon, sir—and illusion.” He looked so like a beaten hound, so frightened, so fawning, that I felt I could with lively satisfaction have transferred the threatened caning to his own shoulders. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

“But you saw it?” I said, impatiently. “No, sir. Upon my honour, no, sir. I saw nothing—nothing whatever.” His looks belied his words. I felt certain that he had not only seen the shadow, but that he knew more about it than he chose to tell. I was by this time really angry. To be made the object of a boyish trick, and to be hoodwinked by the connivance of the butler, was too much. It was an insult to myself and my office. I scarcely knew what I said; something short and stern at all events. Then, having said it, I turned my back upon Mr. Brunton and the mansion, and walked rapidly back to the village. As I was leaving the Winchester, it was a gloomy evening. I was standing high in the midst of a somber deer-park some six or seven miles in circumference. An avenue of palm trees, which led up to the house looked so lonely. The butler said, “If you would but be persuaded to say a day longer, a new experience awaits you. I will take you down the Winchester shaft, and show you the home of the gnomes and trolls. I am the king of Hades, and rule the under World as well as the upper. There is gold everywhere underlying this mansion. The whole place is honeycombed with shafts and galleries. One of our richest seams runs under this house, and there are upwards of forty men at work in it a quarter of a mile below our feet here every day. Another leads right away under the park, Heaven only knows how far! My father began working it five-and-twenty years ago, and we have gone on working it ever since; yet it shows no sign of failing. That is why Mrs. Winchester is rich enough to commit whatever design follies she pleases; and that is saying a good deal. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
“But then, to be always squandering money—always building a rambling mansion—always gratifying the impulse of the moment—is that happiness? Mrs. Winchester has been experimenting for several decades; and with what result? Would you like to see?” He snatched up a lamp and led the way through a long suite of unfinished rooms, the floors of which were piled high with packing cases of all sizes and shapes, labelled with the names of various foreign ports and the addresses of foreign agents innumerable. What did they contain? Precious marbles from Italy and Greece and Asia Minor; priceless paintings by old and modern masters; antiquities from the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates; enamels from Persia, porcelain from China, bronzes from Japan, strange sculptures from Peru; arms, mosaics, ivories, wood-carvings, skins, tapestries, old Italian cabinets, painted bride-chess, Etruscan terracottas; treasures of all countries, or all ages, never even unpacked since they crossed that threshold which the mistress’s foot had crossed but twice during the ten years it had taken to buy them! Should she ever open them, ever arrange them, every enjoy them? Perhaps—if she becomes weary of wandering—if she remarried—if she built a gallery to receive them. If not—well, she might found and endow a museum; or leave the things to the nation. What did it matter? Collecting was like fox-hunting; the pleasure in the pursuit, and ended with it!” Breakfast over, we went around the mansion, and saw the men working. Just as we were about to enter an underground tunnel—a tall, slender lad, with a fishing rod across his shoulder, came out rom one of the side doors of the mansion, crossed the open at field, and disappeared among the tree-trunks on the opposite side. I recognized him instantly. It was the boy whom I saw the other day, just after meeting the butler in the meadow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
“If the boy think he is going fishing in a fruit orchard,” I said, “he will find out his mistake.” “What boy,” asked Mr. Brunton, looking back. “That boy who crossed over yonder, a minute ago.” “Yonder!—in front of us?” “Certainly. You must have seen him?” “No I.” “You did no see him?—a tall, thin boy, in a grey suit, with a fishing-rod over his shoulder. He disappeared behind those nectarine trees.” Mr. Brunton looked at me with surprise. “You are dreaming!” he said. “No living thing—not even a rabbit—has crossed our path since we left the mansion.” “I am not in the habit of dreaming with my eyes open,” I replied, quickly. He laughed, and put his arm through mine. “Eyes or no eyes,” he said, “you are under an illusion this time!” An illusion—the very word made use of by the butler! What did it mean? Could I, in truth, no longer rely upon the testimony of my senses? A thousand half-formed apprehensions flashed across me in a moment, I remembered the illusions of Nicolini, the bookseller, and other similar cases of visual hallucination, and I asked myself if I has suddenly become afflicted in like manner. “By jove! This is a queer sight!” exclaimed Mr. Brunton. And then I found that we had emerged from the fruit orchard, and were looking down upon the bed of what yesterday was a lake. It was indeed a queer sight—an oblong, irregular basin of the blackest slime, with here and there a sullen pool, and round the margin an irregular fringe of bulrushes. At some little distance along the bank—less than quarter of a mile from where we were standing—a gaping crowd had gathered. All the foremen seemed to turn out to stare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Hats were pulled off and curtsies dropped at Mr. Brunton’s approach. He, meanwhile, came up smiling, with a pleasant word for everyone. “Well,” he said, “are you looking for the lake, my friends?” “I see a log of rotten timber sticking half in and half out of the mud,” one of the men said, “and something—a long reed, apparently…by Jove! I believe it is a fishing rod!” “It is a fishin’ rod, squire,” said the blacksmith with rough earnestness; “an” if yon rotten timber bayn’t an unburied corpse, mun I never stroike hammer on anvil agin!” There was a buzz of acquiescence from the bystanders. ‘Twas an unburied corpse, such enough. Nobody doubted it. “It must have come out, whatever it is, Mr. Brunton said presently. “Five feet of mud, do you say? Then here is a sovereign apiece for the first two fellows who wade through it and bring that object to land!” It was, in truth, an unburied corpse; part of the trunk only above the surface. They tried to life it; but it had been so long under water, and was in so advanced a stage of decomposition, that to bring it to shore without a shutter was impossible. Being cross-questioned, they thought, from the slenderness of the form, that it must be the body of a boy. “There’s the poor chap’s rod, anyhow,” said the blacksmith, laying it gently down upon the turf. Mrs. Winchester was summoned and told of the news. That night she rushed to her blue séance room and demanded the spirits tell her what happened to the boy. “I invoke thee, and move thee, and stir thee up O Spirit Leraikha,” said Mrs. Winchester. “From the 30 Legions of Spirits, appear unto my eyes before the circle in the likeness of a man in and tell me what has happened to this boy!” #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

“The words Adam spoke to God, and all things of water were as blood,” replied the Spirit Leraikha. “In the names Alpha and Omega, I am the God of Secret Truth who liveth forever, the All-Powerful. It is to I, to whom all creatures are obedient and in the Extreme Justice and Anger of God that I withdrawal this veil that is before the glory of God, might; and by the creatures of living breath before the Thone whose eyes are east and west; by the fire in the fire of just Glory of Mine Throne; by the Holy ones of Heaven; and by the secret wisdom of God, I, exalted in power, has been stirred up to cast a vision of the past and make clear the present! The secrets of truth in voice and understanding comes: This is the corpse of a boy of perhaps ten and four or ten and five years of age. There was a fracture three inches long at the back of the skull, evidently fatal. This might, of course, have been an accidental injury; but when the body came to be raised from where it layeth, it was found to be pinned down by a pitchfork, the handle of which had been afterwards whittled off, so as not to show above water, a discovery tantamount to evidence of murder. The features of the victim were decomposed beyond recognition; but enough of the hair remained to show that it has been short and sandy. He had a passion for fishing and was in the habit of slipping away at school-hours, and showed himself the more cunning and obstinate more he was punished. At last there came a day when the butler tracked him to the place his rod was concealed and beat the miserable lad about the head and arms with a heavy stick. Pin through hand and blood was running out of his mouth until he fell insensible and ceased to breathe. He dragged the body among the bulrushes by the water’s edge, and there concealed it as well as he could. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

“At night, when the neighbours and staff were in bed asleep, he stole out by starlight, taking with him a pitchfork, a coil of rope, a couple of iron-bars, and a knife. He weighted and sunk the corpse, and pinned it down by the neck with his pitchfork. He then cut away the handle of the fork; hid the fishing-rod among the reeds; and believed, as murderers always believe, that discovery was impossible. His dreadful secret had of late become intolerable. He was haunted by an invisible Presence. That Presence sat with him at table, followed him in his walks stood behind him in the mansion, and watched by his side. He never saw it; but he felt that it was always there. Sometimes he raves of a shadow on the walls of this mansion. I have now told you all that there is at present to tell.” When a community looks only for evidence of guilt and ignores or suppresses all contradictory evidence, the result is a witch hunt. Witch hunts are often used to conceal more heinous crimes. And when a witch hunt occurs, which is the very opposite of what was going on in the case of the murdered boy, the community feels itself so beset by evil that it is no longer capable of perceiving the good. The primary causes of witch hunts are clear. It is usually due to corruption, an outbreak of epidemic hysteria which usually ordinates in experiments with the occult. And the hysterical hallucinations of the afflicted persons are confirmed by some concrete evidence of actual witchcraft and by many confessions, the majority of them hysterical. A number of other explanations have been offered, but most of them are more or less unconvincing. It has been argued that the outbreak is usually due to some new religion. Typically a kind of insanity resulting from sexual repression or denying one’s true sexual nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Winchester Mystery House

It’s a beautiful day for a stroll through the gardens. Today, Winchester Mystery House marks 99 years since our lady of mystery, Sarah Winchester passed away peacefully in her bedroom of Llanda Villa. We mark her passing with the ringing of the bell 13 times as is our tradition. Thank you Sarah for creating this iconic home that we continue to share with guests from around the world.
🎟️ Link in bio.

A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Some People Feel they May Be Flying Apart–We Do Not Forgive Because it Benefits Us!
My turn at last, my Loquacious if Lofty Friend. “How multitudinous are Your sweetness, O Lord, which You have hoarded for those who fear you!” That was the shout of the Psalmist (31.19), and it is my shout too. However, what are You to those who love? And to those who serve You with their whole heart? You are the sweetness of contemplation—who can describe it?—that You bestow generously on those who love You. To this point, in the most generous way possible, You have shown me the sweetness of Your charity. How do I know? You have made me into something better than I was, what I am not, and when I have strayed far afield, You found me and led me back. Hence it is that I serve You now. What is more? You have laid down the one condition, that I should love You. No big deal! I do that already. Although not very well, as You are so fond of pointing out. O Fountain of Perpetual Love! What may I say about You? How can I forget You after You kept me on Your list of friends, even after I pined away and died the spiritual death. Your response to Your servant at that unhappy time was extravagant, an act of friendship, making my every hope a mercy, and my every merit a grace. “What can I give You in return for that grace?” I ask with the Psalmist (116.12). Not everyone has received it. Not everyone has been called to leave everything behind, renounce the World, enter the monastic life. At this point—and, before You say it, O Lord, I do have a point—may I ask a stupid question? What is so great about serving You? We are already under all obligation to serve You; yes, the whole of Humankind. So pardon me if I do not think it is such a great new idea. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What is really great, though—and this is an argument You seemed to have missed—is that You picked a pauper and a pooper like me for You monastery and put me in the company of Your beloved self-actualized. Now that is astounding! That is astonishing! Look at all this Earthly clutter of mine! It is Yours too, as the First Book of Chronicles has it (29.14), at least according to the terms of our present agreement, and I use bits and bobs of it to serve You. However, that is the wrong end to approach it from. You serve me more than I serve You. Just take a look at Heaven and Earth. You created them for the use of Humankind. They are right here in front of our eyes, and every day they do just what You have ordered them to do. And this is just the beginning. “You have ordered the Angels to minister to Humankind,” as the Psalmist has it (91.11). Transcending all of this transcendence is Your deigning to serve Humanity and promising to give Yourself to us. All those thousands of gifts You have given me, what can I give in return? I know. I will serve You all the days of my life! Better, I will serve You just one day of my life, but I will make it a day of perfect service! Ah, my Lord and Gracious Friend, “You are worth the perfect service, and all the honour and eternal praise that go with it,” as the twenty-four elders in Revelations sang to the Spirit on the throne (4.11). As for me, poor servant that I am, I have vowed to serve You with every fiber of my being, to praise You without ever stinting. That is my wish. That is my desire. And you know what I like best? Whenever I come undone, You kindly see to my mending. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Great honor? To serve You! Great glory? To condemn everything else because of You. Like me, those who on the spur of the moment enlisted in Your Most Holy Service have a great grace. That is to say, we who ditched every carnal delight now discover the most delightful consolation of the Holy Spirit. We who ignored the World’s broad highways and followed Your pointy sign down the narrow dirt road, as Matthew quoted You (7.14), are having a fairly pleasant journey. How sweet is the service of the Lord! Yes, my Lordly if sometimes Leery Friend, we like to think the monastery a great and happy place, and we hope You think the same. And yes, religious service has a lot to recommend it. As You say, it does indeed promote Freedom and Holiness. And it does render Humankind equal to Angels, satisfactory to God, unwelcome to Demons, and commendable to all faithful! It is a life one can learn to love and embrace for a lifetime. A service promising the Summum Bonum. With the Gaudium Perenne to boot! In the Church, we are frequently reminded about the importance forgiving one another. We are told that we are “required to forgive all humans,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 64.10. Forgiveness is our responsibility. However, when we teach our children the principle of repentance, more is involved than saying “I am sorry.” Repentance required that we change our lives and, if possible, make amends for our mistakes. This is where the principle of restitution comes in. Restitution has always been a part of the gospel plan. We read in the law of Moses that when one has sinned against another, “one shall even restore it in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more hereto,” reports Leviticus 6.5. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

When we make a restitution for our sins, we show our Father in Heaven that we are willing to change our lives. As parents, we can d much to instill this important principle in our family. Restitution should be made for mistakes. If we run into the back of someone else’s car, it is called an “accident.” However, the law still expects us to pay for having the other car repaired. Restitution is just one part of repentance. Repentance really involves changing our hearts and our lives and accepting the atonement of Christ. Everyone needs to know that God loved them so much that “He gave his only begotten Son,” reports John 3.16. God did that so people could repent. He paid the wages for your sins. The wages of sin is death. It is also important to understand that restitution would be of little worth without the great sacrifice of the Lord Jesus Christ. We are so tied to the foolish idea which regards body and mind as two wholly separate and different entities, that all too many regard it as undignified to practice physical exercises in order to influence the mind. The discoveries of mentalism show how foolish is such an attitude, how much we miss in outer helps to inner attainment. Whether or not someone else provides restitution to us when we have been hurt, we should still forgive. Two types of studies inform what we know about forgiveness and mental health: studies of people with forgiving personalities, and studies that teach people how to forgive. Some research examines the mental health of people who already have unforgiving or forgiving personalities. Some people seem to harbor grudges, and some practice forgiveness across a range of hurtful experiences. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Unforgiving people—whether college students in research studies or clients in therapy—feel more anxious, depressed, and inferior than forgiving people. But why? Does a forgiving personality result in better mental health? Does better mental health make it easier to forgive across situations and over time? Or does adherence to faith—or even the support of family and friends—promote both a forgiving personality style and better mental health? Although we do not yet know the answers to these questions, we do know something about the effects of forgiving in response to specific hurts. In separate universities, both Robert Enright and Everett Worthington Jr. have studied the effects of teaching forgiveness. Can people learn to forgive? It seems so—for adolescents and the elderly, men and women, survivors of incest and people with everyday hurts, and people in individual and group therapy. What are the mental-health benefits? Generally, forgiveness therapies increase clients’ willingness and ability to forgive. When clients complete forgiveness therapies, they feel less grief, depression, anxiety, and anger. They also feel more self-esteem, more hope, more-optimistic attitudes toward family members and other offenders, and more desire for reconciliation. Forgiveness therapies work better than control conditions without treatment. However, forgiveness therapies do not always surpass supportive discussion therapies (both treatments can benefit mental health). Even so, people who forgive more—regardless of the type of therapy—have lower depression and anxiety, and high self-esteem. If clients feel wounded by or vengeful toward an offender—forgives therapy can both help them forgive and improve their mental health. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Most physical health studies have focused primarily on the health consequences of being unforgiving. In type A personalities—highly competitive, ambitious, rushed, easily angered, and hostile—hostility is the dangerous part, ratcheting up the risk of dying early from heart disease. Why? For one, hostile people are more physically reactive when they perceive interpersonal offenses (and they might even be more likely to perceive offenses in the first place). When angered, hostile people experience an exaggerated release of stress hormones, a large cholesterol dump into the blood stream, and a suppressed immune response, to name a few. On top of that, hostile people typically smoke more, overeat, and drink more alcohol—all risky for heart health. As if that were not enough, hostile people often lack social support—they are not as much fun to be around!—placing them at risk for both mental and physical problems. If hostility—an unforgiving personality style—is physically dangerous, then reducing hostility should reduce coronary problems. Indeed, type A’s who learned to manage their anger and become more forgiving also improved their cardiac health. What are some other consequences of being unforgiving or forgiving? College students in one study remembered someone from real life who had hurt them. At different points in the experiment, they focused on four different reactions to his offender: they mentally rehashed the hurt and nursed a grudge (two unforgiving responses), and they focused on the humanity of the offender and tried to genuinely forgive him or her (two forgiving responses). #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

When the students focused on unforgiving responses, their blood pressure rates, heart rates, sweat levels, brow muscle tension, and negative feelings: all were significantly higher than when the students were forgiving. By contrast, forgiving responses induced calmer feelings and physical responses. It appears that harboring unforgiveness comes at an emotional and physiological cost. By contrast, cultivating forgiveness may cut these costs and even bring some benefits, at least in the short term. The jury is out on the long-terms health effects of forgiveness. Perhaps future research will trac people over time and document long-term health outcomes. Will forgiving and unforgiving responses have long term effects on health if they are sufficiently frequent, intense, and enduring? When physiological systems stay highly aroused, they can eventually lead to physical breakdown. If forgiveness clams that arousal, it could buffer health. The challenge we now face is to help people learn not only how to forgive in the short term, but how to make forgiving a way of life. When we consistently practice the virtue of forgiving, we may see the greatest mental and physical health benefits. As Christians, we care about forgiveness and might readily embrace the beneficial messages about forgiveness and health. However, does this promising research have any potential pitfalls? Let us look at three examples. Can research prove Christian claims? Scientific research on forgiveness—and other virtues—holds value for addressing some questions (such as who is more likely to forgive, and what effects forgiveness has on feelings and physiology). #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

However, the scientific method in incapable of testing the ultimate truth claims of Christianity. Although science can illuminate the relationships among forgiveness-related thoughts, feelings, and physiology, science cannot tell us whether we ought to forgive. And whereas science can assess whether certain people judge forgiveness to be a virtue (and whether this is related to their behaviour), science cannot determine whether forgiving is virtuous. Is good behavior always good for us? It seems reasonable that something that we believe is good would also be good for us. However, this is not necessarily so. Being faithful and doing what is good does not inevitably secure good mental and physical health. People may alienate us because our beliefs are countercultural. We may suffer scorn for our faithful labours. We may feel depressed as we work with the sick and sorrowing. Sometimes discipleship has a cost. Why forgive? Some Christians have come to think that the reason they should forgive and should not hold grudges is because forgiveness is healthier. The because in that sentence is problematic. As valuable as research data are, they simply cannot serve as our ultimate motivation. Scientific data describe the way things are and help us predict what will happen in the future. However, these predictions do not always hold up. What would happen if—in future research—we discovered that forgiveness was so difficult for some people that it caused stress, negative emotion, and physical problems? Would that mean that we should stop forgiving? What would Christians do? In the best case, Christians’ motivation to forgive would be unshaken. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We do not forgive because it benefits us. Those benefits may be a welcome by-product. However, our motivation to forgive is rooted in God’s call to forgive, our gratitude for God’s forgiveness of us, and our desire to imitate Christ—the one who perfectly modeled forgiveness and even now perfects our efforts to practice forgiveness. Many therapists believe that some people need to go to pieces, to become totally disorganized, in order to have a chance at better organization. I think this may be true as things stand at present. Our understanding of psychotherapy is not sufficiently developed for therapists to be able to help people disintegrate just in the right area and to the right extent, and in fifty-minute packages! Nor is enough known as yet about the circumstances in which the natural healing process (vis medicatrix naturae) will work best, and how we may encourage it. There is still much to learn. What is clear, however, is that some people feel that they may be falling apart, or even flying apart. An absolutely terrifying state of mind, an unbearable agony; yet this may have already happened in infancy: the unbearable has already happened. Yet is maybe that this is a thing that may need to happen to them again before they can get to an integrated personality-structure which feels better at a fundamental level. It is also clear that they need to be held somehow during that falling-apart time. It is surely almost obvious that being held by a hospital organization or a bed or drug. In practice, however, there is still a lot that psychotherapists need to learn. A little more is known about more controlled therapeutic regressions and relaxations of integration. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

At certain times in therapy, we may be in touch with a baby part of ourselves, and its terrible experiences, while at an adult level, too, all is confusion, disintegration, lack of connectedness, lack of context or meaning. This horrible experience is nothing new. What is new is the experience of feeling like this in the presence of someone who can take all this without losing one’s hold. At first, the adult part of us cannot hold on, never having been able to since babyhood. However, the therapist holds it, is not swallowed up by it, does not deny it but continues to be in touch both with the disintegrated adult and the disintegrated baby parts. In due course, if things go well, the adult part of us co-operates with the therapist in holding the baby and, further along in time, the therapist’s help is no longer needed. Then, the adult is able to feel the baby’s disintegration without feeling overwhelmed by it—the disintegration is integrated as part of the personality: it is not the whole. It is this that helps people get better. The facilitating environment is there to enable the maturational processes to proceed: safety, recognition, opportune reality-presentation. What else? A facilitating environment is in the end not enough. People are needed. Persons. Personal relationships between two whole persons, because one of them is still a tenuous patchwork of disintegrated and suffering adult and baby bits, even then it is important that there is a person in the relationship who is adult and whole, and that is the therapist. Like a good parent, like a good friend, the therapist is there to maintain the consoling knowledge that there are still good things, and most basically, that the good relationship has survived. “You are still you, I am still I, we are still together and sharing.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

“You and I are both at risk of natural disaster but the relationship is surviving.” “You may be (I may be) more confused, more lost, more inept, more of a coward, more sadistic or dirtier than you wanted to believe, but we both know it now and the relationship is still there.” “Your parent(s) may have been more confused, lost, inept, cowardly, sadistic, or dirty than you wanted to believe, but we both know it now, and the relationship is still intact.” That is what holding is. It is not easy to achieve. If analysts concentrate on either the grandiose or the wretched part of the psyche, they waste their time. Both must be accepted, both held: when they are, then parts of the personality which were previously disowned will contribute strength and solidity to the whole. Less than two centuries ago most humans were working on the land, the sea, and the forests and mines. In the cities they worked in hand-operated workshops and the cities themselves were no so large; the countryside was close at hand. They worked hard and long, using the muscles of their bodies, and so did their wives. This involuntary exercise of the muscular system, this exposure to sunshine and fresh air, this limitation to fresh and unpreserved foods, kept most of them healthy and strong even if the lack of better housing and sanitation kept short the lives of some of them. Then came the industrial revolution, when the machine and the civilization it created changed their habits of living. Now they crowd into cities, enter sedentary occupations, sit in chairs for long hours, or stand at mechanical assembly lines. Their bodies become soft, flabby, and undeveloped. Their organs of digestion function imperfectly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Yet such is their hypnotized condition that these people do not realize the harm which modern ways have done them; indeed, they usually pity their ancestors! However, those who do realize it and feel uneasy in their conscience about it, need to make a constructive effort to eliminate the deterioration and the atrophy which are the price paid for straying away from Nature. There is no better way to bring the body under control than the way used to bring the mind under control—to put in under a daily routine of exercise and to have a fixed time for their repeated practice. The best time naturally to do exercise is on rising from bed, but it may not be the most convenient time. If the body is a battery and needs regular recharging (through relaxation practices), it is also a structure and needs reconditioning (through indicated exercises). Cicero’s prescription to follow the daily period of exercise with a period of rest is an excellent one. It is possible with only twelve months of regular, daily work to build up a perfect physical control. The ordinary bodily exercises can soon become tiring to middle-aged people. Moreover they take twice or treble the time needed for the simple culture of the spine, which is the most concentrated form of exercise possible. It stretches the body to the limit. It may be too much to ask students who have reached middle or old age to try all these exercises in physical betterment or follow all these instructions in physical condition. However, what they may find impossible to perform or what they may be disinclined to practice, they can still make advantageous use in the following way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Let them bring such teaching to the notice of younger persons, to children in their teens and those just beyond the threshold of adulthood—for it is far easier for these younger persons to do than for older ones. The effort required is much less, the habits not so much encrusted. The body is deliberately made to exercise itself in certain attitudes and gestures. Any gesture become an attitude when it is arrested. Care of the physical organism will require attention to physical exercise as well as physical relaxation and to deep and abdominal breathing. The disuse of some muscles and the misuse of others can only lead to bodily faults. Restore he first to use, correct the second. As the new 20th century opened, antiquated Victorian social patterns were further substantially modified by a Progressive Era emphasis on the housewife as a “domestic engineer.” This was consciously advocated by Progressives and middle-road feminists to elevate household activities to the realm of skilled domestic engineering in order to provide housewives both higher status and greater personal freedom. No longer could a middle-class woman know only how to manage servants; now she was a manager responsible for the “scientific management” of the home. This meant she had to know budgeting, sanitation, and the characteristics of foods (balanced meals); she had to be an informed consumer. This emphasis on domestic science was reflected in schools and colleges, which established departments of Home Economics. The land grant colleges which had first brought professional programs such as dentistry and engineering onto campuses, were also in the forefront in establishing programs of home economics for the application of domestic science. (Following World War II, the idea of scientific management was further extended by universities into the realm of personal relations with the proliferation of courses on Marriage and Family.) #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

All the concern with domestic management was designed to increase women’s freedom by making the home role more professional and less restrictive. Mary Pattison made this explicit in her influential Principles of Domestic Engineering, where she sought to make the home more efficient by standardizing household tasks into science (May Pattison, Principles of Domestic Engineering: or What, Why, and How of a Home, Trow Press, New York, 1915). Through the use of stopwatch and charts plus several thousand questionnaires that had been distributed to Ne Jersey housewives, the efficient ways to cook clean, and sew were detailed. The titles of some of the chapters give a sense of the scope of the work. Titles of chapters include, “An Auto-Operative House,” “The Business of Purchasing,” “The Regeneration of the Kitchen,” “Personal Freedom,” “Organization of the Family,” “The Cultural Value of Housework,” “The Organization of the Consumer,” and “Housework and Democracy.” The scientific management of the home was tied to progressive idealism. According to the book’s final paragraph, “the truly progressive home is akin to democracy’s method…Domestic engineering would encourage cooperation between men and women leading to personal freedom and personal independence.” The new progressive idealism shows Democracy as a Religion, where men and women guided by God, united, shall work for its issues. “He is in glory, Who whilst He rejoices in Himself, needs not further praise,” reports Moral xxxii, 7. To be in glory, however, is the same as to be blessed. Therefore, since we enjoy God in respect to our intellect, because “vision is the whole of reward,” as Augustine says (De Civ. Dei. xxii), it would seem that beatitude is said to be in God in respect of His intellect. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Beatitude is perfect good of an intellect operation, by which in some sense it grasps everything. When the beatitude of every intellectual nature consists in understanding. Now in God, to be and to understand are one and the same thing; differing only in the manner of our understanding them. Beatitude must therefore be assigned to God in respect of God in respect of His intellect; as also to the blessed, who are called blessed [beati] by reason of the assimilation to His beatitude. This argument proves that beatitude belongs to God; not that beatitude pertains essentially to Him under the aspect of His essence; but rather under the aspect of His intellect. Since beatitude is good, it is the object of the will; now the object is understood as prior to the act of power. Whence in our manner of understanding, divine beatitude precedes the act of will at rest in it. This cannot be other than the act of the intellect; and thus beatitude is to be found in an act of the intellect. With both the brief Glimpse and the lasting Fulfilment comes a strong feeling of release. This refers to release from all the various kinds of limitation and restriction which have hemmed and oppressed one heretofore. Like a prisoner emerging from a gloomy cell after many years of an invalid liberated from long confinement in a hospital bed, one will feel an overwhelming sense of relief as the glimpse deepens and all cares, all burdens, fade away. There is an air of effectiveness in the experience which accompanies the glimpse, a feeling that here is real power ready for use and easy to use, in the way that the Overself directs, of course. It is like the feeling of returning to a well-beloved home after long absence, a joy whose arisal is spontaneous and unavoidable. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

When the glimpse is at its most, one hears within one the harmony of things like a joyous song. The stillness made one feel as religious and reverential as could be, yet one remained unpraying, even unthinking. The base, the mean, the unworthy, and the low seem alien and far from one: the noble, the high, the true, and the ideal seem to become one’s own very nature. From this rare contact one draws an unspeakable peace, a divine upliftment. Too many lives have a hard grey colour about them. The glimpse changes this, for an hour or a day, and puts a delicate pastel beauty in its place. All that is negative in one’s character fades away for the time of this glimpse, as if it had never existed. For one feels that there is pure harmony at the heart of things, within the Universe’s Mind, and that one has momentarily touched it. In these enchanted moments, all life takes on the shadowlike quality of a dream. The gulf between the impersonal calm of one’s present state and the egotistical emotion of one’s earlier one, is immense. The sudden Olympian elation which the glimpse gives, the unfamiliar feeling that it is like looking through a window on an entirely different and wholly glorious World of being, the inner knowing that this is reality—these things make it a benediction. When one is in that consciousness, there is nothing either in place or time which one wants for. For one’s mind is at peace. It is a strange paradox that in this experience although a human becomes infinitely humbler—for one has to be passive to surrender, if it is to happen at all—one finds at the same time an immense dignity within oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

In these glorious moments the awareness of evil in the World faces out; by contrast the continuity of original goodness stays unbroken. The sense of well-being which comes with a glimpse spreads into the body, lights up the mind, glows in the emotions. In its enfolding peace, one will lose one’s Earthly burdens for a time; by its brooding wisdom, one will comprehend the necessity of renunciation; through its mysterious spell, one will confer grace on suffering humans. As its beauty seeps into one and affects one’s entire feeling-nature, all one’s grievances against other humans, against life itself, dissolve. All regrets for the past, complaints about the present, and grumbles over the future, pass away. Even more, all contempt or hatred for other humans passes too. The glimpse brings a feeling of enchantment. It is the opening of a secret door. The effect is a magical release from burdens and a flooding by hope. So, friends, every day do something that will not compute. Love the Lord. Love the World. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be humble. Love someone who does not deserve it (from afar). Denounce corruption and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Praise ignorance, for what humans have not encountered one has not destroyed. Ask the questions that have no answers. Invest in the millennium. Plant redwoods. Say that your main crop is the forest that you did not plant, that you will not live to harvest. Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion—put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Expect the end of the World. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as the honourable do not go cheap for power, please honourable people more than others. Ask yourself: Will his satisfy an honourable person satisfied to a bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Let easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the general and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trial, the way you did not go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection. For the sake of Thy truth, Thy covenant, Thy greatness and glory; for the sake of Thy Torah, They majesty, Thy troth and Thy fame; for the sake of Thy mercy, Thy goodness, Thy unity, Thine honour, and Thy wisdom; for the sake of Thy sovereignty, Thine eternity, Thy mystic bond with us, Thy strength and Thy splendor; for the sake of Thy righteousness, Thy holiness, Thine abundant mercies, and Thy divine presence, do Thou save us; for the sake of Thy praise, do Thou save us, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, do Thou save us. Save Thou the World’s foundation-stone, the Temple, the house of Thy choice, the threshing-floor of Ornan, the Jebusite, from whom David bought the site of the Temple, the sacred shrine, even Mount Moriah, hill of revelation and abode of Thy majesty, where once David dwelt, godliest of Lebanon, lovely height, the joy of the whole Earth, perfection of beauty, lodging-place of righteousness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Book of Job tells us, “He who uncovers mysteries hidden in darkness; brings utter darkness into the light.” Will man’s unquenching need for discovery bring about his end? You are hogging the conversation, my Garrulous if Gracious Friend, the way I hog the fire in the Winter! Do let me get a word in edgeways. The Great Abraham again, in Genesis again (18.27): “Let me speak to My Lord when I am dust and ash!” If that is not just the perfect description of myself about to pray! Of course, I could puff myself up a little, but then You would get mad. You would stand against me, line up my iniquities, and use them as witnesses against me! How could I contradict them? You would have me then. However, what would happen to me? I would vilify myself and reduce myself to nothing. I would give up all claim to reputation. I would pestle myself to death, or at least into dust. All this, and still Your grace would favor me, Still Your light would illumine my heart. However, still all would not be well. Everything about me that seemed so good, You would drown like kittens. And in the very puddles made by my nothingness. That done, You would show me to myself, what I am, what I was, where I have arrived, because, as he Psalmist has said in the Latin Bible, “I am nothing, and I know nothing,” (72.22). If, however, You take even a quick look at me, a sidelong glance maybe, I take on new strength, new joy. Wow! Raised up, revived, embraced. A feather, yes, but also a dead weight. Lett me go, O Lord, and I will plummet to the Lowest Depths at my slowest speed. Your love does this, preventing me from falling and raising me up once I have fallen, guarding me from grave dangers and yet rescuing me from all scrapes. Love of self—that was the dagger that did me in. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
However, seeking You and loving You, I found not only You, but also myself. Then something happened. From that mutual love, I slid down the slippery slope again, bottoming out in the deepest wells. That is because You, O Sweetest Lord, You do for me far beyond what I could earn and above what I could ever dare hope or ask. Blessed are You, my God. That is the prayer of one who is all unworthy of Your blessings. Even to the ingrates and apostates Your infinite goodness never ceases doing good. Turn us around till we face You again, that again we may be thankful, dutiful, prayerful. What else can we say, except, with Isaiah, that “You are only salvation,” (33.2) and, with the Psalmist, our only “virtue and strength” (46.1). The Nature-religions merely reinforce that view of Nature which we spontaneously adopt in our moments of rude health and cheerful brutality; the anti-natural religions do the same for the view we take in moments of compassions, fastidiousness, or lassitude. The Christian doctrine does neither of these things. If any human approaches it with the idea that because Jahweh is the God of fertility our lasciviousness is going to be authorized or that the Selectiveness and Vicariousness of God’s method will excuse us for imitating (as “Heroes,” “Supermen” or social parasites) the lover Selectiveness and Vicariousness of Nature, one will be stunned and repelled by the inflexible Christian demand for chastity, humility, mercy and justice. On the other hand, if we come to it regarding the death which precedes every re-birth, or the fact of inequality, or our dependence on others and their dependence on us, as the mere odious necessities of an evil cosmos, and hoping to be delivered into transparent and “enlightened” spirituality where all these things just vanish, we shall be equally disappointed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

We shall be told that, in one sense, and despite enormous differences, it is “the same all the way up”; that hierarchical inequality, the need for self surrender, the willing sacrifice of self to others, and the thankful and loving (but unashamed) acceptance of others’ sacrifice to us, hold say in the realm beyond Nature. It is indeed only love that makes the difference: all those very same principles which are evil in the World of selfishness and necessity are good in the World of love and understanding. This, as we accept this doctrine of the higher World, we make new discoveries about the lower World. It is from that hill that we first really understand the landscape of this valley. Here, at last, we find (as we do not find either in the Nature-religions or in the religions that deny Nature) a real illumination: Nature is being lit up by a light from beyond Nature. Someone is speaking who knows more about her than can be known from inside her. Throughout this doctrine it is, of course, implied that Nature is infected with evil. Those great key-principles which exists as modes of goodness in the Divine Life, take on, in her operations, not merely a less perfect form (that we should, on any view, expect) but forms which I have been driven to describe as morbid or depraved. And this depravity could not be totally removed without the drastic re-making of Nature. Complete human virtue could indeed banish from human life all the evils that now arise in it from Vicariousness and Selectiveness and retain only the good: but the wastefulness and painfulness of non-human Nature would remain—and would, of course, continue to infect human life in the form of disease. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

And destiny which Christianity promises to man clearly involves a “redemption” or “re-making” of Nature which could not stop at Man, or even at this planet. We are told that “the whole creation” is in travail, and that Man’s re-birth will be the signal for hers. This gives rise to several problems, the discussion of which puts that whole doctrine of the Incarnation in a clearer light. In the first place, we ask how the Nature created by a good God comes to be in this condition? By which question we may mean either how she comes to be imperfect—to leave “room for improvement” as the schoolmaster says in their reports—or else, how she comes to be positively depraved. If we ask the question in the first sense, the Christian answer (I think) is that God, from the first, created her such as to reach her perfection by a process in time. He made an Earth at first “without form and void” and brought it by degrees to its perfection. In this, as elsewhere, we see the familiar pattern—descent from God to the formless Earth and re-ascent from the formless to the finished. In that sense a certain degree of “evolutionism” or “developmentalism” is inherent in Christianity. So much for Nature’s imperfection; her positive depravity calls for a very different explanation. According to the Christians this is all due to sin: the sin both of men and of powerful, non-human beings, supernatural but created. The unpopularity of this doctrine arises from the widespread Naturalism of our age—the belief that nothing but Nature exists and that if anything else did she is protected from it by a Maginot Line—and will disappear as this error is corrected. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

To be sure, the morbid inquisitiveness about such beings which led our ancestors to a pseudo-science of Demonology, is to be sternly discouraged: our attitude should be that of the sensible citizen in wartime who disbelieves nearly every particular story. We must limit ourselves to the general statement that beings in a different, and higher, “Nature” which is partially interlocked with ours have, like men, fallen and have tampered with things inside our frontier. The doctrine, besides proving itself fruitful of good in each humans’ spiritual life, helps to protect us from shallowly optimistic or pessimistic views of Nature. To call her either “good” or “evil” is boys’ philosophy. We find ourselves in a World of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalizing possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled. The sin, both of men and angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave them free will: this surrendering a portion of His omnipotence (it is again a deathlike or descending movement) because He saw that from a World of free creatures, even though they fell, He could work out (and this is the re-ascent) a deeper happiness and a fuller splendour than any World of automata would admit. And God said, it is very good. “Male and female He created them…God saw that he had made, and indeed, it was very good,” reports Genesis 1.27-28, 31. One of the toughest issues that Christians wrestle with is deciding how they should feel about their own sexuality. Perhaps they have absorbed the idea that Christianity is anti-sexual, that Jesus would not be pleased with their feelings dealing with pleasures of the flesh, that God is not eager for them to experience pleasure, that the Bible is a book of “thou shalt nots.” Believing such, yet also feeling heir pulsating urges of the flesh and bombarded with cultural models and messages advocating uninhibited expression of pleasures of the flesh, they may feel confused, tense, guilty, or frightened. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

What, then, is a Christian view of sexuality, and how does this compare with the view of sexuality found in academic and popular psychology? Some Christians have indeed talked as if Christianity views pleasures of the flesh or desire or the body as bad—as something to be ashamed of. (In the Library of Congress’s classification of religious books, the subcategory of “sex” comes just after “sin.”) Actually, as we noted, Christianity affirms that body. The Bible teaches that the created material World is good, that human nature is a mind-body unity, and that some kind of body will be given us at the resurrection as an essential ingredient of our everlasting happiness. In the biblical utopia of Eden, man and woman were refreshingly accepting of their bodies: they “were both unclothed, and were not ashamed,” and delighted in cleaving to each other “as one flesh.” In the Old Testament, this attitude that pleasures of the flesh is a gift in which we can rejoice is celebrated in the Song of Solomon as the erotic longings of lovers for each other are reciprocated openly. “I am sick with Love…O that his left hand were under my head, and that his right hand embraced me!” declares the bride-to-be. “You are stately as a palm tree, and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its branches,” replies her ardent lover. In this biblical view, the significance of intimacy dealing with pleasures of the flesh is not diminished but expanded. Play dealing with pleasures of the flesh is an adult recreational activity and much more. The mutual self-exposure and cleaving of activity involving pleasures of the flesh arise from and satisfy the married adult’s need for intimate communion with a loved one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
To have intercourse is, in the Hebrew language, “to know” one’s partner in an especially intimate way. Behaviour dealing with pleasures of the flesh is therefore for married adult humans a social behaviour for procreation. Seen in this light, the biblical laws against promiscuity and adultery are not prohibitions against pleasure. Rather, they point us toward deeper pleasures—the delicious pleasures of affection, playfulness, intimacy, and climax within the lifelong unity and security that we call marriage. The husband and wife should give themselves to each other, advised St. Paul: “Do not deprive one another except perhaps by agreement for a set time, to devote yourselves to prayer, and then come together again.” God therefore cautions us not against pleasure, but against pleasures that are too weak, too unsatisfying for God’s favourite creatures, or that dehumanize God’s creatures. If the Bible advises restraint of our appetites, it is not because God forbids the pleasures we were created to enjoy, but because God has better things in store for us—a more fully human sexuality. God beckons us not to trade or cheapen the life-uniting, love-renewing experience of committed sexual love for a lesser and more temporary pleasure. Donald Joy (an aptly named Christian writer on this subject) likens biblical moral teachings to an owner’s manual on the care and maintenance of the human machines, provided by its maker to help us fulfill its potential. Of this much we can be sure: God is for us. If the human benefits of any activity outweigh the costs, then God is for it. And enjoying pleasures of the flesh—genuine, self-giving, tender, joyful, caring love—is most assuredly something that God is for. It is ennobling experience, shaking out for a few minutes or hours all that is base in a human, all that is mean, small-hearted, and narrow-minded. However, perhaps even more marvellous than that is the enormous contentment with which it fills one. Desire dissolves, and wit them the frustration, the anxiety, the hopelessness, and the expectancy that accompany them when they remain unfulfilled. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

For a short time one loses oneself in this beautiful consciousness and lets go of the continual routine which makes up one’s usual day. One gains a healing rest in nerve, mind, feeling, and even body Such a glimpse comes of itself—“The wind bloweth where it listeth,” declared Jesus. These glimpses are encounters with divinity. There is a quality about them which separates them from all the other contacts and encounters of life. This Stillness is called, in the New Testament, “the peace which passeth understanding.” It is perhaps the chief feature of the glimpse. That memorable moment when one first opens the door of Consciousness will clear doubt, sanctify feeling, and balance the entire life. This new sense of being liberated from the confining measurements of one’s own ego, unimpeded by attachments and embroilments, carried beyond the vicious passions to inward equipoise, is unimaginably satisfying. In those moments of inward glory all one’s life expands. One’s intelligence advances and one’s goodness perceives new vistas of growth. Heaven opens out for a while in one’s emotional World. When one steps forth from the ego’s timed life the Overself’s liberating timelessness, the feeling of confinement falls away like a heavy cloak. One enjoys an unimagined exhilaration. Just as a blind person suddenly recovering one’s sight is carried away by a rush of joy, so the mystical neophyte suddenly recovering one’s spiritual consciousness is carried away by emotional ecstasy. However, just as in the course of time the former will become accustomed to the use of one’s sight and one’s joy will subside, so the latter will find one’s ecstasies subside and pass away. One’s endeavours to recapture them prove fruitless because it is in the nature of emotion that it should suffer a fall after it enjoys a rise. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

This wonderful and exquisite feeling is really within oneself, only one transfers it unconsciously to the scenes and persons outside oneself and thus perceives goodness and beauty everywhere. If it begins quietly and unassumingly, it ends deeply—with the sensation of having entered briefly and memorably a higher World of being. If the intercourse of a man and a woman is the most intimate act in the lives of both, the conscious contact of a human being with the Overself is even more intimate still. One’s consciousness is lifted up into another World of being; one’s little self is in communication with the Overself; one’s perception of truth is instantly translated into power to live that truth. It is as if one climbed to a high observation post and from there saw what was before utterly unexpected and incredible. The peace of these moments, whether achieved by prayer or received by grace, yields a rich satisfying happiness. Why? Because all those thoughts, desires, attachments, and aversions which compose the ego fade away and leave consciousness free. In this experience one loses consciousness of one’s own personal identity, a state which begins with a kind of daze but passes into a kind of ecstasy. These first experiences of feeling raised to transfiguring peaks should not be expected to reproduce themselves often. They are necessarily rare sensations. Nor, when they do repeat themselves, an they come in precisely the same form and with the same initial intensity. Something of the rapturous emotional reaction is lost by repetition of this experience, but nothing of the wonder and awe is ever lost. At such moments one is filled wit a flowing inspiration, a splendid hope, a vivid understanding. Psychological views of sexuality are mixed. To some extent, they are congenial with the Christian idea that pleasures of the flesh is a sign and seal of a life union. Several researchers have reported that cohabitation and the number of premarital sexual partners is correlated with later marital unhappiness and divorce. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Even better established is the finding that marriage is linked with health and happiness: married people, especially married men, tend to live longer and experience greater life satisfaction than do unmarried people. Of course, such correlations do not prove that premarital chastity predisposes a happier marriage or that marriage produces health and happiness. (Maybe healthy, happy people are more likely to marry.) However, Christians can feel reassured that the data are consistent with biblical affirmations regarding pleasures of the flesh and marriage Christians concerned about the ideas on pleasures of the flesh being taught on television, in R-rated slasher movies, and in hard-core adult films can find justification for their concerns in recent research. In addition to the well-known studies on the effects of television violence on aggressive behavior, there are now many other studies indication the: Television is an unreal fictional World—in which acts of assault outnumber acts of affection and pleasures of the flesh relationships occur mostly outside of marriage—affects people’s perceptions of the real Word. Exposure to sexual violence makes many men and women more likely to believe that many people enjoy being physically forced against their will into intercourse and the physically forcing someone against their will into intercourse is not a serious crime, more willing to say that they might actually commit a sexual assault if they knew it would go unpunished, and more willing actually to aggress against others, especially those who are vulnerable, in laboratory settings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Exposure to nonviolent sexually explicit films also can make physically forcing someone into intercourse against their will seem like a more trivial crime or just part of a blind date, friendship, relationship or marital obligation. Moreover, viewers tend to become more accepting of promiscuity, extramarital pleasures of the flesh, and a vulnerable person’s submission. They also often become more dissatisfied with their own les sizzling experiences with pleasures of the flesh and with their partner. Thus, if we value interpersonal sensitivity and sound human relationships in which pleasures of the flesh is a vital part, if we care to see our partners as equals rather than as servants to our imaginations about pleasures of the flesh, adult films have demonstrable effect that are somewhat less wonderful. So, in some ways, especially in its gathering of evidence, psychology has reinforced Christian ideas and concerns about sexuality (despite potentially skewed results from the biased sample of people who may volunteer to participate in surveys involving pleasures of the flesh and experiments related to pleasures of the flesh). Psychology has also contributed to enrichment of pleasures of the flesh in ways that Christians and non-Christians alike can appreciate—by helping us better understand the nature of things that motivate pleasures of the flesh, by refuting myths about homosexuality, by developing new techniques for treating dysfunctions dealing with pleasures of the flesh. Sexuality is, however, one of those topics about which alert readers will be sensitive to psychologists’ values and assumptions. Sometimes the values of the psychologist are obvious, as when the rational-emotive therapist Albert Ellis encourages “self-gratification…with or without long-term responsibilities” and argues, “Unequivocal and eternal fidelity to any interpersonal commitment, especially marriage, leads to harmful consequences. “More often the assumed values are subtle expressed, as when people are urged not to repress or suppress their “natural” urges for pleasures of the flesh, or when textbook authors, therapists, and advice columnists simply assume that intimate dealing with pleasures of the flesh outside of marriage is normal and healthy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

There is a concern that adolescents may interpret “value-free” sex education as meaning that sexual intercourse is for them a harmless recreational activity. Such a conclusion would be unfortunate because promiscuous recreational pleasures of the flesh pose certain psychological, social, health, and moral problems that must be faced realistically. Pleasures of the flesh are reserved for marriage. Chastity is sexual purity. Those who are caste are morally clean in their thoughts, words, and action. Chastity means not having any relations involving pleasures of the flesh before marriage. It also means complete fidelity to husband or wife during marriage. Physical intimate between husband and wife is beautiful and sacred. It is ordained of God for the creation of children and for the expression of love within marriage. In the World today, Satan has led many people to believe that pleasures of the flesh outside marriage is acceptable. However, in God’s sight, it is a serious sin. It is an abuse of the power He has given us to create life. The prophet Alma taught that sexual sins are more serious than any other sins expect murder and denying the Holy Ghost. “And this is not all, my son. Thou didst do that which was grievous unto me; for thou didst forsake the ministry, and did go over the land of Siron among the borders of the Lamanites, after the harlot Isabel. Yes, she did steal away the hearts of many; but this was no excuse for the hearts of many; but this was no excuse for thee, my son. Thou shouldest have tended to the ministry wherewith thou wast entrusted. Know ye not, my son, that these things are an abomination in the sight of the Lord; yea, most abominable above all sins,” reports Alma 39.3-5. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

If participants love each other, sometimes they try to convince themselves that sexual relationships outside marriage are acceptable. This is not true. Breaking the law of chastity and encouraging someone else to do so is not an expression of love. People who love each other will never endanger one another’s happiness and safety in exchange for temporary personal pleasure. For years, man has tried to rush Nature’s process, but we must not or we risk being burned by the fires of creation. Labels describe behaviour, but they also subtly evaluate it. When sex researcher label sexually restrained individuals as “erotophobic” or having “high sex guilt,” they both describe and evaluate such tendencies. Whether we label sexual acts we do not practice as “perversions,” deviations,” or an “alternative sexual life style” says something about our underlying attitudes. The values of some psychologist can also be discerned form their reactions to the report of the Attorney General’s commission on pornography. The commission did not label “soft-core” magazines, such as Playboy, as pornographic, nor did it recommend outright censorship. However, not surprisingly, in view of the research on pornography’s effects, it did express strong concern about the growing availability of pornography and its effect on women’s vulnerability to sexual harassment and abuse. Although many feminist and religious leaders welcomes the report, the press preferred to quite contemptuous psychologists, such as Ted McIlvenna, president of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Sexuality: “Sexologist should universally view this report with disdain…It is totally an erotophoic report.” The problem, some of these psychologists complained, was that the commission took the psychological research on pornography too seriously—an interesting reversal from the more common complaint that government bodies have ignored research. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
So, in welcoming sexual advice and sex research, Christians should be critically alert to psychologists’ values. On the other hand, we should also counter the nonbiblical idea that sexual relations are bad or that passion is something to be ashamed of. In the final analysis, we Christians are not so much opposed to promiscuity and pornography as we are for the tense closeness and the pleasureful sense of union that occurs when lifelong partners express and renew their love. In such a relationship, sexuality has the potential to become all that the Bible envisions its being: procreational and deeply affectional. Let us therefore remember: our sexuality is a gift that the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it, knowing that God said, it is very good. When people care for one another enough to keep the law of chastity, their love, trust, and commitment increase, resulting in greater happiness and unity. In contrast, relationships built on sexual immortality sour quickly. Those who engage in sexual immortality often feel fear, guilt, and shame. Bitterness, jealousy, and hatred soon replace any beneficial feelings that once existed in a relationship. Our Heavenly Father has given us the law of chastity for our protection. Obedience to this law is essential to personal peace and strength of character and to happiness in the home. Those who keep themselves sexually pure will avoid the spiritual and emotional damage that always comes from sharing physical intimacies with someone outside of marriage. “He that looketh on a woman to lust after her, or if any shall commit adultery in their hearts, they shall not have the Spirit, but shall deny the faith and shall fear,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 63.16. These warning apply to all people, whether they are married or single. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Those who keep themselves sexually pure will be sensitive to the Holy Ghost’s guidance, strength, comfort, and protection (that is why they always survive in horror movies), and will fulfill an important requirement for receiving a temple recommend and participating in temple ordinances. The nineteenth-century ideology of female domesticity suggested women were particularly physically and morally equipped to nurture. This is where the belief in the human being the “woman’s sphere came from,” and the result was a combination that gave moral support to mid-nineteenth-century middle-class suburbanization. Woman’s place was in the home, and that was ideally in the expanding suburbs. It was even reflected in the architecture. Building homes with kitchen windows that looked out into the backyard so woman could watch their children play as they cooked. Some homes even had walls of class along the dining room and living room, also as a way for women to watching their children while having Tupperware parties or afternoon tea and biscuits in the parlor while the darlings play in the backyard. On these story book house with a faceted tower and battened shutters, the crenellation parapet, projects and image of conjuring up archers and protecting the lord’s castle. For the home was to be a fortress and a refuge from the evils and vices of the city. These effervescent suburban dwellings were meant to evoke vernacular homes in western Europe, a nostalgia imported by American soldiers after World War I. The purpose of the architecture was to make one feel like one suddenly slipped into the Germanic forest of Sleeping Beauty, and are peeping at a quaint cottage in the clearing the side of a modest mansion. They were also a snapshot of an optimistic era when anything seemed possible, which no doubt appeals to people in these jaded times. Story book architect arose in the 16th century, people were fascinated by the Middle Ages. For instance, Marie Antoinette’s famous “farm” at Versailles was her interpretation of a medieval countryside hamlet. The 1869 castle Neuschwanstein was designed to look much older than it is. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Nonetheless, the storybook architecture reminded people of the good old times, when things were made by hand, which allowed people to pretend they had stepped back in time. The home, under the practical and moral guidance of the mother, was to be a sacred places in which family values could be promoted around the fireside. A middle-landscape between city and country that had trees and greenery but was neither to wild nor too urban was the proper Currier and Ives family environment. Some communities were even nonautomobile streets and had mandatory front porches and picket fences, to consciously recreate the social patterns of a Victorian small town. While the city was reviled as the center of infamy and anonymity, the suburb, with its open lawns and clean air, was to provide a healthful, natural, and moral atmosphere in which to raise children and teach values. In an era when activities were divided between men’s and women’s sphere, the city was Gomorrah—a World of men, factories, crowding, and vice. The suburban home, by contrast, was sacred space in which under the wife’s tutelage, men would be encouraged to become more civilized and children would be raised in health and virtue. The rearing of children and management of homes were not simply domestic virtues, they were activities essential for the survival of the Republic. The new constituency of middle-class non-farm women was an expanding group whose major responsibility was management of the home. Unlike farm wives, they had no responsibility for working with their husbands as partners operating a farm, nor did they have to labour long hours in the expanding urban factories and sweatshops, as did working-class women. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

As a rebellion against the suggestion that women of the growing middle-class population had no real role, an ideology was designed that gave women a central place in national life. Surely it was a pernicious and mistaken idea, that the duties which tax a woman’s mind are petty, trivial, or unworthy of the highest grade of intellect and moral worth. Instead of allowing this feeling, every woman should imbibe from early youth, the impression, that she is training for the care of the most important, most difficult, and the most sacred and interesting duties that can possibly employ the highest intellect. Through their nurturing role, women can exercise an influence on national character that will transcend class and location. Would will provide the social order holding together American democracy. Proper management of the home and children is seen as the woman’s responsibility, and since this is so crucial, it makes her a fuller partner with her husband. Woman are neither men’s inferiors nor their equals, but their betters. Most men are still developing their strength and need o be guided and taught by women or their fathers, who are stronger. The suburban home, with its emphasis on shared domesticity, is the ideal setting in which to engage in this instruction. The nineteenth-century defining of the home’s interior as woman’s space has some very practical and beneficial consequences for home design. Kitchens, for example, were no longer simply basement rooms with open fireplaces. For the first time kitchens were designed taking into account efficiency, sanitary food preparation, and scientific housekeeping. Domestic engineering was to be utilized to create a professional and elevating influence for the housewives and servants who used the space. Clean surfaces, indoor plumbing, and proper light and ventilation were all part of the design. The result was a far more useful, comfortable, and rationally designed interior. This is not to say that most kitchens were poorly laid out and “obviously designed by a man. The nineteenth-century breakthrough was the acceptance of the view that kitchens were a specifically designed space. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Some people may need the kind of regression that is a relaxation of structures. Their central ego-functioning “coping” self is out of gear, else they would not be in therapy. The time may have come for them to relax and let go of their present personality—integration, so that a new arrangement may come about in which areas of their life may be integrated which have so far been denied a place. It is for this reason that therapists need to be careful to distinguish the circumstances in which it is right to focus on guilt-provoking emotions like rage or greed. Anyone in an authoritative or helping capacity is easily experienced as on the side of anti-libidinal forces. In the kind of regression and relaxation we are now considering, people need all the strength they can muster, in order to stay in touch and no evade their feelings of emptiness and desolation, and pain and terror, about which they already feel very guilty and ashamed. They must not be further weakened by having their moral and intellectual failings brought to their attention as a central issue. If, additionally, we consider that some people will need to recover these split-off regions where their bodily experiences and their (perhaps scant) memories of good times are mapped, the injunctions against promoting guilt and shame become even stronger. This is not the time to put people right—we have first to strengthen whatever strengths they already possess. Even the voice of another person can a times be disturbing. It appals me to think how much change I have prevented or delayed in patients in certain category by my personal need to interpret. If only we can wait, the patient arrives at understanding creatively and with immense joy, and I now enjoy this more than I used to enjoy the sense of having been clever. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
When faced with error or delusion, or distress or disintegration, it is important not to be in too much of a hurry. People come to therapy unready for a direct encounter with their deeper anxieties. If they had been ready, they would have faced them and contained them. When, encouraged by an unwise therapist or friend, they are made to drop the defences they need before they are strong enough to integrate new insights, they will awake the terror which has always surrounded this split-off part, a terror which includes the terror of disintegration altogether. They will then tighten up more than ever, yet feel obscurely shamed and weakened by a sense of having failed to perform as expected. Too stark a confrontation with the deepest anxieties, especially if encouraged by someone on who a person is very dependent for a sense of security and connectedness, encourages the formation of a False Self, in order to please the therapist. Much has been written about the dangers of coaxing a patient into what looks like a recovery—the so-called “transference cure.” However, disturbed people may also be frightened into what looks like recovery, taking their therapists’ “interpretations” as implicit advice and acting rigidly on it in order to contain their disintegration. The corrosive hidden sense of hollowness and badness cannot be reached in this way. A principle might be enunciated, that in the False Self area of our analytic practice we find we make more headway by recognition of the practice we find we make more headways by recognition of the patient’s non-existence than by a long-continued working with the patient on the basis of ego-defence mechanisms. The patient’s False Self can collaborate indefinitely with the analyst in the analysis of defences, being so to speak on the analyst’s side in the game. This unrewarding work is only cut short profitably when the analyst can point to and specify an absence. It is not the aim of analysis to confront the patient with a now supposedly fully uncovered drive…The deepest level to be reached is not the drive…but the experience of the absence of the life-sustaining matrix. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

To let people reach this terrifying level of experience in safety, therapists must allow themselves to a safe environment, facilitating, unobtrusive, unwounding. In general, it is a good thing when people are allowed space to make their own discoveries. However, if people are to make their own discoveries about what a thing can do or what it is good for, usually a period of hesitation and analyzation is necessary. It is an impingement when things are shoved at you before you know whether you want them and can use them. Those things feel alien—to turn away from them is a healthy reaction: to comply is the unhealthy response of the intimidated. So, we must allow for periods of hesitation which precede the moment when people start to make some new structure their own, truly theirs, not half the therapist’s. What is at issues here is how true new insight are to be integrated. They must not be integrated in a depersonalized form. “I-now” have to understand and hold and accept “me-then” and the situation as I experienced it then. If I am truly to feel “I discovered that,” “I made that,” “I did that,” even “I exist,” “I existed then,” “I am,” I have to be the first to be making the connections. When things are at their best, therapist and other arrive together at new meanings. Once there is a certain amount of strength—by which I mean at least the beginnings of a true-self core as an organizing principle—and once good rapport and understanding have been established, the many occasions on which such perfect timing does not happen may also serve a useful purpose. They enable people to start to come to terms with the fact that being perfectly understood (and the perfect capacity for always having perfect insight) never were and never will be their lot. The reality of other people, in all their goodness and badness and separateness is there by established, and hence also one’s own reality. And, if the experience of being held is ever to become a reality, this had to be established for it takes two for one to be held. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Ho. Wiyopeyata ouye power of the setting sun. We call on you. Please have pity on us that people may life. Wakinyan, thunder beings of the black west, we call on you. You are the source of both the power to live and of destruction, who ride the back of minne wichoni, the life-giving rains. For long years, the way of the people has been weak and there has been fear. Many have said that the red road would disappear and that the six powers of Wakan Tanka would turn their faces from us. It is true that many of the old ways have been lost. However, just as the life-giving rains restore the Earth after the drought, so your power will restore the Way and give it new life. We ask this not only for the red people but for all the people that they might live. In ignorance and carelessness, they have walked upon Ina Maka, our Mother. They did not understand that they are part of all beings, the four-legged, the winged, grandfather rock, the tree people, and our star brothers. Now the Earth and all our relations are crying out. They cry for the help of all people. A teaching which seeks the chief good for human beings, but ignores robust health and freedom from pain as a necessary part of the good, is an incomplete one. The old notion that mental healing is only useful to, and possible in, cases where the patient only imagines that one is sick, is outdated. A doctrine which denies the body’s existence while hypocritically trying to cure the body’s ailments, contradicts itself. In any case, the body remains there, a hard unavoidable fact which must be accepted in the end however much anyone believes one has thought it away. You upright who heard the voice of my song, may you merit to join this glorious throng; in Heavenly halls you shall meet them in time, if you hearken His Words, melodious, sublime. Exalted on high, for ever and ever, our Lord in glory and awe! We are His choice, then let us rejoice that He blessed us and gave us the Law. A true measure of a hero, is when one lays down one’s life, with the knowledge of those one saves, will never know. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

The legend of happy suburban domesticity has its roots in the nineteenth-century romantization of suburban life.
It’s not a home until you make it your own! 🏡 The four bedrooms at the Brighton Station Residence 3 give you plenty of canvas for your imagination to run wild. 🎨 The en suite on the first floor is an added bonus! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
A Cresleigh Home plays a vital role in life. Home is the place where we keep our families, where we feel safe, and where we enjoy complete freedom. And if you have a happy family, there’s no place like Cresleigh Home for complete comfort and peace of mind.


































