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The Skull-Rapping of Internal Dialogue
Being filled with God’s love shields us in life’s storms but also makes the happy moments happier. At the age of twenty-one, Max quit the seminary, frustrated but sure that he had, as usual, gotten the best of the bargain. He was young, ambitious, and held a bachelor’s degree which had been paid for by his parents. One of his plans included a profession whose practitioners also had a corner on being right: medicine. So after a minimum two-years army stint, Max enrolled in a prestigious California medical school, knowing from the first day that he wanted the most sought after and highest paying specialty of all: surgery. The years of school, internship and residency seemed to drag on forever. Max’s ambition made him impatient, but he invested his time wisely. He cultivated friendships with the ranking doctors in his hospital. He made sure he was on the lists to join their clubs when the time was right. Later, as he began practicing “for real,” all his investments paid off. Max became a good surgeon. Not the best, but certainly able to appear like one of the best. There were men on the staff who were better than he, but Max made it his business to see that they did not stay with the hospital long. He found out which ones drank a bit more than they should. He hired investigators to follow the surgeons who were above him on the hospital’s ladder. Should one of the ranking men be followed to an “indiscreet” apartment, Max would learn of it, confront the man about it, and that man would willingly seek an association with a different hospital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In this way, Max worked himself up in rank until there was no one above him but the chief surgeon, a tough, dictatorial man who took orders from no one, not even the hospital’s top management. Though Max was only number two, he had the authority to run his part of the organization as he chose. One of his priorities was to concentrate on doing the kinds of surgery which paid the best for the least amount of work. Max liked money, but he never did relish a great deal of work. And yes, he did make a great deal of money. Early in his career, Max had met and married Alana, a young lady who was also Catholic, and who had come to California from Harrisburg, South Dakota, in the hope of becoming a movie star. After several futile years of walk-on parts and waiting tables, she had resigned herself to marriage, babies and a home. Max considered Alana the ideal wife for his purposes: good-looking, passive, and best of all, devoted. She kept a clean home, doted over the children and dutifully held dinner until he arrived. He was as much in control at home as he was in the hospital. He managed to always be “right” and always have the last word—like a judge in his own courtroom. It was in the early-2000’s that Max’s carefully constructed little empire began to fall apart—and it started with pleasures of the flesh. After years of unsatisfying pleasures of the flesh with Alana, Max craved a more exciting woman. Alana was warmth; he wanted passion. She was giving; he wanted to be taken. She surrendered; he wanted someone who refused to submit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
One day Max was presiding over a meeting in which his staff was discussing instituting a new surgical procedure. One of the nurses, a woman named Bianca, had taken issues with him over the procedure. Angered, Max pointed his finger at her and said, “Look, little girl, I’ve been carving up people in this hospital for a long time and I know when something won’t work. This won’t work.” Much to his surprise, Bianca slapped his had away with eyes blazing, shot back, “Don’t you dare point your finger at me, you male chauvinistic pig! I’m a woman, not a little girl, and I know something about surgery too. If you’re so damn smart, why are you paying me $250,000 a year to help you, then not accepting the help when I offer it? This procedure will work, and I’ll be happy to take it to any other hospital while you sit here, admiring your own face in the mirror!” Max was infuriated. Ordinarily, he would have had a nurse discharged on the spot for talking to him that way. However, this was different. This was a spicy and passionate woman! He had to have her. He knew it was dangerous to get involved with a woman from the hospital. He knew it was a mortal sin, adultery. He knew that seeing Bianca was a dead end because he was still too Catholic to get a divorce. However, Bianca ignited him sexually. She did not give him pleasures of the flesh, she took it from him. In their conversations, she battled him, cursed at him, and outwitted him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
For the first time in his life, Max was able to lose battles without feeling beaten. Though Max was a formidable opponent, she was not a threat. She was not after his position; she only sought to maintain hers. In quiet moments at her apartment, he could be soft, vulnerable, frightened. He could tell her what scared him. He could lay his head in her lap and confess his sins the way he never could to any priest. In the midst of this, Max’s boss decided to do the only thing that could possibly undermine Max’s position: disband his unit. He was nearing retirement and was enamored with the thought of retiring in a blaze of glory rather than leaving the unit for Max to mold to his own way of doing things. Max fought the idea, but the old man was adamant. Later one afternoon, in the middle of a routine discussion, the chief surgeon glanced at his watch and said, “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll be late for group.” “Late for what?” Max asked. “Group therapy. You know, like in psychology.” “What for? You’re not crazy. Or are you?” “No, I’m not crazy,” the old doctor said. “It’s just that I’ve got a few problems. It helps to air them out—in a nonthreatening situation.” Max thought of his evenings with Bianca. “Yeah, I know. That is good, sometimes.” “Besides,” the older man continued, “it really gives me a lot of insight about people, what make them tick. I’m getting so I can almost guess what people are going to do and say next.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A warning light went on in Max’s head. “You mean, with this psycho stuff, you can anticipate what someone—like me, for instance—might do in a given situation?” “Not always. But I’ve tried it, and it’s worked.” Max did not relish the notion of his enemies having weapons which he himself did not possess. He decided to look into group therapy. In our first sessions, it was obvious Max was there to learn about other people, not about himself. His questions were intelligent and to the point, but his interest was more academic than personal. However, gradually, in the frankness and comfort of the sessions, he began to open up. He started telling the others what he thought of them—and was interested to hear how they felt about him. Lark surprised us one night when she blurted, “You know, Max, you’re a chauvinistic pig. But in a strange way, you’re lovable.” “Thanks,” he said. “I consider both of those evaluations to be compliments.” “Don’t try to be smart,” she snapped. “What I’m trying to say is that I could love you. Not as—as a lover, or anything, but for who you are. If only you weren’t trying to be so touch all the time.” With that remark, the door to the interior Max opened a crack. In the months that followed, we did get to know him as he told us of his childhood, his career and finally, his affair. He began to “fill out” as someone quite human. We felt our affection for him growing with each disclosure. And he knew it. What intrigued him most was the notion that the women in the group could love him without feeling sexual attraction to him—something he had never run into before. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The blemishes in a romantic relations or marriage are diminished with a focus on love. One thing you never want to do is constantly manipulate people. Manipulators often end up in trouble with the law. Sometimes criminals become too “hot.” And they have to leave the country. Or else, who knows. They live on the run. Under the gun. Messing up. Holding on. Learning, we hope. Black leaders say they want a popular front with whites and browns and reds and technicolor kids. They see the old structure crumbling. They sense the change. Like everyone else, they want to channel it their way. Who can blame them? They say they want to work with white kids. Maybe they want to use them. They are under pressure from everyone. They say they are nonracists, internationalists. They publicly back every antisystem group. Reverand Al Sharpton and Dr. Cornel West have supported long hair, new life-style, women’s lib. They insist they are the vanguard. The coming new year will tell a lot. Reverand Al Sharpton calls himself a supporter of the U.S. Constitution. He calls himself Supreme Commander. Dr. Cornel West is always a ruthless enigma. There is one way to find out where the Panthers are. Black leaders sometimes welcome white kids who do not fit in with the establishment. However, if you want to stay of a good legal ground, you may want to follow the law and try to become part of the establishment. Have lunch around the campfire. Eat organic flour pancakes. Fresh vegetables. Steamed soup. Enjoy tender good-byes to your hosts. Otherwise, for the next ten years you will only see the underground network form in communes. You will ride with the dealers and talk over tepee fires with new tribes, and have to get used to animal skins and rifles on the wall, while listening to the Chief speak quietly of the prophecies. About how the white machine men will destroy themselves with greed, and being a young white man, it might be kind of conflicting, unless you accept that you have a black soul, light skin with a Cadillac and a perm and blue eyes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Acts of self-denial, austerities, are to be valued not for their own sakes but for the sake of the purification of the soul. They can take to a simpler life. It does not demand a bare and spartan existence. It means only that they can eliminate useless luxuries and excessive pleasures, stop buying what they need not buy and keep money they cannot afford to spend. By living a simpler life, by becoming more frugal and less spendthrift, they can cut down their wants, diminish their desires, lessen discontent, and perhaps even become happier. It will be easier to call their soul their own. We live on different layers of desire from the beastly to the angelic. When lust is merely submerged and not supplanted, it will sooner or later reassert itself. Let is an extreme intoxication of the bodily senses, a fire of carnal passion which submerges reason, and an enslavement of desire which tyrannizes over countless victims. A wiser course than total suppression is to limit desires and govern passions. We are conscious of an animal in us. If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity, I would go to see him forthwith. When the pursuit of pleasure, and especially physical pleasures, becomes excessive, it becomes a vice. Where is his mind’s peace when he is racked by desires, irritated by frustrations, and denied even the compensation of knowing why he is suffering? Instinct fights with intellect but purified, elevated, and instructed, it can harmonize with the other, both working together for the benefit of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The irony of this picture of men rejecting their freedom and preferring their chains would be unbelievable, did we not know how gilded those chains are. The terrestrial nature in man may be recognized by the ferocity, the gluttony, the hate, and the violence in man. It is certain that the heart which is agitated again and again by the yearning for sensual joys will not know the calm happiness of spiritual joys. To what better use can a man put his will than the eradication of hatreds and the subduing of passions? For out of those two sources alone come so many wrong deeds and so much consequent suffering. A man may be so infatuated with his lower nature that he prefers to be agitated and disturbed by its passions rather than to attain the unruffled calmness of his higher nature. When I see people showing Christlike love for one another, it feels to me as if that love contains more than just their love; it is love that also has divinity in it. When we love one another in this way, as completely and fully as we can, Heaven gets involved too. So, if someone we care about seems distant from a sense of divine love, we do things that bring us closer to God ourselves and then do things that bring us close to them—and unspoken beckoning to come to Christ. Sometimes people are surrounded by a chorus of voices of discouragement and darkness that weighs into their thoughts, messages telling them they are too wounded and confused, too weak and overlooked, too different or disoriented to warrant Heavenly love in any real way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
What part, in this Universe, could pleasure play or the exquisite joy of acquiescent and accomplice bodies? In it we find an impossible quest for escape from despair—a quest that finishes, nevertheless, in a desperate race from servitude to servitude and from prison to prison. If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the first for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. We must be come, according to Sade’s formula, nature’s executioner. However, even that position is not achieved too easily. When the accounts are closed, when all the victims are massacred, the executioners are left face to face in the deserted castle. Something is still missing. The tortured bodies return, in their elements, to nature and will be born again. Even murder cannot be fully consummated: “Murder only deprives the victim of his first life; a means must be found of depriving him of his second.” Sade contemplates an attack on creation: “I abhor nature…I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succor all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.” It is in vain that he dreams of a technician who can pulverize the Universe: he knows that, in the dust of the spheres, like will continue. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The attack against creation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder. “I cannot succeed in doing so…” the icy and implacable Universe suddenly relents at the appalling melancholy by which Sade, in the end and quite unwillingly, always moves. “We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world—those would be real crimes…” Crimes, yes, but not the definitive crime. It is necessary to go farther. The executioners eye each other with suspicion. They are alone, and one law alone governs them: the law of power. As they accepted it when they were masters, they cannot reject it if it turns against them. All power tends to be unique and solitary. Murder must be repeated: in their turn the masters will tear one another to pieces. Sade accepts this consequence and does not flinch. A curious kind of stoicism, derived from vice, sheds a little light in the dark places of his rebellious soul. He will not try to live again in the World of affection and compromise. The drawbridge will not be lowered; he will accept personal annihilation. The unbridled force of his refusal achieves, at its climax, an unconditional acceptance that is not without nobility. The master consents to be the slave in his turn and even, perhaps, wishes to be. The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A man told me when I was very sick, “I have never known anyone so hell-bent on self-expression as you are!” He sounded both friendly and exasperated. I did not feel capable at that time of what I thought of as “self-expression” but I felt guilty just the same, with the piled-up accusations of the past. I had tried very hard to be “normal” but had not been successful enough to escape criticism. At the same time that I felt guilty, a little growingness is me protested, saying, “Well…I guess everyone is doing that really—expressing himself in one way or another.” I was very confused, and gropingly trying to understand what I do now. “Yes…” said my friend. “I guess you could say that a person is expressing himself when he makes a slightly different stew. But you have to go over it that way.” He gestured with his arms, showing the two ways over the hill. I realized then that he meant that I was trying to find my own way out of being sick, instead of “accepting it” and “making the best of it” as people said I should. I “saw” a hill—that is, I visualized it…Habits are certainly difficult to break. It visualized itself, spontaneously, as a dream does. I had nothing to do with it except that it happened in me…There was a picture in my mind of an endless train of passenger cars full of laughing people going over the hill on one side, while I was wearily plodding over it on the other side, alone. (When I am confused, I am always weary—worn out by conflict.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
I felt “wrong” for not going the way that everyone else did. However, my “vision” told me clearly, “They are not happy. They are just pretending to be happy. They have done it for so long they have fooled themselves.” Laughter can be a cover for unhappiness, particularly when signs of happiness are acceptable and those of unhappiness are tabu. Is not pretending being out of touch with reality too? Caught in the mesh of a script apparatus, men meanwhile have their own autonomous aspirations. These usually appear to him in daydreams in his leisure hours, or in hypnagogic hallucinations before he falls asleep; the brave deeds he should have done this morning, or the tranquil scenes he looks forward to in later years. All men and all women have their secret gardens, whose gates they guard against the profane invasion of the vulgar crowd. If they could do as they please, these are visual pictures of what they would do. The lucky ones find the right time, place, and person, and get to do it, while the rest must wander wistfully outside their own walls. And that is what this essay is about: What happens outside those walls, the external transactions that parch or water the flowers within. What people want to do is shown in visual pictures, the home movies they make inside their skulls. What they do do is decided by voices, the skull-rapping of internal dialogue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Each sentence they say and each scripty decision is the result of such a dialogue: Mother says and Father says and Adult says You had better, while Child, thus encircled, tries to break through to get what he wants. No one can know the enormous, amazing, and almost infinite amount of dialogue he has stored up in the dim-lit caverns of his mind. There are complete answers there to questions he never even dreamed of. However, if the right button is pushed, sometimes they pour out in sheer poetry. Grasp your right forefinger in your left hand. What is your hand saying to your finger, and what does finger have to say for himself? If you do this right, you will soon find a lively and meaningful conversation going on between them. The amazing part is that it was there all the time, and so are hundreds of others. If you have a cold and an upset stomach, what is your churning stomach saying to your congested nose? If you are sitting with your foot swinging, what has your foot got to say to you today? Ask it and it will answer. The dialogue is right there in your head. All this was discovered, or at least brought into full light by the originator of Gestalt therapy, F.S. Perls. Similarly, all your decisions are made by four or five people in your head, whose voices you can overlook if you are too proud to hear them, but they will be there next time if you care to listen. Script analysts learn how to amplify and identity these voices, and that is an important part of their therapy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The object of script analysis is to free the individual so they one can open the garden of their aspirations to the World. It does that by cutting through the Babel in their heads until the Child can say: “But this is what I want to do, and I would rather do it my own way.” The dom-species impose two sets of taboos to maintain its equilibrium and hive-solidarity—exdom taboos condemn the past and predom taboos condemn the future. In other words, the dom-species is held together by its opposition to the proximal past and future stages. The shames attached to cannibalism, violence, violation of property, dishonesty, and rape are examples of exdom taboos. The Ten Commandments are a valuable index of the neurogenetic stage of the time. Thou shall honour thy parents; thou shall not steal, kill, lie, sexually trespass, or violate territory within the hive. Thou shall adore the hive-totem and not worship past pagan Gods or Future Gods. Social welfare countries, exemplified by retiring elders, place under taboo all forms of individuality—both past and future. Domesticated adults’ societies—the demoncratic-bourgeois—place under taboo stage ten barbarian teenager feudal elitism as well as the retiring elders state power brains and Me-generation grown-up post-familial individuality. The predom brain-reality consumer taboo in the latter 20th Century condemned intervention into brain control—either by others or self. Thus, the revulsion against CIA brain experiments using drugs or bioelectrical means. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The predom self-actualized brain reality taboo against self-directed brain change was even more rigid. While there was some liberal hand-wringing about CIA experiments with LSD, there was stark terror at the thought of self-appointed individuals using psychedelic drugs to change their own realities. The predom accelerated brain reality fused taboo against intentional communes of individuals linking to create new realities was very pervasive in the 20th Century. Every attempt to construct such communities was routinely snuffed. If they are expedient and success justified the use of arms, Marxism always held the point of view that weapons are to be used. The accuracy of this point of view was demonstrated in the days from the November 7 to 11, 1918. At that time, Marxism did not care at all for parliament of democracy and killed them both through howling and gun firing criminal gangs. The privileged-class chatter-boxes were defenseless in this moment. To be aware of a need means to experience and identify some lack. Thus, a person may be deprived of pleasures of the flesh, admit it, and set about the task of obtaining gratification with pleasures of the flesh. However, suppose the person regards wishes for pleasures of the flesh as forbidden? Under these conditions, acknowledgment of real feelings might give rise to powerful guilt or anxiety. The guilt or anxiety will then motivate the person to rid his or her mind of the offending thoughts. This effort is called repression. Repression of wishes and feeling does not annihilate them; it renders them unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
A healthier direction would be for the person to keep the feelings in the conscious realm, learn to understand them, and choose to either have an experience involving pleasures of the flesh or not, depending upon his or her personal value system and the ethical-religious beliefs that are a part of the person’s conscious life. One of Dr. Freud’s greatest contributions to human understanding was his effort to decipher unconscious motivation through the study of dreams, slips of the tongue, and accidents. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to protect the community from the devastating effects of fire. Of course, one of those methods is to extinguish them but, they are more cost-effective when they are “proactive” in preventing them. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the Sacramento Fire Department is to precent as many fires as possible and put into place systems which allow for the earliest detection of fires rather than simply waiting until they occur. They do this to avoid greater loss of life, property and potential injuries to both firefighters and the residents they serve. “In these California brush fires, there are two basic types of situations. There’s the situation where you’re busting your behind the entire time you’re on the fire line. And the reverse situation, where you’re in a ready reserve area and end up doing nothing. They’re not the type of thing, like in urban areas, where a fire department comes running in, Johnny-on-the-spot, and puts the fire out. The fire service in California is at the whim of the weather. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“These things are very difficult to combat, because you’re often fighting a fire fueled by chaparral or other brush that hasn’t burned through for over a hundred years. The fuel load is tremendous and often in inaccessible areas, so that the firefighters don’t become so much involved in the actual extinguishment attempts as in protecting structures. You might have ten or fifteen companies assigned to one block in a hillside area to prevent the homes from going on fire. I remember several fires where we were doing just that. We were up on the roof wetting down in preparation for a fire sweeping through or using heavy stream application onto the brush areas surrounding the homes. But usually, when the fire comes through, it’s almost as if your efforts were totally fruitless. The area becomes on intense that it’s necessary for you to seek shelter inside the home. That’s the only way you can get away from it. There’s nothing that hiding under the fire truck is going to do for you. You just have to drop the hose line and run. A few years ago, I was assigned to Engine X in south central Los Angeles, and we were dispatched to a major brush fire in Mandeville Canyon, along with four other engine companies, to form a brush strike team. On arrival, we were given the assignment to protect a particular home on a street in the immediate area. The fire was some distance away but was expected to hit our area after dark. I knew we were in for a long night. I expected this fire to be like others I had been on: long hours of nothing, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“We laid out the hoses and prepared the residence by removing combustibles from the outside of the home. We closed all the windows and made sure the doors were all unlocked and the lights were on, in case this became our refuge when the fire swept through the heavy brush surrounding the house. I remembered previous situations, pending hors soaking the home and everything around it only to have the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and the winds from the fire turning everything bone dry in seconds. In this case, we were almost immediately engulfed in a hailstorm of burning embers blown by the fifty-mile-an-hour winds. We stood our ground, soaking the wood-shake shingle roof with an inch-and-a-half line, when the captain gave the order to drop the house line and get insides the house. It was the only place that offered us any safety from the heavy smoke and the furious ember-laden winds. We had three lines around the home. We dropped them, and we all congregated in the main hallways of the house. I was relieved that no one had suffered much more than the usual heavy dose of smoke and a few burns from the flying embers. We were in there only three or four minutes when the fire engulfed the whole surrounding area. The hallway was positioned in such a way that we could see out through the large number of glass patio doors in the back. You do not want to be close to the windows or that number of glass doors, when you’ve got that kind of superheated wind blowing around. We were still able to see, but from a distance from the windows. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“The idea, of course, is that the fire will mover swiftly past in the force of the wind. The thought certainly occurred to us that the fire could take the building, too. It’s always a distinct possibility. Given the two choices of being outside in the furious winds and the embers that are blowing around and chunks of tree branches and everything that’s carried by these tremendous winds, being in the house is probably the better of the two choices. Besides, it was tremendously hard to breathe out there. We weren’t using anything more than bandannas across our faces, because the breathing apparatus in this type of environment is more restrictive than it is helpful, so you don’t use it. You just resort to the old brushfire standby, the bandanna over the nose and face. It’s still difficult to breathe, not only because of the heavy smoke, but the hot dry winds, of themselves, make it difficult. It was nighttime, and the scene through the patio doors was spectacular, like millions of fireflies, though they were really embers blown by the tremendous wind. They were more like balls of hail—fireballs of hail going past. As soon as the fire sweeps through your area, that’s when you spring back into action, retrieve your house line, and start putting out the roof fires or whatever else may have become ignited. It’s a scary situation. When you’re in the house, you’re praying like heck that the house doesn’t burn down. In this case, when we went outside we were greatly relieved to see only a few small wisps of smoke coming off the roof, and we doused them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“This is not such an exceptional thing. Hundred of other guys out here have been in the same situation.” The Sacramento Fire Department protects people in Sacramento, in other parts of California and across the United States of America every single day—but did you know that they are looking after everyone’s future, too? You can help save lives by being patriotic and donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Being patriotic means being proud of who you are as an American. It is important to raise your children to love America. When you choose American-made cars and other goods and services, this results in higher quality products that save money in the long run due to their quality, safety standards, and long-lasting durability. It is imperative to love God and His Son, Jesus Christ. When we love God and Jesus Christ, we experience joy and fulfillment. As citizens, we respect the laws because they are clearly communicated and fairly enforced. Everyone is held accountable to the same laws, and those laws protect our fundamental rights. The United States Constitution is the foundation of the rule of law in America. Education provides stability in life, and it is something that no one can ever take away from you. By being well-educated, and holding a college degree, you increase your chances for better career opportunities and open new doors for yourself. From an early age, it is important to read books. Reading books may have several physical and mental benefits. These include strengthening your brain, increasing your ability to empathize, reducing stress, building your vocabular, and it will help you with spelling and to become a better writer. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Reading also reduced stress, can alleviate depression, and reduce age-related cognitive decline. Showing respect to others, especially the elderly benefits everyone. When people feel valued, their emotional well-being improves, and they will have better health outcomes. Younger people will also gain perspective and enjoyment from intergenerational relationships. Pledge allegiance to the American flag is a symbolic act that represents loyalty and devotion to one’s country. It used to be a ritual in every school during first period. Pledging allegiance to the American flag is often seen as a patriotic gesture, reflecting a sense of unity and shared values among citizens. We are willing to humble ourselves before God, willing to repent, willing to learn, and willing to change. The flag of the United States of America represents not just our country as a political unit, but the principles that bind us together as Americans, namely individual liberty, and unalienable natural rights, endowed by our Creator, which the government shall not infringe upon. Reciting the Pledge is not a compulsion, but a mark of patriotism to the country. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. God of Might, God of Right, Thee we give all glory; Thine all praise in these days as in ages hoary, when we hear, year by year freedom’s wondrous story. Now as erst, when Thou first made’st the proclamation, warning loud every proud, every tyrant nation, we, Thy fame still proclaim, bend in adoration. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you,” reports John 13.34. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
Did you know that when Mrs. Winchester was alive, in addition to her mansion, there were other Victorian houses on the estate as well as gazebos?
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
You are Already Dead to the World
Always make those senior to you feel comfortable in their superiority. Never take your position for granted and never let any favours you receive go to your head. For Sade, the law of power implies barred gated, castles with seven circumvallations from which it is impossible to escape, and where a society founded on desire and crime functions unimpeded, according to the rules of an implacable system. The most unbridled rebellion, insistence on complete freedom, lead to the total subjection of the majority. For Sade, man’s emancipation is consummated in these strongholds of debauchery where a kind of bureaucracy of vice rules over the life and death of the men and women who have committed themselves forever to the hell of their desires. His works abound with descriptions of these privileged places where feudal libertines, to demonstrate to their assembled victims their absolute impotence and servitude, always repeat the Duc de Blangis’s speech to the common people of the One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom: “You are already dead to the World.” Sade himself also inhabited the tower of Freedom, but in the Bastille. Absolute rebellion took refuge with him in a sordid fortress from which no one, either persecuted or persecutors, could ever escape. To establish his freedom, he had to create absolute necessity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Unlimited freedom of desire implies the negation of others and the suppression of pity. The heart, that “weak spot of the intellect,” must be exterminated; the locked room and the system will see to that. The system, which plays a role of capital importance in Sade’s fabulous castles, perpetuates a Universe of mistrust. It helps to anticipate everything so that no unexpected tenderness of pity occurs to upset the plans for complete enjoyment. It is a curious kind of pleasure, no doubt, which obeys the commandment: “We shall rise every morning at ten o’clock”! However, enjoyment must be prevented from degenerating into attachment, it must be put in parentheses and toughened. Objects of enjoyment must also never be allowed to appear as persons. If man is “an absolutely material species of plant,” he can only be treated as an object, and as an object for experiment. In Sade’s fortress republic, there are only machines and mechanics. The system, which dictates the method of employing the machines, puts everything in its right place. Hos infamous convents have their rule—significantly copied from that of religious communities. Thus, the libertine indulges in public confession. However, the process is changed: “If his conduct is pure, he is censured.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Sade, as was the custom of his period, constructed ideal societies. But, contrary to the custom of his period, he codifies the natural wickedness of mankind. He meticulously constructs a citadel of force and hatred, pioneer that he is, even to the point of calculating mathematically the amount of the freedom he succeeded in destroying. He sums up his philosophy with an unemotional accounting of crimes: “Massacred before the first of March: 10 After the first of March: 20. To come: 16. Total: 46.” A pioneer, no doubt, but a limited one, as we can see. If that were all, Sade would be worthy only of the interest that attaches to all misunderstood pioneers. However, once the drawbridge is up, life in the castle must go on. No matter how meticulous the system, it cannot foresee every eventuality. It can destroy, but it cannot create. The masters of these tortured communities do not find the satisfaction they so desperately desire. Sade often evokes the “pleasant habit of crime.” Nothing here, however, seems very pleasant—more like the fury of a man in chains. The point, in fact, is to enjoy oneself, and the maximum of enjoyment coincides with the maximum of destruction. To possess what one is going to kill, to copulate with suffering—those are the moments of freedom toward which the entire organization of Sade’s castles is directed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
However, from the moment when sexual crime destroys the object of desire, it also destroys desire, which exists only at the precise moment of destruction. Then another object must be brought under subjection and killed again, and then another, and so on to an infinity of all possible objects. This leads to that dreary accumulation of erotic and criminal scenes in Sade’s novels, which paradoxically, leaves the reader with the impression of a hideous chastity. To some people, being “right” is not just important—it is necessary for survival. The chief advantage of being a tyrant in your every day life is that you get what you want. For some people, from the time they are born, nothing comes easy. Some families use their life savings to open a business so that they can be their own employer and they work as hard as they can to make sure their business is a success. Their children start working as soon as they are able to, often by the age of six or seven. When a child starts work at an early age, they certain do learn the value of a dollar. A youth learns from observation and dealing with customers that people who have money get whatever they want and they get money by taking it from others. Being young and working and coming from a family that is frugal, some boys learn that it is important to save the money they make. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By saving money, some boys are able to lend money to their friends. If the friends are not able to pay it back, then they can work it off. As a boy learns that the harder he works, the more money he will make, as soon as he becomes efficient, he takes on more work so he can earn more money. However, by being one of the only children with money and having the ability to lend it to others, to ensure that they do work it off, some boys essentially become loan sharks. They gather information about their peers that their parents do not know and threat to expose their secrets to their parents with the information. One may think that such a manipulative youngster is unloved and comes from an impoverished household and has poor grades, but sometimes their children are babied by their mothers, have hard working father and are reprimanded from having anything lower than an “A” on his report card. This boy in particular, who we will call Max, went to a Catholic school, where he found that the nuns, with their strict rules and stiff paddles, had the power. Max never challenged this power openly, preferring to work his mischief at times and in places the nuns could not detect. His idols were the priests, who drove long black cars, had a cook, a maid—and the final word on everything. Their power was greater than that of the nuns and the lure of it led him to study for the priesthood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Yet from the day he entered the seminary, Jason knew he would not last. What bothered him was the vow of obedience, the Church’s stubborn insistence that he obey every whim of his superiors. This was the brick wall against which his stubbornness eventually crashed. Passion conquers the young man in the end and forces him into an affair, a relationship, or a marriage. However, he who withstands it drive, conquers passion itself, is a hero. A blind obedience to the urges of physical sense-satisfaction, indifferent to the restraints of ideals, reason, knowledge, or intuitive feeling, weakens concentration and meditation, but strengthens the lower nature. The unruled passions are responsible for a substantial part of the difficulty in summoning up enough aspiration to make men do what they ought, and enough penetration to clear the mind of its illusions. Those with some mental development wisely add tomorrow to today, consequences to causes, and thus finish the picture. Others are ruled by the moment’s impulses or the day’s trend or by passion rather than reason. It is supposed to go so far that even such a lofty desire as one for desirableness itself can no longer remain acceptable. He may feel the temptation but he need not submit to it. It is the emotion, sill more the passion, which anyone pours into an attachment which may make it an obstacle on his quest. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Men who are driven by strong ambitions will have little energy left for strong aspirations. In the Sphinx sits the symbol of that enterprise which offers the candidate for initiation his greatest reward but which paradoxically brings his greatest suffering. This is the conquest of passion by reason and will and the overcoming of personal emotion by impersonal intuition. The Sphinx is a perfect image of the adept in whom the man controls the animal. The attainment is a rare one—too many are satisfied to remain hardly more than animal, with a few human traits. If he cannot put the objects of his desires completely outside his heart, then he must do the next best thing and put them on its borders. Thought creates attachment, and this in turn leads to desire. When a man, with his impulses and passion, meets life with its paradoxes and illusions, he soon falls victim to the deceit of appearances. If the passions dry up, is there any real loss? Are anger, hate, and lust worthy expressions of a being whose spiritual possibilities are so wonderful as man’s? The man who has learnt in some way—whether by personal experience or by a wise old man’s instructions or through an inspired book—that excessive ambition may be folly, excessive luxury has no end to the labour of collecting it, knows that the self-actualized Christians who are content to live barely and simply may not be fools after all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
However, it is also possible for another man who has cultivated an inner detachment to have the same feelings and nevertheless seek to enjoy life. To feel free at last of nagging desires and frustrating attachments brings a large measure of contentment. What is the use of studying philosophy unless we are to become wiser in the future and unless we use its lessons to discipline the impulses and dominate the senses? The white lotus lives in the black mud. It is both an example and an inspiration to man. There is danger in a view of life which makes men unable to be satisfied with a similar life and which stimulates their desires endlessly. Even if it is beyond his power to kill these passions without Grace, it is within his power to curb them. We get muddled and worried by problems which have been manufactured for us by our own desires, instincts, and passions. The need of disciplining them is evident. If the energy used in the pursuit of ambitions or pleasures could be diverted to the following aspirations, if he had the strength to remove everything else from his life except the quest, how could he fail? He may discovery that the battle is not really over, that atavisms of the old animalistic life, rooted either in the present or in former births may come pouring over the threshold of the conscious ego. When the intellect is enslaved by desires, by greeds, by ignorance, it readily finds several defenses against the call of the Quest. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
When the ego has become a little freer and listened to the call, it just as readily finds defenses against making any practical application of what it has learnt. If your passion is transferred from a passing object or human body to the more durable and beautiful soul, you will be progressing from a lower to a higher plane. People may sicken in consequence of excessive life stress or from infection ensuing from lowered resistance. An inability to gratify needs by effective action contributes to physical sickness in direct ways. If a person is obligated to persist in ways of acting that are required by familial, occupational, or age roles, when these ways fail to produce basic need gratification, the person will gradually become dispirited. Dispiritation refers to a state of lowered morale, diminished zest in living, and a sense of hopelessness that lowers one’s resistance to infection by germs, bacteria, and viruses. A student may develop the flu after being rejected by his girlfriend. A woman may be deprived of feeling love in pleasures of the flesh, affection, and appreciation and yet persist in living the joyless life because she can envision no other; her chances of contracting various illnesses are increased. Any prolonged need deprivation dispirits a person and reduces that person’s commitment to life. This reduced commitment to living appears to be responsible (in ways not fully understood) for alterations in the efficiency of the immunity mechanisms of the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Everyday life itself is stressing, and persons rest in order to regain strength to cope with the challenges of existence. If a person is living a joyless existence, and cannot alter it, it is necessary for that person to force himself to fight the impulse to flee the scene. This unremitting struggle to remain in a thwarting situation imposes even more stress and can contribute to cardiovascular diseases and respiratory and eliminative disorders. However, perhaps more importantly, the dispirited person finds less and less joy or fun in work, family, or in life itself. Thus, in the same fashion that one needs to see a physician or change some part of one’s life in the face of continuous physical illness, one also needs to attend to the self in the condition of dispiriation. How does one defeat dispiritedness? First, recognition of the state and of the need for change is helpful or a professional counselor, psychologist, social worker, or psychiatrist. On most college campuses such help is provided by a counseling center or student mental health service. One should not look upon this as an embarrassment but rather as indicative of your knowing yourself and knowing when it is time to seek help. There are also other roads to escape from being dispirited—changing one’s job; changing one’s life objectives; getting out and seeking new, successful, yet exciting alternatives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
It also may help to seek good friends who will not try to talk you into their solutions, but who will, rather, help you to talk out your own ideas and seek your own solutions—this is also a successful approach to coping with the very normal occurrence of being dispiritied. Normal though it might be, it demands attention in order for one to maintain a healthy personality. The script equipment is the nuts and bolts from which the script apparatus is built, a do-it-yourself kit partly supplied by the parents and partly by the child himself. Antonia was depressed by an unhappy love affair. She was afraid to be frank with her lover because she might lose him. On the other hand, if she were not frank, she was afraid she might lose him. There was nothing sinister in it, actually. It was just that she did not want him to know how passionate she really was. The conflict sometimes made her frigid and sometimes panicky. When she talked about it, she felt so mixed up that she clutched her head. What would her parents say about it? Well, her father would say: “Take it easy. Do not lose your head.” And her mother? “He is taking advantage of you. Do not get too attached to him. He will leave sooner or later. You are not good enough for him. He is not good enough for you.” She went on to tell an adventure. When she was about five, an adolescent uncle had got sexy with her, and made her feel sexy, too. She never told her parents. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
One day when Antonia was taking a bath, her father told her how cute she was. There were some visitors in the house and he had held her up naked for them to see. They sexy uncle was one of them. What were he reactions? “I want to hide. I want to hide.” “My God, they will find out what I have been doing.” How did you feel toward your father doing that? “I wanted to kick him in the privates. I knew what a man’s private parts looked like, too, from my uncle’s ‘excitments.’” Was there any ha ha? “Yes deep down, there was. I had a secret. And worst of all, I knew I liked it under all the other feelings.” From these reactions Antonia had constructed a script, which was to have passionate love affair and then get left. Along with that, however, she also wanted to get married, stay married, and have children. There were two counterscript slogans from her father: “Take it easy,” and “Do not lose your head.” These fitted in with her aspirations of getting married and raising a family. There were dive injunctions from mother, all telescoped into, “Do not get attached to anyone.” There was a strong seduction to be passionate and sexy from her uncle, reinforced by the nude provocation from her father. These seductions and provocations from Parental demons had reinforced her own demon throughout her life. There was a strong implication of a built-in release: the familiar Prince with the Golden Apples—not like father; if she could only find one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The interesting thing is that his whole bit came out in one session. As someone remarked, she was quite happy to hold it up for everyone to see. Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards. Let us use the old term “madness” for awhile. There are two kinds of madnesses, only one of which is generally recognized. That is the one that we call “abormal” or “out of touch with reality.” The other one seems to me to be out of touch with reality too, although it is called “normal” because a majority of people are that way in our society. In this sense, it is a reality—like the reality in many parts of the World that most people go to bed hungry every night. This is not a reality which most of us would recommend adjusting to although where it exists it is “normal.” Ther are two normal too, only one of which we usually recognize. That is the statistical normal which is nobody, like the average Harvard man who has 3.5 children. The other normal is unknown because it is me if I had not been interfered with, what I might have become, my own norm—a constantly changing potentiality becoming actuality. This happens to nobody too—but it could happen. Why should not we increasingly make it possible for this to happen. When people hold themselves to any pattern it cripples them. It robs one of the confidence in their ability to grow as a person and to become independent. The recognized “abnormal” is a very lonely one, because no matter how many other people are in it, the individual lives in so much isolation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Abnormal people are cut off from other people because they reject people who are different, and the individual’s response to them may also be chopped off too—perhaps in the way it happens when one is overtired and cannot even enjoy doing what he likes to do. It evokes no response in the individual. The other madness, which is called “normal,” is not lonely—or rather one’s loneliness has got buried so that one does not notice it so much. One can “forget it.” They may remember the vision they have had, but they cease to regret it, maintain themselves by the common routine, learn to avoid excessive expectations, become tolerant of themselves and others, giving and taking, in the usual actions what there is to give and take, They do not repine; are contented with the morning that separates and with the evening that brings together for casual talk before the fire two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never understand them…and the other life will be only like a book you have read once and lost. However, the loneliness is still there. When one has substituted a superficial togetherness for the basic being-together, one has built a superstructure with no structure underneath it. That is fantasy, even though the fantasy may become a second-order reality by many people engaging in the same fantasy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
A man can be linked with many other people through his surface, or mask, or disguise—by approved actions. This is phoney, or veneer, because it is put on, but as long as he keeps his mind focused on it, he has the illusion of being in touch with other people and himself by interacting with their phoney surfaces. Even if he has done this for so long that the surface seems real to him, it is more like apples bobbing in a tub of water, skin touching skin, with no awareness of the flesh or core. We are all apples and that is enough, is it not? What more do you want? Not satisfied with being an apple? Just do what the other apples are doing and you will be already. Not to do this is “bad.” (A threat to my veneer, which might crack and split if exposed to the weather of humanness?) The Self-Actualization Movement originated—where all individual freedoms start—on the Western Frontier. On nursery planets the military warrior-caste is responsible for developing new technologies for faster mobility and communication. Soon afterwards, the citizens in the Western Frontier coopt the technology for their own action. Genetic causes exist for human problems. Discovering this is a big breakthrough—resisted, of course, by stage twelve retiring socialist demo-poll cultures. Genetic determination focuses on gene pool statistics and caste-differentiation, thus minimizing the importance of hive managers. Socialist-welfare cultures insist that the collective super-hive—also known as “The State”—assume responsibility for everything. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
When we human begin to face the fact that genes determine the varied destiny of our different children, then we are ready to see that genes determine our own caste. Next comes the catastrophic discovery that each gene pool is a time-hive, a genetic molecule, made up of many elements called “castes” and that the whole game is genetic robotry. After genetic counseling courses began studying genetic potentials and self-selected breeding soon emerged on the Western Frontier. Neither China or Russia offered courses on genetic elites. As our intelligence evolves the definition of genetic counseling will evolve from an emphasis on pathology to one of excellence and growth. The definition of genetic counseling might read like this: “A communication process which deals with the human potentials associated with the occurrence, or the possibility of occurrence, of genetic advance in the gene pool.” The dom-species on the Sunset Strip move from twelve social-sacrifice to stage thirteen self0consumerism. PreDom ideas emerging on the western frontier: Stage 14: Self-Actualized Adults: Bodily intelligence self-actualization “My Body is my Time Ship.” Stage 15: Hedonic Networkers: Voluntary civilian space migration “We Are Not Terrestrials.” Stage 16: Brain-Reality Consumer: Brain Reality Consumerism “I Can Select My Own Reality.” Stage 17: Brain-Reality Self-Actualized: Brain Reality Self-Actualism “I Can Create My Own Reality.” Stage 18: Brain Reality Fusion: Brain Reality Fusion “We Can Fabricate an External Reality.” Stage 19: Genetic Consumer: Genetic Consumerism “I Can Select My Own Genetic Reality.” Stage 20: Genetic Engineer: Genetic Engineering “I Can Fabricate My Own Genetic Reality.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Terrestrial dom-species place all notions of the future under hive-taboo. The ideas of bodily-sensory-hedonic consumerism—fiercely taboo in domesticated adults and retiring elder societies—crumbled by the late 20th Century on the Western Frontier. The predom self-actualized adult stage taboo against bodily self-actualization similarly crumbled—as exemplified by the legalization of marijuana, the classical tool of one who wishes to control one’s own hedonic reality. The predom hedonic networker taboo of the late 20th Century condemned civilian space migration was a “preadolescent” idea and he was precisely correct. If preadolescence is defined as age eleven, then a preadolescent idea will become a young-voter idea in seven years and will be legalized in California ten years later. How few of the images which fill his mind come from his higher self, how many from his animal self! It is not enough to refrain from sensual acts. It is no less needful to refrain from sensual thoughts. As this diviner self displaces the Earthly one in his will, heart, and mind, it is natural that what he hitherto felt as temptation will be felt as such less and less. On the philosophic path he will attain to this without immuring himself in any cloister, but rather in the very midst of Worldly activity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to providing excellent service to their customers in a professional and humanitarian way. They protect lives, property and the environment through safe and timely response. They are innovative in fire prevention, suppression, rescue, emergency medical services, training, community outreach, public education, and other services. “It was nine o’clock in the morning, and the alert came in that there was a fire in an occupied dwelling. We pulled up to the place, and Captain X and Lieutenant Y yelled for a ladder. It sounded like there was somebody trapped on the second floor, because there was a lot of screaming going on. One woman, who looked like she was burned, was screaming the most. I grabbed the twenty-foot free beam and ran to the side of the house. However, the woman was screaming that her baby was in there on the first floor. “In the crib,” she said. It’s in the crib.” So Lieutenant Y got on his knees under the first-floor window, and I jumped on his back. I tried to get in the window sideways, but I could not. So I had to go in straight, diving head first. There was a bunch of junk in there. The people had just moved in the day before. It was a small room, maybe ten by ten. I could feel my ears burning. I remember kneeling at the crib, looking over my shoulder at the window. Then it got terribly hot. That’s the last thing I remember. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
“Captain X, senior man at Engine Z, dove in after me, lugged me to the window, and they pulled me out. I must have gone into respiratory arrest because Captain X was beating on me. Then the squad came, scooped me up, and took me to the hospital. I was in that room only about a minute all told. What was weird about that fire, was that my dad, who had been in the department for twenty-five years, was driving to the union office when he saw the smoke, and he figured that his kid was at that fire. Then he said, ‘nah, I’ve seen him work,’ so he passed up the exit to go there. But something made him turn back at the next exit to go there. He pulled up in front of the house, and he saw a guy lying there, and they were working on him. Chief A said to day, “That’s your boy.” So Dade rode in the squad with me. I remember waking up in the squad, and Dad was straddling me. They were trying to give me oxygen, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t know what was going on. I was burned up bad, but I didn’t know that. I felt like there was a ton of ice on my face. I remember trying to kick my boots off, and it was all pain. I knew then I was hurt. Then I blacked out again. They were wheeling me in, I remember that. They cut my clothes off. B, a guy I went to Hawaii with, was there. I said, “I loused up, I loused up, I loused up.” Then I asked him what I looked like. B’s eyes were bulging, they were bigger than I’ve ever seen, bigger than plates. He said, ‘Don’t worry about it, C. You just lost your suntan.’ He didn’t want to tell me. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“I don’t really remember much of being in the hospital. I remember a bunch of firemen coming to see me. I was only in for two days because of the danger of infection; you get more infection in the hospital than you would at home. I had second- and third-degree burns on my entire face, ears, and left hand. They did an experiment on me because I was so young, only nineteen. They did this biobrane. It’s like a skin that they put on a leg burn, a thigh burn, or an arm burn. They put that on my face, and it saved years of reconstructive surgery. Aside from that, all I’ve had to do was get eyelid surgery, because the fire burned through my eyelids. So they took skin from my neck over my left clavicle and redid my eyelids for me. I still need a little bit more nose work and then some eye surgery, and that’s it. They did laser surgery on my eyeballs. I had burned corneas, stuff like that, and I had a lot of edema. My biggest problem, though, is photophobia, sensitivity to light. But the best thing they did was let me go home and let my family take care of me. My sister did. My mom was so busted up she couldn’t even be in the room with me. And my dad, who’s not a big drinker, took it really hard and started drinking a lot. I stayed at my mom’s for a month while they took care of me. The smartest thing I did was, I never looked in the mirror. I didn’t have the slightest idea how badly I was burned up. And all my running mates, they’d bring the rigs by, and they’d spend time with me—that really meant a lot to me—to see me, the monster man. I mean, I was horrible-looking. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
“My captain took it hard, because he’d never had a son on the job, and I was young enough to be his son. Lieutenant Y took it hard, too. What happened at the fire was, there was a mother, she had about five kids with different fathers, and she was in bed with some live-in boyfriend. The baby was in bed with them. The other kids were playing with matches under the dining room table, and the house took off. She and the guy jumped through the window and left the baby in the bed. Then they told us the baby was in the crib. The baby was obviously dead. They ended up suing our arson squad, because Arson reported it as kids playing with matched. They weren’t worried about their baby. If I had a tragedy like that and my child died like that, I’d definitely not want to dwell on it, I’d want to get it behind me and end it. D got some minor burns on his neck and brined the tops of his ears, because that room was going when he pulled me out. It flashed over, and flames burst out the window. And he went in there. He’s a little black guy, real shy, doesn’t talk loud at all. He won the Medal of Valor, the highest award you can win in the Sacramento Fire Department, for pulling me out of that fire. If anyone ever says anything bad about him, I’ll fight to the death for that man. He saved my life. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
“That biobrane, to me, is the greatest thing since sliced bread, because I would be Mr. Scar. I would just be totally scarred. It’s evident from where it didn’t take, at the corners of my mouth and my lips. My lips always peel now, they’re always dry. I’ve got scars at the corners of my mouth, over my upper lip, right on my nose, on the ends of my nostrils, and under my chin, where the biobrane didn’t take. But biobrane is the best thing that ever happened to me. Lieutenant Y wants to get in touch with the doctor who did it, a young aggressive plastic surgeon, but he went down to New Orleans, and it’s hard to get in touch with him. When to the burn center for the eyelid surgery, they sewed my eyes shut for six days, and that was the worst part of it. I was super depressed then. The nurses understood. The firefighters were pretty serious about the whole thing, but the first day I came home the doctor put this net over my head to hold the biobrane mask on so it wouldn’t fall off. Captain X laughed and said I looked like a ham. That kind of broke the ide for the other guys. They took pictures of me every day, and they wanted to use one of them for the Burn Tournament poster for the burn center, but it was too hideous. The caption was going to say, “They never ask what happened to the firefighter who tried to save the baby.” It was just too horrible. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
“It takes a year for you skin to heal up. But I was going stir crazy. I was bored, lethargic, gaining weight. I just wanted to get back to work. I told the doctor I would wear my Nomex hood all the time, so I went back to work after less than nine months. I would have gone back sooner if I didn’t have such trouble with my eyesight. I still wear sunglasses outside. It’s going to be a long time before that clears up. The skin is really sensitive. I wear my Nomex hood, and I still get the tops of my ears a little bit friend, and my face blisters up. I had a good one last night and got burned a little. But I’ve stayed on duty because it’s not that burned, just a little blistered. I’ve got to work for a guy tomorrow, and I don’t want to screw up his work release. That dive I took into that room wasn’t so good. For one thing, my mask was knocked off, and I kind of busted my nose, and my left cheek was swollen up pretty bad, so I must have hit something. My helmet must have come off, too, because I had burns on top of my head. But the helmet is still living. It looks like a good squad helmet. It’s all black. “The Sacramento Fire Department provides their customers safer and healthier neighbourhoods through an engaged, educated, and diverse workforce dedicated to life safety and improved quality of life. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, parents, teach your children to love America and be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, to buy American made goods and services and cars, to respect law and order, and teach others with compassion, respect, and dignity, especially their elders. Release all captives, we beseech Thee, Lord whose mighty hand doth set men free; and hear the glad acclaim of all Thy people who praise and glorify but Thee. Preserve the righteous ones who seek Thee, and, in love, Thy unity proclaim; O guard and bless with Thine abundant goodness, Thy people who revere Thy name. Thou, Lord, who art alone exalted, please turn to us and hearken to our plea. We bless Thee, Thou who knowest all things hidden, Thy kingdom is unto eternity. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, under God, Indivisible with Liberty, and Justice for all. O Guardian of American, guard the remnant of America; let not American people perish, the people which proclaims: Hear, O America. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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It Comes on You Like a Spell and Your Poor Mind is Full of Hell
Every cross roads has a story. The Devil and his works have long assumed many forms. In modern America, rebellion for the sake of rebellion has taken precedence over genuine need for change. The frozen sperm of Satan’s magical children have been born upon the Earth. The child is no longer made in the image of God, but in the form of Satan. The quality of children has become more important than the quantity because relative material stability has been reached with the help of technology. A child who can produce is more important than having many children. A swordsman needs but a good smith to forge him a stout blade. Christians are facing a conflict because as man becomes more able to extend his life and prevent death, many consider this to be due to witchcraft and demonic elixirs which are not natural. Some question if Christians will want to experience immortality because they cannot afford to be aligned with things of the Devil. Satanism differs from other religion because it does not hold man enthrall of a fantasy, it rather President a little slice of Heaven here on Earth, known as The American Dream. Satanism is taken out of logical rather than desperation. The need for a cultural stimulus and aesthetic satisfaction has been with us every since the struggle to stay alive ceased to be so whelming that it absorbed all of man’s time and energy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
William was a general practitioner in an isolated area in the Rockies. There was no other doctor for miles around. He worked day and night, but no matter how hard he worked there was never enough to support his large family and he was always in debt to the bank. For a long time, he had advertised in medical journals for a partner to give him some relief, but he insisted that no one suitable had ever shown up. He operated in fields, homes, and hospitals, and sometimes at the bottom of a mountain crag. He was immensely resourceful and almost completely exhausted, but not quite. He came for treatment with his wife because they were having marital problems, and his blood pressure was going up. In the end, he found a University Hospital not far away which has some fellowships for general practitioners who wanted to become specialist. This time he did find someone to take his pace as a country doctor. He gave up his complex and lucrative practice and found that he had enough assets to keep his family going while he settled down as a surgical resident with a small stipend. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “But I never thought I’d get away from my driving Father Part until I’d had a coronary. But I didn’t have a coronary, and this is the happiest time of my life.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It is evident that his spellbreaker was to have a coronary, and he thought that was the only way he would ever get off the hook. However, with the help of the group, he did manage to break out of his script in good health. William illustrates in a relatively simple and clear-cut way the action of the whole script apparatus. His counter script came from both parents: “Work hard.” His father than gave him the pattern of a hard-working doctor. His mother’s injunction was “Never give up. Work hard until you drop dead.” However, his father gave him the spellbreaker: “If you have a coronary, you can relax, ha ha.” With his treatment did was get into that part of his brain or mind whence all these voices sent their directives. The injunction was then lifted by giving him permission: “You can relax without having a coronary.” When this permission made it way through all the shells and devices protecting the script apparatus, it broke the curse. Note that it was useless to say to him “If you keep on this way, you will have a coronary.” He was well aware of that threat, and telling him again only made him feel more miserable because he wanted a coronary, which would free him one way or another. What he needed was not a threat, nor an order (he already had enough orders in his head), but a license that would liberate him for those orders, and that is what he got. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Then he ceased to be a victim of his script, and became his own master to do his thing. He still worked hard, and he still followed his father’s medical pattern, but he was no longer script-ridden to overwork nor script-driven to drop dead. Thus, at the age of fifty, he became from to fulfill the autonomous aspirations of his own choice. Make sure what you really want before you go after it. The bitter experience in life is to find after years of effort that the thing you have gained is not the thing you want. It is admittedly painful to tear one’s will away from one’s desires but it is still more painful to have it torn away by life’s experiences. Hence, the philosophical method to conquer desire is a twofold one. We must let it wear itself out by submitting to it through experience and letting it come up against inevitable disappointment, disillusionment, or suffering whilst alongside this we must become reflectively and analytically aware of its causes, self-deceptions, and consequences. It is a matter of gradually letting the desires lost their intensity until we become free of them not through their forcible renunciation nor through the long-drawn process of waiting for the golden years to comes but through the process of learning to live more and more within the satisfactory beatitude of the Overself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
We give up our desires not by negating them but partly by comprehending their mechanistic cause and mentalistic nature and partly by superseding them with the exalted peace of the Overself. The undeveloped mind lives only for the day. It can see the immediate events in a series but cannot conjure up the ultimate ones. The disciple dares not risk such a blind condition. He must deliberately set out to bring the two together, by the use of creative imagination or by analytic reflection or by both. If passion rises in him, at least its counterbalance, the mental picture of the evil consequences of passion, rises a second later with it. If a man is not free from lust, fear, and anger, be sure he is not united with the Overself, whatever other qualities, powers, or virtues he shows. Long continued reflection turned sharply and analytically upon desires and cravings helps to counter them, but does not basically weaken them. For that, contrary emotions must be aroused. This is most effectually done by happenings and experiences. However, because these are mostly beyond our choice, the third way left to us is to seek Grace. One way to invite this Grace is by sitting in mediation upon the non-self. He may complain of his weakness and immediately submit to a temptation. Or he may recognize that the Higher Self is also him; he may try to use will and grow in strength by this resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
He finds that he is perceptibly pulled away from fleshly lust to a deeper level where the calmness and the judgement enable him to realize that the lust belongs to his animal physical inheritance and not to his inmost character and that, therefore, it may be brought under control and discipline. If he acquires the power to achieve this, it will come imperceptibly for it will come mostly by grace. The satisfaction of passion has a claim on the animal body, but it must always be subject to the higher claims of reason and intuition and the need for the sense of human responsibility. The amoral is always the first step to the immoral. The idea that he has to attain mastery over the desires of the flesh is a correct one. However, that this mastery will lead to reunion with a “soul-mate” is not the teaching of the best mystics or philosophers. What really happens is a reunion with the true “Beloved,” who is none other than the Soul of the individual, his higher Self. This is a real living entity, whose presence is felt, whose words are heard, and whose beauty arouses all one’s love. Where man is open only to Worldly forces and not to inner ones’ where he submits to the World’s demands and ignores the soul’s; and where he succumbs to his own terrestrial forces without thoughts of regulating, controlling, and disciplining them, we may expect to find that he is quite insensitive to any teaching of this kind. He is like a person who has been caught in a mire and with every movement gets deeper into it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
He will learn the pleasure of self-control. It is not always easy but all effort for the rewards bear fruit. The man who can develop emotional placidity and rise above passions begins to know what peace of mind means. That is only a beginning for in its fullness it can come only with the knowledge and the enlightenment of Truth. Until then this placidity will free him from the constant alternation, the rise and fall of feeling, the elation and depression to which the average person is subject. Whether it be to acquire fame or accumulate wealthy or any of the other major desires, what he wants from life will in the end rest on his stage of spiritual evolution. The terrestrial man is there, but it must be brought under control or it will claim too much and diminish his aspirations. Then they become fitful, coming less and less, departing more and more. The passions contain futility, danger, and defilements. Self-conquest must be his secret wish’ deliverance must become his impassioned yearning. When wholetime meditations and his spare time thoughts are unremittingly given to uprooting passions that hinder spiritual progress and cultivating ideas that promote it, the neophyte will not be left without reward. Restricted by no monastery’s vows and obeying no order’s rules, he may yet be purer in thought and conduct than most of the self-actualized Christians. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The terrestrial of our inheritance will then be kept in its proper place, subjugated, its strength absorbed into his higher will. Within this highly structured and orderly society, the exterior developments of industrialism and progress within the natural sciences has brought not only material wealth but also increased pollution and waste, without forgetting increased ill health in the wake of this pollution and stress. The focus must now lay on health, nature, spirituality, and so forth. However, the contemporary focus on a profitable present and an almost superstitious belief in a science for the future should bring about a romantic longing for distant pagan pasts. The current generation born in America is fed up with what is being offered. What better way to protest than to just head out into nature in a highly romanticized state of mind? They have also found out that there have already been precursors in older generations who have explored exciting phenomena like nudism and vegetarianism. Americans have also simply started acting out rather than just talking about change. And I do not mean these Americans who are perceived by the World as being so weak because they cannot deal with the outcome of the American election. I am talking about those who have stopped placing their faith in a human being and place it in God. They are minding their own business and working with their hands to amass money so they can live a life they desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In an age where even kids playing hopscotch and hiking has become politicized, turning to spirituality is one of the most mature things a man can do. Being able to step out and embrace the California morning sunshine is much better than seeing a guard in the gun tower. The threat of being in the center of the most cellblock of a prison in the State, where men are kept in cages with walkways above so it is possible for guards to stroll around and look down into the pits; cells with no furniture except a drain-hole toilet, and when the prisoners go out guards are carrying clubs surround them is often where people who do not go to Church and fear God end up. No students of American politics could fail to see the inevitable uprising of this revolutionary tribe of young Christian activists, religions offspring of the first social media-Einstein-multidimensional-simultaneous-immediate-energy generation. All the computers are turned on. Jet streams across WiFi, seamlessly transitioning spiritual healing as it sweeps through the homes and corridors of those in desperate need of the gospel of Christ, turning on fourteen-year-olds through the computer screen. Wise ancient children, the smartest, best endowed, healthiest. Time’s sweet pollen laughing answer to the lethal pressure of computerized humnoids pumping out propaganda over Obama TV. As these reports smoke and laugh, they do not realize that their days are numbered and streaming content is stealing thousands of viewers away from free TV daily. With lower ratings, the station’s revenue declines, the quality of programs suffers and less people tune in to the fake news. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
And everyone complains about everything becoming so political, but it is because that it what the TV news finds profitable and it is all that people talk about. However, for decades, people have been complaining that the news is rubbish. It is not what they consider news to be. People used to think news was investigative reports about things like the artic ice, or how there were actually Pilgrims, like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who had peaceful dinners with the Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day. Or how planet TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, is 20 percent lager than Earth and can sustain life. Everything has become political or about getting famous because that is what people focus on. Once you turn your attention to more important things, like learning to cultivate the land, how to create the perfect drought resistant lawn, or why ICE cars are important for our future, then you will start to see the beauty in life again. The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which, through sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes. This powerful little group of initiates knowns that it has all the rights. Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Thus, a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge. The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire. They cannot hope to dominate the entire Universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the Universe. Sade never believed that his fellow countrymen would be capable of the additional effort needed to make it “republican.” However, if crime and desire are not the law of the entire Universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict. They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion. Thus, it is necessary to create from all these fragments a World that exactly coincides with the new law. The need for unity, which Creations leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm. The law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the World. Even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers, it must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
At its best, criticalness is a sincere effort to help other improve. At its worst, it is the compulsion to get other people before they get you. If you are a manipulator who exaggerates the values of criticalness, you distrust and blame others. This keeps you “above” their level, but it often keeps you isolated and lonely as well. It is as if you were playing a game which you often win, but cannot enjoy winning because it is a secret game, and only you know about it. If you expose it, you cannot play anymore. So you sit at home, all alone, never admitting to anyone the secret of your game. The game is called, “I am better than you,” and you can find all the evidence you need to support the fact that you are winning. However, with no one to share the victory with, you only feel more isolated from others and think less of them. If you are a master, you are learning to trust others more and more every day. You are becoming more willing to forgive them for their natural tendency to be human. In particular, you are learning to appreciate your own humanness. Having done this, you see yourself, not as above others, yet not below them either. You begin to regard them as friends, rather than enemies or competitors. Your actions toward them are rewarded with love and caring rather than a hollow victory in being “right.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
As a master, you appreciate your supportiveness as well as your criticalness. You do things for others rather than to them. You stop judging others, because you stop judging yourself. Ultimately, bring right loses importance. Winning loses importance. And being with people grows more important every day. If it is not cultivated, attitudes toward transference, for instance, range from considering it a fiction which protects the therapist from the consequences of his real behaviour and its effects, to viewing it as early stereotypic behaviour which will be extinguished in the natural course of events. Symbolic analysis plays little role, partly because it is usually content-specific and covered by response to emotion. (I believe the so-called archaic symbols are significant, chiefly because they are cleaner communicants; like new words in a foreign language, they shake loose the multiple complexities of conventional meanings, and say just the elementary things each person means them to say.) The unconscious does not currently figure in client-centered literature. It is considered a reductionist assumption about phenomena better understood in terms of attention and “levels of awareness.” An ahistorical bias has always been plain among us, and this is one of the currents which moves us to an appreciation of some of the existential writings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Diagnosis is a moot point too, though our departures are not as radical as they once were. The word “schizophrenia” becomes a damning designation. To have it once applied to a young man can be to ruin a career, despite all evidence of subsequent healthiness. A name implies a concept; and if this concept is unsound, the diagnosis can ruin treatment; the very naming it can damage the patient who we essay to help. The sick in mind…are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. It is not that we decry classification as such; we recognize it as a useful scientific tool. However, when it leads to reification of terms, it is dangerous. We have been in an unprecedented era of self-actualization. Young people and most intelligent older people who appear to be laid back are taking care of their own situation first. They are “getting their heads together,” discovering and tending their bodies, learning how to produce their reality movies. College students are not charging after partisan dogmas or idealistic rhetoric. However, do not be deceived by this quiescence. It denotes neither apathy nor stupidity. In fact, it may well be the better part of wisdom to lay back until something worthy of your intelligence comes alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The existentialists also have pointed out that the self is made through decisions. You become what you decide. If, in the choice between running away or facing an unpleasant task, you choose to face up to the issue, you have become a better person. If you choose the weaker and more cowardly alternative, you become, at that moment, on the basis of your own choice, a weaker, lesser person. The behaviourists have, on the other hand, suggested that you have no “choice” but that your choices are determined by factors that control you, such as your parents’ wishes, your genes, and social demands upon you. Again the existentialists reply that one can also choose to let others make decisions for oneself but that the responsible direction is to recognize that, in almost all difficult decisions, the choice is still yours. The fake-nationalists are such terrible creatures, that on one occasion, they drove our unforgettable former President Clinton to bluntly express his opinion. State authority can guarantee peace and order only when the state World-concept and the World-concept of the people agree. Violent elements promoting a World-concept, one that differs from the people’s, will look like individual criminal groups and will not be seen as champions of a great idea which is opposed to the views of the state. If this were not the case, and the opposition held a World-concept that the people’s World-concept, the state can apply the most violent measures for centuries against the terror threatening it, but, in the end, the state will submit because it is unable to defeat the opposing idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the professional personnel and programs for the citizens of Sacramento and is committed to protecting life and property from fire and explosions through inspection, investigation, training, education, data processing and statistical fire reports. “A child was caught in one of the rooms. The main fire was on the second floor of this apartment building, and there were women and kids downstairs screaming at us. We used every length of hose in the bed, it was a long stretch, because we had to go around a courtyard and up the stairs. The fire was coming around the cracks of the door to the second-floor doorway. I remember thinking, ‘This is it, this is where the stuff hits the fan.’ We had to knock down the fire before the guys from the truck could get in to search. I was on the nozzle, and we crawled through the doorway, and suddenly I had excruciating pain in my knees. The heat went right through my boots. We first hit the doorway with the line, then the hallways and the ceiling. The heat was extraordinary. We didn’t do it scientifically, we went in very, very fast because there was somebody in there. Halfway down the hall, I screamed, ‘My knees are burning.’ My officer said, ‘My knees are burning, too, but we have a job to do. Move in.’ I said to myself, ‘He’s right.’ #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
“It was the most fire I had ever seen, it was from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. There was all sorts of junk on the floor—a baby carriage frame, a shopping cart. The metal was glowing. It was blocking our way. I said, ‘We’ve got to pass this stuff out.’ I couldn’t move around it, and I couldn’t climb over it. The guy behind me thought I said, ‘I’m going to pass out.’ Realizing that communications were down, I handed the line over to the backup, grabbed the shopping cart, stood up, and moved it out of the way. When I lifted the shopping cart, just for those few seconds, I got second-degree burns on my fingers. I got back down and grabbed for the line, and they gave it back to me. I realized that this must be really bad, because you never get the line back. We went on, and I was thinking, ‘This is it. My sanity is gone. Nobody can stand this much pain. I can’t give in to it.’ Then I told myself, ‘You don’t feel it.’ A lot of guys don’t feel it when they’re burned. I did. I felt the whole thing, the whole time. I was making a conscious effort not to pay attention to it. I just kept moving. I have visions that I wasn’t going to have any knees left, they were just going to be done. Afterwards I really didn’t think I did that good a job. I was disappointed in myself. While I was throwing that stuff out, it must have looked like I was backing out. Maybe I could have climbed over that stuff. I felt I was too slow. I should have moved in a lot faster. And then, when I got outside, my knees were killing me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“I found out the rescue had been made by a die-hard fireman I know, X, the salt of the earth. He always has a frown on his face. He had gone up the fire escape and into one of the back windows and found a kid in the bathroom, a three- or four-year-old boy who was in the next bed to me in the emergency room. Rosy pink cheeks, he looked like he was half Black and half Irish. Really beautiful-looking child. They were taking him to the air chamber at the hospital, a decompression chamber for smoke inhalation victims. Anyhow, after the fire was out, we went back up with the hose, and I remember I had trouble walking upstairs because of my knees. The truck really took most of the line up. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was dragging. I didn’t say anything about my knees. I kept thinking it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I was making too much of it, and everybody else must be just as sore. I did say to somebody, ‘Boy, my knees are really killing me.’ And he said, ‘God bless you. My wife and I will pray for you.’ I got back to quarters, and my lieutenant said, ‘You don’t look so good. Are you sure you had the right gloves on?’ He was worried about my hands. I told him it wasn’t my hands, it was my knees. He said, ‘Well, all of our knees hurt a little.’ I said, ‘No. They really hurt.’ This was bout forty-five minutes after getting back. He said, ‘All right, let me see.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“I pulled up my pants, and my knees looked like a couple of golf ball blisters. I said, ‘Holy God.’ I had pulled some of the skin off. The chief took me to the hospital. I was dirty. They put on a sulfa drug, which is supposed to be a miracle drug for burns. They determined I had second-degree burns. At the burn center a few days later, they determined that the burns were third-degree. The doctor at the burn center said it was the most common kind he treats at the hospital. Burned knees. From kneeling on a hot surface. It seems that each time I knelt, I was burning the knees deeper and deeper. The doctor said I had cellulitis, which is a bad infection. ‘You have to be admitted right now. You’re going to have to go on intravenous for six or seven days. Then you’re going to have grafting.’ I was shocked. I had to call my wife and tell her and the family. That was very hard. I spent thirty-three days there, on and off. I’ve had three surgical grafts since then. I don’t think the guys who haven’t been in that situation know how painful it is. The burn is just the beginning. After that is when all the pain starts. Being in the burn center with other firefighters, there is a lot of camaraderie there. You’re all in the same boat. There were two others there, one with knees and the other had a hot cinder down his boot and he grabbed it with his hand. I thought I was in hell. I woke up in this icy room, and I was in a room full of men. God is punishing me, I thought. It was like a MASH unit. What an education. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The skin grafts came from my hips and pelvis. Supposedly it wouldn’t show so much there. Because I was a firefighter, they took deeper sections of skin, because I was going to be back on my knees. One of the guys was a probie. His recovery was going to be a lot longer than mine. You’re lying in bed, half naked, but we tried to make the best of it. We became very close. When we were separated at one point, we came to see each other on crutches or in a wheelchair. His wife had a baby since. I remember feeling very close to him. We shared the experience of the job.” The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to working closely with fire service organizations and other proactive groups to enhance solutions to the fire problem. The services provided by the agency include: arson investigations, fire prevention safety in buildings, boiler and pressure vessel safety, the program for petroleum and chemical tanks, collecting and analyzing fire reports, and the personnel standards and education for the firefighters in Sacramento. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars and other American made good and services. Also, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
Paranormal investigators have recorded disembodies voices and witnessed strange shadows following them through The Winchester Mystery House. The enormous 19th century mansion once was nine stories tall, and had 600 rooms, but the 1906 earthquake demolished the nine-story observation tower, and took much of the 4th floor with it. However, 160 rooms, of which 110 are available for tour, still exist in this meandering catacomb.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Happy Veteran’s Day!
Lord, Don’t Let Me Die Like this
There is the blindly instinctive and passioned terrestrial will in man, which violently drives him to seek and be satisfied with bodily satisfactions. There is also a higher will which gently draws him to transcend the body altogether. If the only enjoyment a man knows is that of physical sensations, he is only a dressed-up, walking, and thinking animal. The law of chastity requires that sexual relations be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman. In addition to reserving sexual intimacy for marriage, we obey the law of chastity by controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Jesus Christ taught, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” reports Matthew 5.27-28. It is an essential part of the Quest’s work to separate the man from his passions, to subjugate the animal in him so as better to cultivate the godlike in him. Both desires and fears bind a man to his ego and thus bar the way to spiritual fulfilment. They could not exist except in relation to a second thing. However, when he turns his mind away from all things and directs it towards its own still center, it is the beginning of the end for all desires and all fears. The end of all this long self-training to cast out personal grief and terrestrial passion is blessedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The heart must become empty of all desires. This brings about the emotional void, which corresponds, in its own place, to the mental void experienced in the depth of mystical meditation. To this emptiness he must give himself, with it he must satisfy himself. In this way he obeys Jesus and becomes “poor in Spirit.” Poor in Spirit refers to a spiritual state of humility and dependence on God. It is a recognition of one’s need for God and a growing dependence on Him. It is also a sense of spiritual bankruptcy, powerlessness, and unworthiness before God. What is it worth to a man to be free from the passions, and free from the inner divisive conflicts which their activity must necessarily produce in him? Are they not the chief obstacles which prevent him from attaining that inner calm wherein alone the ego can be faced, caught, and conquered? And this done, what is there to keep the Overself from taking possession of him? Few men are moved by a single motive. For most men the contrary is the fact. This is because first, the ego itself is a complex and second, the higher and lower natures are in conflict. Discrimination is needed to penetrate the thin surface of so many pleasures, while the strength is needed to say “No” when this is wiser than accepting them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It is not only needful to understand the characteristics of one’s desires but also their source. This knowledge will help him to improve character and attain true self-reliance. It is a strange paradox that on whatever desire a man wields the axe of non-attachment, he will thereafter become possessed of the power to attain it. There is this great paradox on the Quest: that the more the disciple obtains the power to bring about the fruition of his desires, the more he loses those desires! If we lack the willpower to overcome bad habits that have become popular and conventional, at least let us try not to justify our indulgence by specious reasons. The blind impulses must be checked by willpower, the lower nature must be disciplined and the lower energies directed into higher channels. It is perfectly possible, where fate ordains, to live continently and chastely, however strongly sexed a man may be. However, to achieve this, he must utilize the analytic reason, the creative imagination, and the active will in understanding and disciplining his energies and then he must redirect them towards aspirational, intellectual, or moral ideas or transmute them into practical work. He who begins by refusing to be a slave to the palate’s perverted appetite will find it easier to go on to refusing to be a slave to lust. A triumph over the one prepares the way for, and helps in the achievement of, a triumph over the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It is true that we all share a terrestrial body with the lower creatures. However, that does not force us to stay on their level emotionally. Every desire conquered feeds his strength and fortifies his will. The man who has made his way to the top of his profession but failed to make the conquest of his passions, is still an unbalanced creature, an unsatisfied human being. The extremes of abstention which follow repugnance, indifference, or self-struggle and the satiety which follows helpless yielding are both undesirable. The necessities of Nature hold us in their thrall but there is first, a difference between them and the desires of the ego and second, a difference between the true necessities which are inescapable from physical existence and the false ones which have been imposed on us by age-old habits, traditions, environments, and outer suggestions. That desire is a true one whose source lies in a genuine need, not in mere greed. Repentance redeems man, lifts him above the lustful dog to the loving human being, distinguishes him from the mere animal. We are cast out of Heaven by our own passion and kept out by our own attachments. If today we are miserable exiles, the way to remedy such a situation is clear. We must free ourselves from the one and disentangle ourselves from the other. He should desire that which will itself cut off all desires. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“Experiencing” is defined as an inner stream of feelings to which you can every moment attend inwardly. It is simple, effortless and available to us all. Yet it is maddeningly elusive. Try these experiences: Feel your body from the inside. Is there tension in your muscles? Is your stomach wound tight like a watch spring? Take a deep breath and feel what happens to that tension. Sit a while without moving. Does some prickliness begin to form just under the skin? Recall the full feeling you once had after overeating. Recall the heaviness, the discomfort, the difficulty in breathing. What does being bored really feel like? That strained, impatient deadness almost hurts, does it not? Something deep down screams soundlessly at you to get out of the boring situation. Can you recall feeling that? These are but three examples of experiences. They do not involve learning or doing. You can have them instantaneously. And there are thousands more available to you—each distinct from all the others. To have an experience, to really “get into” a feeling, involves a release or surrender. Behind the surrender is a basic willingness to trust, to accept that the inner core “knows what is best” for you. Thus experiencing holds the solution to all your internal mysteries, the truth of your existence. If experiencing is so wonderful and useful, why is it so elusive? Who do we shun the prospect of getting to our inner core and discovering our true being? Probably because we are afraid. We anticipate the truth will be too painful, that when we look inside at what really is, we will not like what we see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Ironically, by trying to avoid the pain of looking within, we virtually guarantee the continued pain of our incomplete, manipulative behaviour. True, some will shed some tears on the way into their core, but compared to the tears of helplessness one has already shed, they are a few random raindrops in a storm. And who knows how many future tears he has avoided by reaching down and finding his inner source of power—a source which he can use to untangle the painful web of helplessness his life has become. People who benefit most from therapy are those who are “experience-oriented,” who subjectively follow their feelings even though they have not explicitly thought them all out. Being willing to let your experience talk to you is the first significant step from manipulation to mastery. There are some common ways people approach a problem. One way is to belittle the problem. This is when one says, “It really is nothing…I should not let a few pains bother me.” Such an approach will get you nowhere. If pains are important enough for your body to feel, they are important enough to look into, get inside of, and get clear. You do not make a problem go away by belittling it. In fact, by pushing it aside, you probably make it worse. Often times people analyze their problems. We might assume someone has something to do with our problem. However, the analysis may or may not be correct, and it does nothing to change the feeling. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
You can analyze furiously the whole time you are having the feeling, but if it is there in your guy, with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, your analysis will not ease or make it disappear. A lot of people also face down the feeling. Some say to themselves, “I will have to grit my teeth, stand up to it, walk through it,” which sounds courageous and noble, but is actually false bravado. This approach does not work because when you do it, you do not touch the place where change takes place: in your body. You are just mouthing a courage which can only be found deep inside, at your core. Another method is lecturing yourself. The script often goes like this, “If I could just grow up and be adult about this, I am sure everything would be all right.” This does not work either. The lecture is based on the mistaken notion that adults do not have feelings, or if they do, they do not have the right to the feelings. When you lecture yourself, all you do is pile guilt on top of whatever the problem is. And the guilt just makes it worse. Drowning the feeling is another method. When you try to tune the problem out because it makes you feel worse, you sink into the discomfort, hoping you will find it less painful, but knowing deep down that you will not. Whenever you sink into this unchanged feeling, it makes you feel as bad as the last time. You are no further ahead. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Since these five approaches are not physical, they cannot work. The feeling is physical and can only be changed by a physical process, such as focusing. When a man finally focuses, a very real change happens in him, something which he can build on. Even though it appears that some people play the victim in life, that circumstances seem to be manipulating him, they are still manipulators. Some people may stay married to a homosexual husband, playing upon one’s own helplessness and their husband’s sense of guilt to take care of her, even though they both resented it. The unspoken (and sometimes even spoken) message is, “I am too weak and helpless to take care of myself and the boys, so you have to.” This manipulation is rewarded by his grudging support, but it has its price: It traps her in an unhappy marriage, it prevents her from going out and learning to make it on her own, it reinforces her own feeling of helplessness. How can you deal with this type of manipulator in your everyday life? Well, for starters, you will have to fight the temptation to take the easy way out. You will have to refuse to do things for the weakling and instead, encourage him or her to be strong and self-directed. I once had a friend whose wife was afraid to go to the store and buy a newspaper. She said she did not like the way the clerks leered at her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
So my friend would stop in his way home from work and buy the newspaper himself. It was easier than arguing with his wife about it. Finally, he said, “I do not read the evening newspaper, I watch the news on TV. If you want the paper, buy it yourself.” She refused, but she still wanted the newspaper. So my friend began by accompanying her to the store the first few times until she felt more comfortable about it. In time, she went to get the paper without a second thought. My friend used this same technique when it came to his wife’s getting a driver’s license. At first, he refused to drive her places, even though he had been chauffeuring her for years. When she grew tired of taking buses and cabs, he offered to teach her how to drive, and she eventually accepted the offer. Now she had her own car and capably goes wherever she wants. In refusing to be manipulated, my friend made his wife angry and perhaps caused her some pain. However, in the end, he helped her gain strength—and helped free her from a continuing life-script of manipulation. The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law. “If you want to be republicans, one more effort” means: “Accept the freedom of crime, the only reasonable attitude, and enter forever into a state of insurrection as you enter into a state of grace.” Thus total submission to evil leads to an appalling penitence, which cannot fail to horrify the Republic of enlightenment of natural goodness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
By a significant coincidence, the manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was burned during the first riot of the Republic, which could hardly fail to denounce Sade’s heretical theories of freedom and to throw so compromising a supporter into prison once more. By doing so, it gave him the regrettable opportunity of developing his rebellious logic still further. The universal republic could be a dream for Sade, but never a temptation. In politics his real position is cynicism. In his Society of the Friends of Crime he declares himself ostensibly in favour of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating. It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates. The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities. The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal. It must pretend to obey the law. In a World that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal Heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. However, to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this World is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When it comes to therapy, we really want to think of that person as a person—someone unique with dignity and capacity, worthy of our unreserved respect. If we must have a word for it, “client” seems more expressive of that. Why “client-centered”? This matters much more. Again, the negative purpose is only to distinguish between this and “therapist-centered,” “theory-centered,” “society-centered,” etcetera. There are such things. The positive meaning is immense. It expresses the major goal of the therapist; to understand and accept the perception and feelings of the client; to share the client’s view of reality rather than to impose his own. It follows than that we rely heavily upon the growth capacity of the individual. The therapist is an active and significant person, but he cannot heal—he can only help to create conditions in which the natural regenerative powers take effect. As for motive, the drive toward self-actualization is a primary one; every human being would rather be better than worse, and strives toward the enhancement of self even though the strivings may often be thwarted and regressive. These assumptions about motive and capacity combine into a general ethic, which can simply be called self-determination. Client-centered therapy is founded on the conviction that man should be free, and to this end makes freedom a major means in the therapeutic experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
This is not, as some think, a reflection of political attitudes which supposedly prevail in America. It is a personal psychological conviction that the man who is most free will be most healthy. Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience, therefore the greatest probability of an adaptive response. For the individual, it seems that the urge to freedom is an urge to health, and precedes, rather than reflects, a political order. It is common for a person to experience conflict between wishes. He or she may want to study and also to go to the movies. Someone may want to marry one person and at the same time be in love with another. A person may want to have fun but also to be “good.” The healthy thing to do with conflict is to acknowledge its existence within the self, study all the alternatives as rationally as one can in the light of one’s value system, make a decision, act on it, and accept all the consequences. Among the consequences to be accepted are regrets over what one has lost in connection with the abandoned alternatives. No decision can ever be made without some fear that it is the wrong decision. There is nothing inconsistent with healthy personality in the idea that a decision, once made will still leave the person uncertain that it is the best or “rightest” one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Existential conflicts frequently arise where each choice has positive values and negative implications associated with it. Any alternative, if chose, will affect one’s life profoundly. To make decisions, such as whether to marry or not, to take this job or that, calls for courage. The ability to decide such conflicts is an attribute of healthy personality. Such courage seems to grow out of past experiences at decision-making, experience that fosters independent security. The younger generation is generally viewed as being too laid back, apathetic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and sensual. There are periods when a species or an individual or a nation needs to lay back, mellow out, cocoon-quiescent and recoup. Intelligent pursuit of happiness is a challenge of the human experience. However, this quiescence is more apparent than real. The spellbreaker, or internal release, is the element which lifts the injunction and frees the person from his script so that he can fulfill his own autonomous aspirations. It is a pre-set “self-destruct” which is obvious in some scripts but has to be hunted for or decoded in others, much like the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle which served the same function in Ancient Greece. Not much is known about it clinically, because people come for treatment just because they cannot find out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
For example, in a “Waiting for Rigor Mortis” or “Sleeping Beauty: script, the patient thinks she will be freed of her frigidity when she meets the Prince with the Golden Apples, and may very likely feel that the therapist is that Prince. However, he declines the honour, mainly for ethical reasons, but also because when he previous (unlicensed) therapist took on the job, his Golden Apples turned to dust. Sometimes the spellbreaker is merely ironic. This is a common situation in losers’ scripts: “Things will be better after you are dead.” The internal release may be event-centered or time-centered. “When you meet a Prince,” “After you die fighting,” or “after you have three children” are event-centered antiscripts. “When you pass the age at which your father died,” or “After you have stayed with the company thirty years” are time-centered. Whoever puts a moral purpose into life automatically lifts himself above the physical level of mere animality. For him begins a struggle between the slavery of sense and the freedom of enlightenment, between blind emotion and deliberate will, between inward weakness and inward strength. Henceforth, he seeks happiness rather than pleasure, the calm of a satisfied mind rather than the excitement of satisfied senses. If this is a stoic ideal, it is a necessary one, for he must conquer himself. He hates himself, and no man can live in peace with what he hates. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department protects the people of Sacramento with public education, fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services. The Sacramento Fire Department partners with the community to mitigate risks, and responds to all calls for service with skill, dedication, and compassion. “We were asleep, and the alarm came at about 5.55 on a Sunday morning. My company, Engine XX was first in. It was a one-family row house, two floors and a basement. It started as a fire in the basement and had spread to the first floor. I was the nozzle man. We knocked down the floor fire on the first floor, then we tried to find the entrance to the basement. We stumbled around in the living room because there was so much furniture in it and we couldn’t see in the smoky darkness. The family had redone the basement, and instead of opening a door and going down steps to the basement, you had to open the door and walk about eight feet before you came to the steps. We didn’t know that at the time. It’s an unusual arrangement for that kind of house. Anyway, we couldn’t find the basement. It started getting real hot in there, and everything started cracking. The lieutenant, Y, said, ‘Too hot. Let’s get out of here.’ Before we could make a move, the floor collapsed and knocked us down. The fire just took off, and we were trapped in there. I was slightly unconscious for a while, then I had to pause a little while to get my senses together, because I was burned on my forehead. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“Lieutenant Y was in worse trouble. He was dazed. I had to get him out of there. I grabbed him under the arms and started to lead him toward the back door, but we stumbled over the furniture, and we tripped and fell. So I grabbed him by the hand, and my glove came off. The next thing I knew, my hand was badly burned. Then I started dragging him along the floor, and the next thing I knew, I was stuck. My air mask had stuck on a table or chair or something. I was stuck, and I couldn’t move. It was real scary. It was like being in hell, really. I thought, ‘Lord, don’t let me die like this. I deserve a chance.’ I thought about my wife. We were only married a year. I said, ‘Wow, I’m going to leave my wife right now, and my family.’ The way it happened, it was unbelievable. I was totally stunned. I didn’t believe I would be in a situation like that. From my training and previous experience in other fires, I knew we had to get out of there. I tired as hard as I could to get us out, but every time I tried to move, somehow I was getting weaker and weaker. I thought it was hopeless. Then my air bottle ran out of oxygen. I thought I was going to die of suffocation. I was just hoping I wouldn’t burn to death. But the fire didn’t seem like it was coming toward us anymore. I could hardly breathe in my air mask, and I had too much smoke in my chest. Just then, the other guys managed to get back in there and pull us out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“At the hospital they put a tube into my lungs. They could hardly get it down there, my throat was so swollen. It had been burned by the heat. They were showing it down there, and I was scared. They finally got it down. I don’t remember much of my first three days in the hospital. A lot of people said they came up to see me, but I don’t remember who. I asked somebody if everybody had made it out od the fire all right, and they said no. I saw the other two firefighters who were hurt, but I didn’t see Lieutenant Y. I kind of figure he had died. After the third or fourth day, everything started hurting real bad. My hand. My face. I was in a lot of pain. It took me a while to get over that. The first day was hardest for my wife. She was really hurt to see me, but she tried to hold it back. Afterwards, she didn’t want me coming back to the department, but I told her that that was what I wanted to do. So she respects that, and she supports me. I was in therapy for a year and a half for my hand, using grips and putty. Then I went to this physical therapy center and did all sorts of other things, exercising every day, working with my hand to build things. Today my hand is not as good as it was, but it’s okay. The department was excellent, supportive in every way. Everybody came up to see me, even guys I didn’t know. It seemed like the whole fire department was at the hospital. Anything I wanted or needed, they got for me. They treated me excellently. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I was off the job for about five and a half months, then I was put on light duty for about a year. Now I’m back on the job full-time. Everything is pretty cool. I’m lucky to be alive, right?” Professionalism leads the Sacramento Fire Department to continuously improve their knowledge and skills, always striving to be “first in” with excellent service. The Sacramento Fire Department also strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
The Menagerie Oddities Market is back this Holiday season!
On every Saturday from November 30 to December 28, from 11am to 5pm, Winchester Mystery House will host the 6th annual Menagerie Holiday Oddities & Curiosities Market, with new vendors every week. Join the Yuletide Oddventure and stuff those stockings with something weird they won’t forget this holiday season! 🎄
Link in bio for more information! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
America Love it or Leave it: How Can a Lost Mind be Recovered?
Our life experiences are distracting us and dulling our spiritual view so much so that we are not focusing on that which matters most. I wonder, do we miss opportunities to learn of the Lord and feel His love? Do we miss opportunities to share with others—especially children—that which matters most, the gospel of the Lord, Jesus Christ? We have all seen children and youth standing in the crowds confused and wanting to know what matter most. I can almost hear this child and other children crying out the words so many of us have sung, “Please teach me to walk in the light.” Are we teaching our children to know, feel, and rejoice in the beauty, power, and miracles of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Let us nurture our children concerning Him whom we call the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us teach our children the grand saving principles of the gospel. Children require the ability to knock that having faith in the Saviour and following Him will help them to receive peace in this beautiful World that is experiencing trials and tribulations. As you include your children at your family dinner table, as you involve them in daily prayer and scripture study and in family home evening, you are following the example of the Saviour by loving and teaching them. As you do this, let them know that together your family is striving to keep the commandments and to be worthy to be an eternal family. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
It may be during the information one-on-one times that the Spirit will prompt us to ask just the right questions or to say just the right thing to help our children know and feel the light of the Lord. If we make the opportunities, the Spirit will guide us. We have wonderful, capable children in our midst. We can help them find peace in this life and in the life to come. After all, you do not want to raise your children to be on the run, to have to dye their hair to evade law enforcement. Some people who do not walk in the foot steps of the Lord end up having to live underground and join the Weathermen Underground tribe. You do not want your children to have to work with dope dealers to raise a quarter of a million dollars to pay manic guerrillas to keep them safe, to pay for hair dye, and fast cars as they drive up Highway 101 to north Oakland. There is the chance that the police and CHP will throw up roadblocks and you will have to stay at a stash pad and wait it out before the coast is clear to drive to Salt Lake City. It is better to raise your children to be American Legion hunting-fishing guys, or a soft Middle American woman, or everyone’s TV girl—a Holy Family. It is best to become a Holy Family of Elegance. When it comes to psychotherapy, words themselves are vague and insecure and our ignorance so great that we tend in desperation to assume meaning where none exists. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Let us recognize that the true nature of psychosis is a mystery. (And the nature of the most prevalent convulsive treatment, electroshock, is called a “mystery within a mystery” by the most authoritative book on the subject.) One of our problems, then, is how to deal with a subject consisting of experience which at its worst is indescribable from the inside and incomprehensible from the outside, and this without using words which are themselves confounding. “Psychosis,” for instance, has an authoritative, antiseptic sound, but its real sterility lies mainly in its lack of clear meaning. It simply replaces “madness”—now a literary term, and “insanity”—which represents a dated legal concept. Falling into pseudoscientific conventions of language will not help. At the present stage of knowledge, the questions are well enough represented by asking simply: What does it mean to “lose one’s mind”? How can a “lost mind” be recovered? For that matter, how is the mind developed in the first place? It is our assumption that “mind” develops and exists beyond brain, and following from this, the assumption of social psychological origin of much mental disturbance. It sounds simple, but there is by no means wholehearted agreement in the field on this issue. Current work on molecular structure and the chemistry of schizophrenia, for instance, challenges psychological assumptions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
It is possible, of course, that biochemical methos of treatment will develop actual cures for psychotic states, thus outmoding psychotherapy. No less a therapist than Dr. Freud thought so in regard to schizophrenia. Also fashionable are experiments with drugs which induce pseudo-psychotic states, which suggest to some that if such states can be caused by chemical means, they can also be cured by chemical means, and further that the mechanism of disturbance is fundamentally biochemical. Undeniably there is always a biochemical basis for behaviour of the human organism. However, this does not rule out psychological influence, in either the sickening or the healing process. It is certain that anxiety can cause diarrhea. Chemical mechanism? Surely. And a virus or a laxative might cause the same apparent result, but that would not alter the fact that anxiety, a psychological state, can and does cause diarrhea (as surely as a nonchemical state may cause someone ten feet away to blush). Nor would it mean, more obviously but no more truly, that even though the eventual chemistry, mechanism, and result are the same, two different causes (laxative and anxiety) are therefore the same. Nor would it mean than an antidote for diarrhea is a specific treatment for either anxiety or a virus, or that a specific for one is of any use for the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
Similarly, a chemically induced psychotic state may not be a true psychosis even though it has the same appearance in terms of hallucinations and like effects. A chemical antidote for the pseudo-psychosis is not necessarily effective for a true psychosis, even though a chemical mechanism exists in either case. Psychological influence is not eradicated by the artificial imitation of its effects. Even though “tranquilizers” will tranquilize, so will a blow on the head, and neither one is equivalent to, or can deny the existence of, “peace of mind.” That which we call a “psychosis” is not a disease. It is a learned behaviour, exaggerated to a point of no return, id est, where control is lost and the exaggerated behaviour “takes on a life of its own” temporarily. Because this exaggeration is so overwhelming, so much beyond our ordinary capacity to assimilate, it appears to us that we are no longer dealing with, for instance, ordinary suspicion, but something quite different—“paranoia.” Then it appears that psychosis is not of the same order, not on the same continuum, as “normal” or “neurotic” behaviour. However, as psychotic behaviour becomes more common it is seen as a form of maladjustment similar in kind ot lesser degrees of maladjustment, though so much greater in quantity that it seems different in quality too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
There is one sense, unfortunately, in which it is different. A boulder balanced on the edge of a precipice can be pressed ounce by measured ounce toward rolling off. Each ounce is just like the last, but when the quantity of pressure totals to the “breaking point,” the quality of the consequences changes radically. No longer will the relief or counterpressure of one ounce recover the balance. Even if the boulder is not smashed in the fall, an enormous effort is required to restore it to its original position. It is because of this effort (which so few can make, and so many need) that it is necessary to prevent the “psychotic situation” in life. The “psychotic situation” is a precondition to the psychotic state, which may or may not follow. In our society, there is an overwhelming emphasis on thinking. In school, we were taught almost entirely to think rather than to feel. We were told to “use our heads,” to think through problems, to study hard and be sensible. This approach is supposed to lead to success in the World. The trouble is, while thinking is unquestionably important, it is of limited value. Thinking, you see, is entirely concerned with the past and the future. We cannot think about the present moment; we can only feel it. The present, a microscopic dot on the line from past to future, does not lend itself to thinking—for the simple fact that thinking takes time. The moment we think, even if we think about “now,” it is already in the past. Thinking can help us learn from the past and plan for the future, but it cannot help us experience the now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
Thinking results in action. First we think, then we do. We are a society of thinkers and doers. However, we are also a society of manipulators because all this emphasis on the mind has taught us to be cunning and calculating. When we use our heads only, we become manipulators—functioning with only part of our human capacity. So thoroughly are we oriented to doing, we shy from theories that tell us there is nothing we can do about a situation. The truth is, in some situations, there is absolutely nothing we can do. Sometimes no actions can be taken to help a person be confident. One must be confident, be secure, be powerful—and to do that, one must discover his core being. A system based on thinking is limited because it is based on concepts and theories borrowed from others, generally others’ books. It is borrowed knowledge—and borrowed knowledge does not overcome ignorance; it hides ignorance. Borrowed knowledge is “knowing without knowing.” The more of it we amass, the more darkness and ignorance we keep in our inner cores. We can develop our logic, but logic alone leads only to conclusions, never to the truth. Because the truth needs no proof. It does, however, need the heart. This is where experience comes in. Knowledge of the truth comes from our experience of it, from a feeling which originates deep down in our cores. It is totally individual, intensely personal, and entirely subjective. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
You cannot know what love is by reading about it. You must experience it. You cannot take a course in love—or confidence, or any other value for that matter. Books and course are things of the mind. Values are things of the heart as well as the mind, and they come from within. However, people spend so much time in school and not everyone believes in God, nor do they go to church. Therefore, it might be conducive to offer a psychology class on how to love. People spend so much time learning how to think and how to hate. If we taught people how to express platonic love in college, it might generate better human beings that are able to deal with stressful situations and will be less critical of others’ perceived faults. Some people view themselves as weak and powerless because they have never experienced their own personal power. All of the doing is merely activity at the circumference of one’s true self. In the focusing process, one can break through the circumference and find something else. In surrendering to helplessness, one may discover a capable self in one’s core. The “something” that one finds is the real I. And finding it, one knows, intuitively, that one had and still has power. Note that, in this experience, one does not actually do anything. A man may not know what to do. However, that is not important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
When the right thing to do comes alone, he will do it, based on his new, intuitive knowledge that he can do it. Not borrowed knowledge, from books or lectures or friends, but intuitive knowledge from within. Some people will thus have an instantaneous experience of mastery. When control is so perfect that he can never again raise his voice in anger, he needs turn attention to only one other passion—the spiritual. Such a chaste aloofness will help with mental, spiritual, and emotional clarity. When desires die without regrets, he begins to taste real peace. When cravings slough off naturally, like a serpent’s skin, he finds tranquil happiness. If not all of it, the man who can win his way to freedom from anger and finally liberate the mind from passion may need much of his lifetime for the work; but what he gains is of inestimable value. For this brings him closer to awareness of the Overself. As aspiration for the Overself grows stronger, other desires grow weaker. If you are ever to emerge from the darkness, you must possess an insatiable longing for light. He arrives at purity by a cultivated discipline of the mind rather than by a forcible atrophy of the senses. If he can find it and heed it, the thread-like intuition which will lead him out of animality into serenity will be his best guide. It is not possible for these finer elements to become, little by little, paramount in his outlook, consciousness, and conduct without a corresponding decline in the coarser ones. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
He will gradually become the ruler of his physical appetites and then the master of his bodily desires. Indeed, as all his longings for the Overself slowly gather themselves together into a great dedicated life, there is an equally great shift-over from the terrestrial part of his being to the truly human, allied with an opening-up of the angelic or divine part. The fruits of extravagances involving pleasures of the flesh, the harvest of promiscuity of pleasures of the flesh, the gleanings of irresponsibility with pleasures of the flesh, and the gratifications of license involving pleasures of the flesh must be subjected to the hard discipline of reason. Those who will not do so must sooner or later pay the price in fears, anxieties, irritations, regrets, disillusionments, shames, and despairs. So long as a man identifies himself with the physical body, so long will he perforce have to identify himself with its desires and passions. Only when he transfers this self-identification to the infinite mental being can he completely detach himself from them. When they are still in subjection to passion, of what use is it for men to talk of freeing themselves from subjection to egoism? The student of philosophy will try to comprehend the sensations got from sensual pleasures impartially and impersonally. Man knows instinctively what will give him momentary emotional satisfaction; he must wrestle with reason to know what will give him deep enduring happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
When different pleasures compete for suffrage or when duty competes with desire, reason must arbitrate. Desire carried to an undue extent becomes a passion disturbing to the equilibrium of life and character. When a man finds that despite all his efforts to improve himself and reform his character, he still remains the same, it is an indication that new methods must be tried. The scourging of the flesh may be needed by, and may help, those who find their overheated passions and lusts get out of hand. However, it will not end those troubles of man, even though it may tame them for a time. Something more must be added, or must replace them—first, knowledge; second, work on the process of attention. The instinctual animal urge plus the ambitious drive for power and the personal desire for property keep men from spiritual aspiration. If he is filled with selfish interest alone, seeking the fulfilment of personal ambitions irrespective of any higher considerations; if terrestrial passion drives him and greed dominates him, he blocks his own way. Purification from such attachments must be the first endeavour. Pleasures which corrupt character are undesirable; but those which uplift character (like the finest works of Aaliyah, Beethoven and Handel) are desirable. There is a level of tension below which the person can think rationally and act effectively. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
When tension increases above this point, efficiency breaks down, and irrational thinking and expressive behaviour takes the place of rational thinking and effective action. This point on the tension continuum is called the frustration threshold. It varies from person to person, and within the same person at different times. A mother wants her house to be clean and orderly. In the forenoon, her three-year-old daughter Annie might spill a glass of milk, leave her Barbie dolls in disarray, and scatter magazines all over the newly cleaned living room. The mother’s reaction at the time is one of mild anger, followed by efficient attempts to set things straight. At five-thirty in the afternoon, the child repeats her efforts at messing up the house. This time, the mother “explores”—she sends the child to her room, screams, and is unable to prepare supper until she has vented her tension. Optimum physical health produces a high frustration threshold. A sick or exhausted person has less energy to cope with tension and is more easily frustrated than one who is fit. People who manage to survive the extremely corrupt Sacramento City—a so-called death camp—have pointed out that a strong commitment to life and a sense of mission to fulfill were definite factors in survival. Individuals with such a sense of mission were less readily frustrated by the deprivations, stresses, and pressure of extremely hostile environments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
When Zorba, the Greek, was unable to express his grief following the death of his beloved son, he danced a Cretan dance until he dropped from exhaustion. On another occasion, when he felt he had at last found the solution to a problem of brining logs down a mountainside, again he danced. Finally, when the plan to bring logs down the mountain failed, and his boss’s investment was dismally lost, the boss asked Zorba to show him how to dance, and the two men danced and laughed like madmen. When someone has access to such means of self-expression, as in dance, violent exercise, painting, or song, that person can release the inevitable frustration of life without recourse to mindless, destructive outlets of tension. As Reich pointed out, sexual orgasm also provides a natural means for the dissipation of tension. In fact, prolonged privation of pleasures of the flesh is a common cause of frustration. It is however, a mistake to think that other frustrations, such as material misunderstandings, are all relieved by pleasures of the flesh. Nothing is more revealing in this respect than the famous lampoon, read b y Dolmance in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the curious title: People of France, one more if you want to be republicans. Pierre Klossowski is right in attaching so much importance to it, for this lampoon demonstrates to the revolutionaries that their republic is founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right—and that by guillotining God on 21 January 1793, they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
The monarchy supported the concept of a God who, in conjunction with itself, created all laws. As for the Republic, it stands alone, and morality was supposed to exist without benefits of the Commandments. It is doubtful, however, that Sade, as Klossowki maintains, had a profound sense of sacrilege and that an almost religious horror led him to the conclusions that he expresses. It is much more likely that he came to these conclusions first and afterwards perceived the correct arguments to justify the absolute moral license that he wanted the government of his time to sanction. Logic founded on passions reconclusions before the premises. To be convinced of this we only have to appraise the admirable sequence of sophisms by which Sade, in this passage, justifies calumny, theft, and murder and demands that they be tolerated under the new dispensation. It is then, however, that his thoughts are most profound. He rejects, with exceptional perspicacity for his times, the presumptuous alliance of freedom with virtue. Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner’s dream, cannot endure limitations. It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom. On this essential point Sade never varies. This man who never preached anything but contradictions only achieves coherence—and of a most complete kind—when he talks of capital punishment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime. “My imprisonment by the State, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.” From this feeling of horror, he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned. A few years later Nodier summed up, perhaps without knowing it, the position obstinately defended by Sade: “To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after a calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible.” Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life. Sade is more moral, we see, than our contemporaries. However, his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals. You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence. Even if only once, from the moment you accept murder, you must allow it universally. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Permissions are the chief therapeutic instrument of the script analyst because they offer the only chance for an outsider to free the patient from the curses laid on him by his parents. The therapist gives permission to the patient’s Child by saying either “It is all right to do it,” or “You do not have to do it.” Both say to the Parent “Let him alone.” Thus, there are positive and negative permissions. In a positive permission, or license, “Let him alone!” means “Let him do it!” This cuts off the injunction. In a negative permission, or external release, it means “Stop pushing him into it!” This cuts off the provocation. Some permissions can be regarded either way. This is particularly true of antiscripts. Thus, when the Prince kissed Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, he was offering her both a license to wake up and a release from the witch’s curse. One of the most important permissions is a license to stop acting stupid and start thinking. Many patients of advanced years have not had a single independent thought since early childhood, and have quite forgotten how it feels to think, or even what thinking means. With properly timed permission, however, they are able to come through, and are more than delighted when they say out loud at the age of sixty-five or seventy what may be the first intelligent observation of their adult lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
Often it is necessary to undo the work of previous therapists in order to give a patient permission to think. Some of them have spent years in mental hospitals or clinics where the slightest attempt on their part to think independently came up against powerful resistance from the staff. There they were taught that thinking is really a sin called “intellectualzing,” to which they must confess promptly and promise never to indulge in again. Many addictions and obsessions are based on parental come-ones. “Do not stop taking drugs (or you may stop coming home to ask for money)” says the mother of the heroin addict. “Do not stop thinking about pleasures of the flesh,” says the parent of a lecher or a nymphomaniac. And the whole concept of permissions as a therapeutic instrument was started by a gambler who said: “I do not need someone to tell me to stop gambling, I need someone to give me permission to stop, because somebody in my head says I cannot.” A permission, then, allows Jeder to be flexible, instead of responding with fixed patterns frozen by slogans and controls. This has nothing to do with “permissive up brining,” since that is full of imperatives, too. The most important permissions are to love and to change and to do things well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
A person with permission is just as easy to spot as one who is all tied up. “He sure has permission to think,” “She sure has permission to be beautiful,” and “They sure have permission to enjoy themselves,” are Martian expressions of admiration. (One of the frontiers of script analysis is the further study of permissions, primarily through observation of eye movements in very young children. Thus, in some situations the child glances sideways at his parents to see if he has “permission” to do something; in other cases, he seems to be “at liberty” to follow his own inclinations without consulting them. Such observations, carefully evaluated, may result in a significant distinction between “permissions” and “liberties.”) The term Genetic Counseling indicates that a genetic consumer consciousness is dawning. The emphasis is on genetic disorder, not upon genetic endowment, but this is to be expected. A new technology always appeals to hive-security first as a way of dealing with danger. Awareness of genetic disorder precedes awareness of genetic excellence, just as psychiatry precedes self-actualized psychology. Pathology precedes potential. When the experts in a hive begin treating “broken-down personalities” they have recognized the existence of “personality.” The next step is for healthy individuals to take charge of their own “selfs.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
New technology always appeals to hive-security first. The Ad Hoc Committee on Genetic Counseling of the American Society of Human Genetics described genetic counseling as a “communication process which deals with the human problems associated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a genetic disorder in the family.” This one-day workshop is primarily for health professionals who want to learn how to do genetic counseling or who want to strengthen their skills in this field. Hidden in this course description are valuable neurogenic clues, evolutionary evidence, which is easily overlooked by hive observers because it reveals much about the neurogenetic stage of the give culture—and of the planet. Genetic counseling appeared a generation after personality counseling. When an advanced, post-political culture offers courses in “Job Counseling,” “Personality Counseling” or “Martial Counseling,” Evolutionary Agents know that a move towards self-actualization is occurring—a free-mobile-individually oriented society is emerging. The military defense groups are willing to train those who are willing to be trained and have a good temperament and they simply do not bother training those who lack discipline. Being part of the United States of America’s armed forced is an honour and a privilege. It is ridiculous for an organization to even attempt to train some hundred thousand men in the State’s twilight of decline when, only a few years before, the State disgracefully abandoned one hundred and seventy million. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. They ensure Sacramento City can respond to, recover from, and mitigate against any hazard that affects their city, the region, the state and beyond. “I like ladder work. It’s probably the most dangerous jobs in firefighting, and the real purpose of it is to go in and look for anyone trapped in a fire. You’re more or less on your own, you’re not with the rest of the men, and you don’t have the benefit of the hose line. I was assigned the SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) that day. We got the call to a fire in a three-story dwelling. We are second in. Another engine and ladder company was ahead of us. When I got off the truck, I was all prepared to go in the building. It was a strange fire, actually—a kerosene heater, which was overfilled. It has been knocked over, and the kerosene went between the floor and the wall down into the basement from the first floor and was ignited by the hot water heater. So the fire ran up the walls to the upper floors, and the flames were coming out the third-floor windows when I got there. As I say, I had my air pack on. I went around to the back alley before the other guys. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
“The first company was still trying to get the ladders up in this narrow alley. I went up some steps to the kitchen door and kicked it open. A couple of guys were already in there on the floor. They didn’t have packs, so they were taking a beating from the smoke. One of their ladder guys also had a pack, so his chief put him on a hose, and he said to me, ‘Go down to the basement with this guy and give him a hand with the tip.’ Engine or ladder man, it didn’t matter to him. He saw we both had packs, and it was pretty smoky. I helped this guy drag the line, and we both went down to the basement from the kitchen very quickly, because it was like a chimney. It was getting real hot, and the fire flashed over us. He hit it with water and knocked it down. There was a small window next to the steps, and he was trying to fog the smoke out the window. The heat was coming toward us the whole time. Then apparently somebody saw how bad it was getting and called, ‘Everybody out of the basement.’ There were only the two of us there. I didn’t hear it. The guy on the tip supposedly did and told me he was leaving. Again, I didn’t hear him. He closed down the hose, and all of a sudden he was gone. I learned later that he went out the window. He had to take the pack off to fit through the window, it was so narrow. I didn’t know he had left. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
“So the water was stopped, and I was lone in the basement. I couldn’t go back up the steps to the kitchen, because when he shut down the water the fire had flashed over again and set fire to the stairs. You see, the water wasn’t really putting the fire out, but it was keeping the heat away from us. Now it was getting very hot. It was very dark, it was smoky, I couldn’t see. I was down on my stomach on the basement floor, looking for the back door I knew was there, but I couldn’t see it. I was probably only ten feet from it the whole time. I became a little disoriented, but I didn’t panic. I had been in basement fires before, and I knew you shouldn’t panic. I thought, ‘Now, how did I get into this situation. I don’t have any water. I don’t have anyone with me.’ I could see that the fire had engulfed the kitchen steps and I couldn’t make it up there. I knew there was a back door there somewhere, but the people had been remodeling the basement, and I had to feel my way through a lot of debris. There was paneling against one wall, and I thought that might have been the door. I slid on it like a slide and fell to the floor. I say there for a second, and said, ‘I gotta compose myself, or I’m going to be in trouble here in a minute.’ I thought to myself, I’ve been through a lot in my life. I probably should have been dead eight times over. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘I haven’t come this far to die in this person’s basement. This can’t happen to me. I’m going to survive. I’m not going to die in this guy’s basement because he was overfilling his kerosene heater.’ I got mad then. I remember. I said, ‘Dammit, I’m not staying here. I’ve got to get out.’ #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“So what I had to do was raise my mask and holler for help. If I hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have found me, because they didn’t know I was in there. This guy didn’t tell them I was still down there, and my lieutenant hadn’t ordered me to go down there; he thought I was on one of the upper floors. It was the chief of the other company who had sent me down there. They heard my hollering, and they were saying, ‘Come this way. This way.’ I would put my mask back on and walk toward their voices. I couldn’t see anything, so I was going by their voice. But they couldn’t hear me with my mask on. They didn’t know where the hell I was. It was getting harder and harder. It was very hot down there. I burned my ears, and I still had my helmet on. I knew if I didn’t get to that door soon, I wouldn’t make it, so I just kept going. I pushed things out of the way, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I had my hand stretched out like a blind man, and somebody grabbed my hand, and they pulled me out. One of my boots came off, and my helmet fell off. They never found my helmet, it had melted away, and the only thing left of my boot was the sole. There are points that I don’t recall. I didn’t actually black out, but I think it was my mind acting it out for me. I don’t recall exactly how I got to that back door. I was just glad to feel someone’s hand. I was kissing the floor, and the gentleman who grabbed my hand was in the doorway. He couldn’t advance any further. In fact, he was on the ground, and somebody had hold of his legs. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
“I didn’t realize I was saved until I was in the rescue squad actually. I was on my way to the hospital, and I was holding the oxygen mask over my face, and I started crying. It finally hit me that I had almost died. I don’t normally cry. I believed I was going to be all right. I knew I was hurt, but I also knew I was going to make it. The first night in the hospital was hell. I had a tube going down my mouth into my lungs. It has a ballon-type thing at the end of it to keep the air passages open. Everything in there was swelling, and I would have chocked otherwise. And they were pulling a lot of things out of my lungs and throat, big pieces of black stuff. I didn’t know I had taken that much smoke, I had thought it was mostly heat. They gave me morphine, but I was conscious when they were putting that thing down my throat. It makes you gag. They refused to give me more morphine, saying they had given me enough already. When I wanted to say something I had to write it down, because I couldn’t speak. So the first night I was going in and out of consciousness. I kept writing down, ‘If you don’t take this tube out of my throat, I’m going to pull it out myself.’ I was a terrible patient that first night. I was in intensive care, and the orderlies, nurses, and doctors were at the desk fifteen feet from me, drinking soda. My mouth was so dry, I wanted some water, and they wouldn’t give it to me. They’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll get you something,’ thinking I’d go to sleep and forget. I would wake up an hour later, and nothing would be there. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
“My father was there within an hour. He’s a fireman, too, and he heard the call come on the fire radio. He knew, before he was told, that I was in trouble. He heard the call for the rescue squad, and he said, ‘I knew it was you.’ The commissioner came, and so did a couple of guys I work with and my wife and my mother. Everyone showed a lot of concern, and everyone was as nice as could be. It meant a lot to me. Because it was nice to see familiar faces. The next day I was more relaxed. I didn’t fight the tube, I just tried to make the best of it. Then I felt lucky. I felt glad to be alive. I was released from the hospital a week later, and after a few days at home, I was mad. Angry that I got hurt when I shouldn’t have been hurt, that my whole life had changed. I don’t like changes. I’m used to going to work, and now I had to stay home. I wanted to get out of the house and couldn’t. I was miserable as hell, I was climbing the walls. I took a lot of it out on my wife. She had had a back operation less than a year earlier and was bedridden. Then she had had a premature baby, and my son was in intensive care for two months. He had just gotten out of the hospital and weighed only 21/2 pounds (1.14 kilograms). So she was dealing with her back, and the baby was home on a monitor and she was worrying about him breathing, then I came home and she worried about me breathing. So her back was forgotten for a time, and now it’s in terrible shape. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
“I was miserable even to the kids. I was jumpy all the time. I was physically hurt, and I was still spitting up things. My ears were burned, and the doctors told me I would need glasses, because my corneas were burned. I became depressed, and I was mad. The only ones to take it out on were my wife and kids. I feel bad for them now, but they understood. My wife was great. She had a lot of patience with me.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to build a safer and more resilient Sacramento. Firefighters and EMT put their lives on the line every day, several times a day to provide the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive service possible. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
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Over a Game of Cards
To be weak is miserable, doing or suffering. As much as we in the Western culture revere the strong, so do we protect and care and perpetuate the weak. For the person prone to weakness, it becomes an easy, comfortable trap. However, it soon becomes a miserable one. If you are stuck on the weakness polarity, you are a particularly hard-to-handle manipulator. You tend to depend upon others for everything, and when they try to get away, you play weak or helpless, thus sucking them in again. You are an excellent role player. You apologize a lot for everything, using pleas of ignorance or incompetence to avoid responsibility. To reassure yourself, you constantly ask others if you are okay. Unfortunately for you, you are so busy looking into the faces of others for expressions of approval, you never look inside yourself. Your inner self is thus a vast, unexplored territory. In spite of all your admission of weakness and incompetence, you have refused to truly examine those feelings of weakness. Your emotional life has thus remained a shallow one. If you are a master, however, you do not play the helpless role; you have the courage to really face your limitations and define them as your body and emotions guide you. You trust yourself and look inside, appealing to you “inner Supreme Court” for answers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The weakness you find within is real, not a manipulative game—and not a mask. When you are able to face your limitations inside, you are also able to find strength and competence there. As a master, you know you can look within to find all the answers and all the guidance you need. Having mastered, not exaggerated, your weakness, you improve your physical health. You attend to clues your body gives you as to its condition, rather than allowing them to develop into vague, nagging aches. Among others, you stand on your own feet and are free to relate to others as an equal. You carry your own weight of responsibility in the World. Mustering the strength to shoulder this weight can be a long and difficult process. Some people have been afraid all of their lives. Some infants are afraid of the wind. It howls menacingly across the open fields, then darts through the cracks in the floorboards of their farmhouse, which startles the baby with a sudden chill. On blustery nights, it makes the house shiver with what a baby might imagine is a fear like his own. Next, some children learn to fear their father. He is a stern, brittle man who works his farm from before sunrise until after sunset every day of the year. He seems to be at constant war with the farm and the farm seems to constantly fight back. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The struggle might make a father mean, and he may vent his meanness on everything around him: the land, the animals, his wife and children. As a result, some children learn to never talk back to their father. Breaking one of his rules, even a little, means feeling the awful whack of his hand across the face, neck, shoulders, back. And when he begins to hit, he seldom stops until his hand is too sore to hit anymore. This causes some wives to become just like one of the children. She does her chores, obeys her husband unquestioningly and when she breaks one of his rules, even a little, is whacked just as hard and long. The only time the father did not hit his wife is when she was sick. Growing up in the isolation of a farmhouse, some children also come to fear the outside World, the World of the unknown and unknowable people beyond the wide fields which stretch in ever direction. A child may try a few, tentative friendships in school, but sometime the youth is never able to spend enough time with their peers to get comfortable and familiar the way real friends do. This child’s World is the farm and family and the fear which pervades everything. When abused children turn eighteen, it is often demanded that they get a job. Some youths are not willing to put up with the hard work pay, and constant crude advances of the customers. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Abused youth often enjoy the work—not because it is easy, but because for twelve hours a day it allows the youth to be out of the house, out of the reach of his father’s stinging hand. When he serves someone particularly well, an extra dollar or two appears under the plate. Although these paychecks are sometimes all surrendered to the father, he is able to keep the tips for himself, his private treasure. As an adult, when people live with fear, it can cause pain and sickness. And often, nothing seems to help. Not the medicines, not talking about it, not anything. There will be times in our lives when we find ourselves on an unexpected path, facing severe circumstances. When events, often out of our control, alter the life we had planned or hoped for, how do we respond? No amount of change, trial, or opposition can alter our eternal course. We are God’s spirit sons and daughters, and we accepted his plan by which we could obtain a physical body and gain Earthly experience to progress toward perfection and ultimately realize our divine destiny as heirs of eternal life. The changes, and resulting challenges, that we encounter in mortality come in a variety of shapes and sizes and impact each of us in unique ways. Although each change may be unique to your individual circumstances, there is a common element in the resulting trial or challenge—hope and peace are always available through the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Atonement of Jesus Christ provides the ultimate corrective and healing measures to every wounded body, damaged spirit, and broken heart. Jesus Christ knows, in a way that no one else can understand, what it is that we need, individually, in order to move forward in the midst of change. Unlike friends and loved ones, the Saviour not only sympathizes with us, but He can empathize perfectly because He has been where we are. In addition to paying the price and suffering for our sins, Jesus Christ also walked every path, dealt with every challenge, faced every hurt—physical, emotional, or spiritual—that we will ever encounter in mortality. In this mortal experience, we cannot control all that happens to us, but we have absolute control over how we respond to the changes in our lives. This does not imply that the challenges and trials we face are of no consequence and easily handled or dealt with. It does not imply that we will be free from pain or heartache. Helpless is a place—a place that is real. However, it is important that we do not let ourselves play helpless. Do not give in to it. There is cause for hope and that is due to the Atonement of Jesus Christ, we can move forward and find better days—even days full of joy, light, and happiness. Healing blessings come in many ways, each suited to our individual needs, as known to Him who loves us best. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Sometimes a “healing” cures our illness or lifts our burden. However, sometimes we are “healed” by being given strength to understanding or patience to bear the burdens placed upon us. In the first year that I knew my wife, we played Russian Bank quite often. She had been winning but then she began losing, and one evening she threw her head and arms on the table and sobbed, as though she had lost not a game of cards but everything in the World. That was what I noticed at the time. Instead of letting that thought itself be said, the spontaneous noticing, matter-of-fact, without opinion, neither tender with pain nor hard with accusation, I let myself be scared by seeing this “strong” woman fall apart “over a game of cards,” by seeing her little rib cage heave like a child’s. It was cultural conditioning that made me view this as “weak” or “helplessness”—something that “should not happen” and so must be stopped. In losing my neutrality, I wanted to put her back together. I put a hand on her shoulder. I bent and kissed the back of her neck. She pulled together and smiled at me, her eyes saying thank you. And I thought that I had helped her, too. There were these moments, brief and rare, when my wife’s guard was down, when she was cracking. I had botched them. I did just what she did—tried to put “her” back together, not knowing that this was not her. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
If I had not done this, just possibly she might not have done it herself. There might have been the of an opening. All those years of reassurance were crutch-type helping, and all the times when I prevented her suicide never really saved her life, because her life was what she never lived. If I had said my own thought as simply as I felt it, as it came into my head, my first thought that was my own direct and immediate response and really me, is it not possible that she might have told me what “losing” meant to her? And if I had accepted that (not saying that it was not so, that there were many ways in which she won, was running ahead of others—which was true in the view of the society of which we both were a part, but not in the view of all societies) might she not have been able to speak what she never could say to anyone and so could not hear properly herself? Suppose, that morning after the Japanese attack, I had said, “You sound as though you feel this really is the end for you. I hope it is not.” Those were my true thoughts, my own thoughts at the time, that I let get blacked by what I saw as my World and what I thought that his should be. My World at that time in fact was not superior: it required that she be in it with me. My World did not see that she was in it only more so, and blocked my own immediate and direct response to her. My tenderness for human suffering did not include her. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Some people do not believe that mental illness exists. The phenomena now called mental illnesses [should be] looked at afresh and more simply, be regarded as the expressions of man’s struggle with the problem of how he should live. How do we fit ourselves in a society that gives us so much trouble? That is the wrong question. It is possible to lose all awareness of ourselves as an active participant. In the year before I left my wise, she had almost totally convinced me that I was “insane,” unfit to be a father. “No judge would let you have him (our son).” In fighting not to blame my wife for my hurt and confusion, because I could not bear to have my love change to hate, I arrived at knowing my own part in it, and told a doctor what was true: “I watched her dig the pit, and obligingly fell in.” However, I could not see that clearly while I was under fire. Each time that I almost grasped it, my wife’s words—or even the way she looked at me—threw me into a chaos of uncertainty again—the doubting of myself. No one else seemed to find her behaviour odd, so was it all in me? I had to be away from her, away from everyone with opinions, to find out. It gives me the creeps that children who are told they are “wrong,” “no good,” “worthless,” cannot get away, and that our young people are required to fit into a society which does not fit them. When we require always more doctors, more psychotherapists, more jailers, more police, who is at fault? #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
There are some people who have been in prison for twenty years straight and they talk to themselves. There is no one that they can call on. Their New York lawyers cannot do anything for them. There is no appeal from a .30 caliber summons. Some wonder if Sade is an atheist? He says so, and we believe him, before going to prison, in his Dialogue between a Priest and a Dying Man; and from then on, we are dumbfounded by his passion for sacrilege. One of his cruelest characters, Saint-Fond, does not in any sense deny God. He is content to develop a gnostic theory of a wicked demiurge and to draw the proper conclusions from it. Saint-Fond, it is said, is not Sade. No, of course not. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously. Now, all Sade’s atheists suppose, in principle, the nonexistence of God for the obvious reason that He existence would imply that He was indifferent, wicked, or cruel. Sade’s greatest work ends with a demonstration of the stupidity and spite of the divinity. The innocent Justine runs through the storm and the wicked Noirceuil swears that he will be converted if divine retribution consents to spare her life. Justine is struck by lightning, Noirceuil triumphs, and human crime continues to be man’s answer to divine crime. Thus there is a freethinker wager that is the answer to the Pascalian wager. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The idea of God which Sade conceives for himself is, therefore, of a criminal divinity who oppresses and denies mankind. That murder is an attribute of the divinity is quite evident, according to Sade, from the history of religions. Why, then, should man be virtuous? Sade’s first step as a prisoner is to jump to the most extreme conclusions. If God kills and repudiates mankind, there is nothing to stop one from killing and repudiating one’s fellow men. This irritable challenge in no way resembles the tranquil negation that is still to be found in the Dialogue of 1782. The man who exclaims: “I have nothing, I give nothing,” and who concludes: “Virtue and vice are indistinguishable in the tomb,” is neither happy nor tranquil. The concept of God is the only thing, according to him, “which he cannot forgive man.” The word forgive is already rather strange in the mouth of this expert in torture. However, it is himself whom he cannot forgive for an idea that his desperate view of the World, and his condition as a prisoner, completely refute. A double rebellion—against the order of the Universe and against himself—is henceforth going to be the guiding principle of Sade’s reasoning. In that these two forms of rebellion are contradictory except in the disturbed mind of a victim of persecution, his reasoning is always either ambiguous or legitimate according to whether it is considered in the light of logic or in an attempt at compassion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
It is true that thought precedes action, that actions express thoughts, and that to rule mind is to rule the entire life. However, it is also true that man’s battles with himself proceed by progressive stages, that he exerts will more easily than he changes feeling. Therefore, the discipline of inward thinking should follow after—and no before—it. To counsel him to take care of his inner life and that then the outer life will take care of itself, as so many mystics do, is to be plausible but also to show a lack of practicality. Man’s heart will feel no peace as his mind will know no poise until he abandons the lower instincts and gives himself up to this unearthly call. First, he must abandon them outwardly in deeds; later he must do it inwardly even in thoughts. This will inevitably bring him into inner struggle, into oscillation between victories and defeats, elations and despairs. The way up is long, hard, rugged, and slow to tread. It is always a stage for complaints and outcries, battles and falls. Only time—the master power—can bring him to its lofty end. Only when the lessons of birth after birth etch themselves deeply and unmistakably into his conscious mind through dreadful repetition can he accept them co-operatively, resignedly, and this put a stop to the needless sufferings of desire, passion, and attachment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
When a man’s desire and yearnings, thirst and longings are so strong as to upset his reasoning power and block his intuitive capacity, he is stopped from finding the truth. In this condition, he shuts his eyes to those facts which are displeasing or which are contrary to his desires and opens them only to those which are pleasing or agreeable to his wishes. Thinking bends easily to desires, so that the satisfaction of personal interest rather than the quest of universal truth becomes its real object. Reforms that begin with the lowest in man lead the way to the highest in him. The mastery of terrestrial passion opens the door to the birth of the spiritual intuition. Whether the cage be made of gold or the net fabricated from silk, the reality of their inner captivity still remains. A discipline which is not stern but gentle and easy is best suited to modern man. The astrological Zodiac which has continued to attract the attentions of intelligent people for five thousand years must have some caste-type meaning—and this significance must be explained by the theories which improve it. New theories can improve, can explain, but not reject, the Zodiac. The Genesis version of Creation obviously must have had profound survival validity even through it obviously fails to take into account the newer evidence from Darwinian, Mendelian, DNA, sociobiological and Behaviour genetics. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Correspondence Theory is a “magic stick” for searching out new laws, because it sets formal constraints on new mathematics. As Morrison emphasizes, the Correspondence Principle secures science against the loss of achievements of the past. For innovators it is a warning like Hippocratic maxim for physicians—above all do no harm! Classical mechanics is not a mere blunder that was repudiated in 1905, as the headlines imply. This affectionate maxim holds even more strongly for human ethology—id est, philosophy. All the theological and philosophical systems of the past must be seen as attempts, valid at the preceding, more primitive stage of neurotechnology, to explain the inner-outer (CNS-DNA) reality paradox. Thus the concern in the Starseed Transmissions to trace correspondences among the many occult theories of the past, including Christianity and Buddhism, and the new sciences. Each past philosophy, far from being repudiated, or rejected, joyously fits into an evolving, stage-by-stage theory. Medieval alchemy and astrology were not blunders repudiated by Dow Chemical and Dr. Freud. The demon is the jester in human existence, and the joker in psychotherapy. No matter how well a man lays his plans, the demon can come in at the critical moment and upset them all, usually with a smile and a ha ha. And no matter how well the therapist plans his psychotherapy, the patient always has the upper hand. At the point when the therapist thinks he has four aces, the man plays his joker, and his demon wins the pot. Then he skips merrily off, leaving the doctor to lead through the deck trying to figure out what happened. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Even if he is ready for it, there may be little he can do. The doctor may know ahead of time that just as the man gets his stone rolled up to the brow of the hill, the demon will distract his attention, and it will roll all the way down again. There may be others who know about it, too, but the demon is already at work, and sees to it that the man keeps away from anyone who would interfere. So the patient starts to miss appointments, or drifts away, and if anyone pressures him he just plain quits. He may return after he has Sisyphused out, sadder, but not much wiser, nor even aware of his glee. The demon first appears in the higher, when the man scatters his food on the floor with a merry glint, waiting to see what his parents will do. If they make friends with it, it will go on to later mischief, and then perhaps into humorous fun and jokes. If they beat it down, it will lurk surly in the background, ready to leap out at an unguarded moment and scramble his life as it originally scrambled his food. A substantial proportion of the World’s population lives in cities where trees and grass are seldom seen, where the sounds of birds and babbling streams are not heard. The air they breathe is either filtered through air-conditioning units or heavily polluted with smog. Such persons adapt to the milieu within which they live, but it is an unnatural environment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Contact with the physical World, with seaside, forests, and parks, with fields and animals, gives persons a sense of rhythm that contrasts with the rhythms of industrialized urban life. These experiences remind the person that he or she does not simply have a body, but that the person is a body, an embodied being who is in and of nature. Chronic physical and muscular tension, accelerated rhythms of speech and movement, are common to people who live apart from their own nature and the nature around us all. Just as a person may suffer from estrangement from the rest of nature, the person may also suffer a kind of alienation and distance from the body. From infancy, the human needs physical contact with the other human beings and with the World. Infants and grownups alike need handshakes, hugs, enjoyable exercise, and dance in order to feel the vitality of their bodies. As Reich, Lowen, and Rolf have pointed out, growing up leaves a person with many muscular systems chronically tensed, as part of an overall defense against danger and pain. This “muscular armour” interferes with fullest respiration, with proper poster, with sleep and rest; it often requires specialized massage and manipulation before the muscular system is restored to the pliability most compatible with a health-giving life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Reich especially pointed out that a chronically defensive attitude reduces a person’s capacity for the fullest intimacy. Of course, intimacy is also an exquisite experience. Our culture, with its puritan heritage, has encouraged people to repress pleasures of the flesh, perhaps because it interferes with compulsive work. Recent counterculture developments have introduced a variety of approaches to a reengagement with nature and with one’s own body that seem compatible with healthier personality. The year 2024 is important for many people and the American movement in many ways. We have seen the cause and effect of not having a balanced system. One nail drives another deeper still. Even new obligation that America assumes, as a result of its criminal mis-handling of foreign American interests, creates a stronger blow which falls on the states. When the democratic party intentionally allowed border security to fail, it gave the revolutionary uprising of an acceptance of criminal behaviour and the appearance of a spear point aimed at the American Christian family, they did not do this from the standpoint of American interest, but only as a commissioner of widespread illegal activity, corruption, and a general disregard for national security. It is obvious that this “valuable gem,” who had been constantly wandered around American political centers as the journalists’ rabble, should have been the last person called upon as a protector of American interests and he was completely indifferent whether America was even part of God’s wide World. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The Sacramento Fire Department has to avert dangers to public safety caused by fires, explosions, accidents and similar events. Technical assistance and firefighting tasks play an important role in this. They also provide medical assistance for people who are in life-threatening condition. The aim is to preserve life or health. This includes initial medical care and, if necessary, the establishment of transportation to the hospital. The tasks assigned by law include, among other things, statements in the context of building permit procedures, fire safety inspections or contract procedures for fire alarm systems and fire brigade key depots. “It was a bitterly cold night, maybe twenty or twenty-five degrees (Fahrenheit). The was a farmhouse, heavily involved, and there were kids trapped in it. We got out there, and the house was cooking. There was heavy smoke coming out of the windows; since the fire hadn’t gone through the roof, it was bending out all the windows. This was the first time any of us young guys had a situation where we knew someone was trapped. We started stretching an inch-and-a-half because that’s what we always did, and out chief said, “The heck with the inch-and-a-half. The kids are trapped up there, and we’ve got to get up.” None of the guys from the other department had air packs on, and we were all masked up. They pointed to the back of the house, which wasn’t so involved with flames. The kids’ bedroom was there. We put a ladder up to the little roof over one of the side doors and went up. I looked inside the window, and the whole quarter of the house was going, trapping the kids. These were farm kids, and they had already been up doing their chores. Now they couldn’t get out. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“We tried to get in this window. I could see down the hall, I could see a crib. It was at the point where the flame is so intense that you can see again, when it’s really lit up, before you deal the water. I tried to get in the window and I got blown right back. I kept trying to reach for the crib, and I kept getting burned back, because the whole damn fire was venting this way. Two other guys were trying the next window, meeting the same thing—getting blown back. There was just heat coming at us. I lost my helmet, my New Yorker, in there. Then our bells went off, and we were called down. I was so man, I said, ‘Dang, we couldn’t get to them, we couldn’t get to them.’ And one of the guys I had never given much of a thought to slammed me against the side of a wall, and said, ‘That’s it. It’s done.’ Apparently I was sufficiently obnoxious about my frustration that somebody felt it necessary to snap me back. Meanwhile, a booster line, a high-pressure beam gun, was working on the fire. I had to change air packs because the face piece on my mask was burned so that I couldn’t see out of it. We went back up and made an entrance through the second window. We knew it was too late in the firs for the kids to be alive. I went in and started searching the room. The far corner of it had burned through to the first floor. I started crawling and found one of the kids practically underneath the window. It turned out to be a fourteen-year-old girl. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“I took off a glove and felt for a pulse, but I could see by the way everything was burned there that there was nothing I could do and I should just report it. She had probably gotten to the window and opened it, and then probably got sucked back in. The room has flashed. I don’t know why it flashed. I searched further, and I came across a lot of stuffed toys, and there was a little girl with a ponytail, all charred and black and very brittle. I remember reaching out to that. It was the little girl’s room I was in. Further on, across the hallway, there was a body strewn there, with a nose falling down across the face. It was absolutely gruesome. I came back and reported the fatalities to the chief. You think about scenarios. The older sister must have gone into the little girl’s room to try to save her and gotten trapped and just passed away. The chief and I were standing in that room, waiting for the medical examiner to come and talking about it. The little girl was the child of a poor farm family, but she had books and today and stuffed dollars and everything she could want. It was striking. The parents got out, and they were an absolute mess, the thought of their kids trapped upstairs and them getting out because their bedroom was downstairs. But the worst thing for them must have been the knowledge that they fire had started in a faultily installed wood stove, which they had twice been warned about by the fire company when they had been there earlier on less serious fires. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“Up until then I had been a young snot who really thought he could knock the tar out of any fire. I had been in real hot fires and gone through it and really had done my job, and I would have sworn that I could have gone through anything to have gotten to the kids. That is just not the way it is. The thing is, you think you’re invincible, that you can get through any smoke or anything. I mean, the fire was horrible, four kids died in it. It was physically impossible to get through the window. I did everything I could, and I know I did. I went up to the house a couple of day later. I wanted to find my fire helmet, which was still in there somewhere. There was a lot of clutter all around. I looked up and saw my helmet inside the crib that I had been trying to reach into. I took it back, cleaned it up.” With empathy and understanding, the Sacramento Fire Department protects life, property, and the environment in their community through an all-hazards approach to fire protection, emergency medical services, community risk reduction and education. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House
he ghosts are The Winchester Mystery House and are treated like members of the family. They are greeted and wished a Merry Christmas and asked to protect that house. The caretakers strive to create a home that is welcoming to everyone. The goal is to make guests feel comfortable and safe. There are a variety of tours, some for those who love theme parks and others for children and families and those who love more historic tours.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Does it Feel that Way to You?
Through life, some people have as a dominant value their strength. A man’s physical strength is sometimes obvious. However, he also may use his intelligence as an asset to do what his physical strength cannot do. After an injury, a man may no longer be able to come out on top by using his physical force, when this happens, he must use his acumen successfully. Due to addictions that sometimes occur when a person is disabled or because of physical constraints, some men find that they are no longer able to manage their money, and they have no where to turn. He may perceive that inability as a weakness, and rather than admit the weakness and deal with it, he might decide to avoid it, pretending that it is not there. Thus, his money situation will simply get worse. Viewing strength and weakness as a duality, a man might believe that his only choice is to have one or the other—not both. In his mind, to admit weakness is tantamount to giving up his physical prowess. And from a man’s point of view, strength is what has kept him alive. He is therefore a slave to brute force. He cannot abandon it. He is “stuck” on it. It takes courage to move from strength to weakness and back again. It takes a brand of courage some men do not have. Many men are “stuck” on strength because of their inability (or at least unwillingness) to experience weakness by going through and getting in touch his inner core, his being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A man who is not able to use his physical strength to support himself or his family may see himself as a spaceship without a pilot—in a sense, empty. He does not see himself as having a core, or essence. In his mind, he is not a complete human being. He is no more than a shell he carries himself around in. That is why some men who become disabled have the constant, gnawing feeling that “something is missing.” Since men with physical limitations see themselves, and therefore others, as “things,” their lives can become an endless round of manipulation, using his own “strengths” and others’ “weaknesses” to constantly come out on top. This, then, is how some men become manipulators. And their styles of manipulation may be quite simple. He merely overpowers people in getting what he wants. As boys growing up in less affluent neighbourhoods, some of them overpower people with their superior body strength. However, as men in business and in marriage, they overpower people with what they believe to be their superior intelligence. A man becomes a walking embodiment of his own attachment to strength. What a man is looking for, though he does not have words for it, is a balance between the values of strength and weakness—a state of emotional mastery, where he can be in touch with his own core, his real self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Whereas a man, the manipulator, is saying, “I am out here, all alone, and I have to be strong to survive,” a man who is a master would say, “I am a man, and I am tough and strong. I have strength and I have weakness. Even thought I am strong sometimes and weak other times, the real me always survives/ It is OK for me to be weak; it is OK for me to need people. I am not my strength, nor am I, my weakness. I am something more. I am me, and that is enough.” This is the essence of a man’s journey. It is a journey which might very well resemble your own. The strength/weakness polarity is a common one, especially among men. How does it apply to where you are, in your World? Well, your life is like a stream. And if you are a manipulator, the twigs and rocks are the values to which you cling so desperately. If you are like most people, security is what prompts you to keep clinging. The polarity in life is that it consists of clinging to your security—your dubious, unwanted yet comfortable situation, and taking a chance by opening up your innermost self, making yourself vulnerable, risking insecurity. In choosing to take a risk, you go to your core, you find your being, you become what others will call “Messiah.” You become a master. However, those who cling to their comfort zones tend to become manipulators. They are “stuck” on their exaggerated values. Though unwilling to risk letting go themselves, they nevertheless condemned the “Messiah” creature for his willingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
A man who lets of what does not strengthen him is not necessarily smarter, stronger or better than any of the other men. What separates him from the rest is his willingness to risk. In risking, he goes into his core, finds courage, and through it becomes truly free. This is something that manipulators—and indeed all of us—have yet to learn fully. When you truly learn to take strength, you take the first step on your journey from manipulation to mastery. This allows a man to experience the loss of his physical strength and survive it. He is able to see that there is still a whole, completely person left, a person who can be weak and still exist. Men will also find that weakness—which they avoid and deny their whole life—also has power to it. Men learn their weakness has the power to make them more “real” and brings people closer to them. For many men, weakness opens the door to power of loving, the power which comes from letting others be strong. Weakness enables us to relax, stop competing, let go and regain our strength for another time. When a man learns to have an encounter with weakness, sometimes people will offer to help him get his finances straightened out. However, it is difficult for most men to admit to others that they are in financial trouble and that they cannot handle it themselves. It is an admission of weakness. Yet it is something that a man is able to do when he confronts his weakness in Church and/or therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
A real man can survive weakness. However, this weakness still may cause a man to withdrawal from his friends and loved ones because he still cannot face himself. For many, his strength is still too important to him and discovering more weakness would be too uncomfortable. Yet once his journey has begun, and once begun can never be turned back. For a brief moment, some men are able to give up strength, retreat to their inner core and find something there. It is something he will never be able to “unexperience.” And it will assist him in his journey many times in the future. However, other men continue to grow. Man’s true intelligence is feeble while it remains imprisoned in egoism and narcotized by sensuality. He must liberate it by the philosophic discipline before it can become strong. So many of our feelings and so many of our thoughts have until now been dictated by the body. Is it not time to think and feel also as the true self would have us do? The terrestrial heritage has given him instincts, appetites, impulses, and desires; the human holds out higher possibilities to be worked for and realized. One message of the Sphinx is to balance the human mind with the brutish terrestrial being in us. This is not the same as the ascetics’ message, which is to exterminate the terrestrial being altogether. He who has not overcome his passions finds himself compelled to act against the clearest warnings of his reason. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
What really moves a man to act is his feeling; that is why the passion which are strong feelings, need more deliberate effort of the will to bring them under restraint. An action which is spontaneous and not a calculated one—that can be safe only for the enlightened man. For others it may be mere impulse or mere passion. The point is not that natural impulses of the body are wrong—how could that be?—but that men have made them wrong. Originally the satisfaction of the pleasure-instinct was in harmony with higher will as a lesser part of a greater function. However, now human will have reversed its role and exaggerated it to first place. The result is disharmony and disease. On one thing all men in all lands are agreed, that it is immeasurably more preferable to be released from anxieties than to suffer them. Yet, these same men throw themselves into situations or bring about events which will rivet the chains of anxiety upon them. How is it that such a contradiction exists everywhere? What causes them to do this? It is the strength of their desires, the power of their ambitions, the tendencies inherited from past births. This being the cause of the trouble, the remedy for it becomes plain. The more a man frees himself from desires, that is, the more he masters himself, the more is he freed from numerous anxieties. And even if he too is subject to the painful tests and unpleasant ordeals which inescapably affect human existences, he does not consider them to be misfortunes but as devices to draw out his latent qualities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The way out from tyrannical desires may have to be staged. First becomes a witness—indifferent and dispassionate—every time there is a surrender. This way is taking a new direction, starting to disidentify from the desire. On the one hand, he must tear himself away from his Earthly passions. On the other hand, he must give himself up to his sacred aspirations. The eagerness of desire betrays him into romantic self-deceptions and leads him into wounding frustrations. The ego lures his hopes constantly onward only to lacerate them in the end. Whilst we are still limited by the body and its inescapable needs, it is an impossible task to extirpate desire and negative self-interest. Philosophy adds that it is also an undesirable one. Only, put desire and self-interest down in their proper place, it says, do not permit them to obstruct higher and spiritual needs. It is not that they have to abandon joy but to purify it. If the joy which comes from debased pleasures is thereby lost, the joy which comes from ennobled thoughts and refined feelings is gained. When Earthly desires are extinguished, calm befalls a man. He must needs declare open war on his own passions, for he now sees that he cannot have them and peace too. Like all war this one will witness both victories and defeats, hardships and sufferings. However, out of these battles with himself he may progress, learning discrimination and gaining willpower. If uncontrolled, he realizes that he has to break his passions, or they will break him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In this work of purification, the need for mortal intellectual and emotional honesty will have to be stressed. It is satisfied by discriminating examination of thoughts, feelings, and motives, with constant self-distrust as a guide in the work. The more he trains himself to recognize and reject the impulses that come from his lower nature, the more will clarity of comprehension become his. The brute creature that he is most be kept at bay; his freedom as a man must be gained by degrees. Personally, I knew about my wife’s World to understand something of how life was to her. I even knew the terror of it because once, before we were married, I got swept into her agony, his suicidal chaos, and all the World became morbid to me in a most frightening, unmitigated and unmitigable way—everything was going haywire and out of control. I wanted to kill myself. I said so. She spoke to me as though I were a peasant who thought she new the passions of a kind. She thrust me out. In two shakes I thought, “Whew! I will never get into that again.” In thrusting me out, she got out of it herself (when she became the King?” but to be in it at all was too dangerous for me. Of course, I have wondered through the years since her suicide whether there was anything I could have done to help her. Everything I read or heard of psychotherapy I thought of in relation to my wife, questioning, and always I got the same answer: “With her, it would not have worked.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This made me wonder whether I was white-washing my own failure. However, if so, why could I not ever be satisfied? Why did I not let it drop? Did I know that I was guilty, deep down in some sub-non-unconscious way? (When I mistrust me, there is no end to it, because then what I live with is mistrust.) If I were guilty, why could I not feel that?—instead of living with the knowing that I had tried very hard, I had loved her very much, and I had stayed too long. I received a latter from a man who stayed too long with his wife, in which he said “I have tentatively concluded (for me) that more time and more suffering than make sense are required to get on top of the mores and our personal motivations and unenlightened advice, to work through to the point where you can know yourself free of guilt for the life you can’t save.” It was only last spring, nearly twenty years after my wife’s suicide, that I understood something that I might have done. My relief expressed itself in a sign (letting go). I felt better about it. Not good, but better, and better is a kind of good. And then I knew—by feeling it clearly within myself—that the “bad” that I had been feeling was not guilt but sad. My “better” feeling was because it was not solidly inevitable that people like my wife must suffer so much all their lives and wipe out other people along the way. I do not know that I could have helped. However, I could have been more in touch with my thoughts and feelings (acceptance of myself) and more acceptant of his distress, sharing it her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Instead of both of us trying to shove out her distress and replace it with a happiness which was phoney, I could have let her agony be, and then there might have been the beginning of change. Where to everything else I had said, “No, it would not have worked. She would not have let it,” when I thought of this in relation to my wife, I remembered the times when I might have got through to her. Even if I had not, I would have been more me and that would have been better for all of us. The most beautiful times that I remember with my wife are the many hours that we spent together saying only a few words now and then, like a touch on the shoulder or a hand touching hand. Our chairs were yards apart, but we were together. At such times she was in touch with the wordless resonance, the love that was in her and in me, and let it live awhile. However, then I would be sure that I, eighteen years younger, must be unhappy, must want to be “doing something,” and then I lost my awareness of all that was going on in myself and between us, and the sensing with all my senses that I had been enjoying, and I thought that I had to reassure her. She never did entirely take my word for it, and I never asked her, “Does it feel that way to you?” My wife was exceptionally good at explaining astronomy, anthropology, medicine, English literature and history, Greek and Latin poetry, and probably some other things which I have forgotten. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, in the person sense, my wife explained nothing. Perhaps she was so out of touch with herself that she could not. There were times and ways in which I understood (or heard) her no better than she did herself, and that was because at those times I did not hear me too. The human needs varied stimulation, not just to avoid boredom but actually to preserve the ability to perceive and to act adequately. When a person is radically deprived of the customary variety of sights, sounds, smells, conversation, and so on—as happens in solitary confinement—he or she begins to feel strange and may show signs of deteriorating as a person. “Sensory deprivation” experiments show that when volunteer subjects are placed in a special room that is soundless, with their vision closed off by special goggles, and immersed in warm water kept at body temperature (to reduce the experience of tactile stimulation), some begin to hallucinate and go through other psychoticlike experiences. I have been in such an isolation chamber, and I found it tranquil and conducive to meditation. Variety in “stimulus input,” then, may be regarded as a basic need, even though deprivation as extreme as that produced in the laboratory seldom occurs in everyday life. The “evil twin” of varied experience is boredom—a form of dispiriting in style of life. Travel, risk-taking, excitement, and simply trying something new in the way of clothes, reading, vacations, or challenges are the antitheses of boredom—varying one’s experience of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Even moonrises and sunsets can get monotonous for the jaded tastes of the daily skywatcher. The healthy personality is also nurtured by meaningful variety. Excitement has often been thought of as a need for the young only. We now recognize that it is part of the fullest of lives in all generations. The excitement experience is one of the most difficult to create. Not all excitements involve risk-taking, and excitements are quite individually determined. One person may be thrilled by the firs parachute jump—another is equally excited about the first sighting of the sandhill crane. The Correspondence Principle requires that every new theory contain a limiting transition to the old theory it replaces. Insofar as the old theory has fitted some sound experiments, the new theory must concur. If Planck’s constant h tends towards zero, the quantum equations become just the classical ones. If the speed of light approaches infinity, Einstein’s kinematic and dynamical equations go over to Newton’s, and so on over a large number of examples from contemporary physics. As we apply the Correspondence Principle to sociobiology and exo-psychology, we expect that each new Einsteinian, relativistic theory of human behaviour and neurogenetic evolution will include a translation back to the old theory it replaced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Darwinians are clearly in violation when they fanatically summarily reject the Monotheistic Creation theories of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Newer theories of evolution must provide new insights into the validity of the older theories—specifying the historical neurotechnical factors which limited the earlier metaphours. Any new theory of neurogenetics must relate to and lovingly demonstrate why the previous philosophic theory was “right” for its time arid its gene-pool—knowing that those to come will affectionately do the same for our theories. Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up to Father Meslier and Voltaire. His negation is also, of course, the most extreme. From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative. Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination. Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power. In this respect Sade is the archetype, for in so far as society treated him atrociously, he responded in an atrocious manner. The writer, despite a few happy phrases and the thoughtless praises of our contemporaries, is secondary. He is admired today, with so much ingenuity, for reasons which have nothing to do with literature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
He is exalted as the philosopher in chains and the first theoretician of absolute rebellion. He might as well have been. In prison, dreams have no limits and reality is no curb. Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge. Only the dream turned out to be prophetic. His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction. In this way, at least, Sade is our contemporary. The militaristic history of Germany has many imagines of a strong silent sentry soldier on guard, watching, protecting, which made the Germans feel secure and strong. The content of the American news media was once honourable, but most of the enterprises are managed in a way that has made it impossible for them to function as a business. The first duty of TV news media has become that of the propagandists, to win over people who can subsequently be taken into the organization. And they train men and women to carry on their propaganda. The second duty of the TV news media has become to disrupt the existing order of things in America and thus make room for the penetration of the new teaching of sin, lawlessness, and corruption. The organizers of the propaganda department (the TV News media) have been fighting for the purpose of securing power, so that their doctrine of sin and corruption may finally triumph. After propaganda has converted the entire population over to an idea, only a handful of men are needed to finish the job. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Great theorists are rarely great organizers. The greatness of a theorist lies in his ability to understand and establish correct, abstract laws, while the organizer must primarily be an expert in understanding the human mind. The script controls are inserted and take effect early in life, while the counterscript slogans only become meaningful later. Added difficulty are scripts that tell it like it is: people really do act clumsy, as the child well knows; while the counterscript is usually square as far as his experience is concerned: he may or may not have seen someone attain happiness by working hard, being a good person, saving money, or being on time, not eating starches, avoiding public toilets, taking laxatives, and not masturbating. The problem we are having in America currently is that American people are being ignored and public works projects that have been in desperate need of completion are being ignored to add things like new bike lanes that people do not use anyway. Also, democrats are teaching Americans to expect everything for free, to feel entitled, to ignore the law, to rebel and be destructive and that breaking the law and discrimination is acceptable. The way you live your life determines your ultimate destiny. If you are harmonious, you may pass by unnoticed on the inside of the pages, but if you are in conflict, you may bring surprises and make headlines. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Thus, Hard-Working Church Deacon may end up President of Council, Retires After Thirty Years, or Jailed For Embezzlement, and Devoted Housewife comes out Mother of the Year, Celebrates Golden Anniversary, or Leaps From Roof of Building. In fact, it seems as though there are two kinds of people in the World: real people and plastic people, as the Flower Children used to say. The real people make their own decisions, while the plastic people are run by fortune cookies. The Fortune Cookie Theory of human living says that each child gets to pull two cookies from the family bowl: one square and one jagged. The square one is a slogan, such as “Work hard!” or “Stick with it!” while the jagged one is a scripty joker, such as “Forget your homework,” “Act clumsy,” or “Drop dead.” Between the two, unless he throws them away, his lifestyle and his final destiny are written. The conflict which we have sought to avoid is upon us. It is a comfortable, self-indulgent cop-out to look for conventional economic-political solutions. This is a war for survival. There is no choice left but to defend life against the genocidal machine. There are no neutrals in genetic warfare. Do not be deceived. It is a classic stratagem of genocide to camouflage their wars as law-and-order police actions, but democrats are telling illegal aliens how to evade ICE. Remember the Sioux and the pogroms and the African slaves and the indignation over airline hijackings and 9/11! If you fail to see that we are the victims of genocidal way you will not understand the rage of the oppressed, the fierceness of the Weathermen, and the pervasive resentment of the young. We cannot allow our government to become a lethal instrument. Remember the buffalo, the Iroquois, and the deer in the Sacramento Valley! #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The members of the Sacramento Fire Department are professionals dedicated to providing services that are innovative and progressive, ensuring the safest environment for their community. “I’m going through EMT right now. I was an ECA, that’s emergency care attendant. With that I could run first aid for the fire department. There are widespread deaths from vehicle accidents in the Sacramento area. We have a lot of busy intersections, and we also have people who go out and party, and they get on the roads and bring death with them. I have handled a lot of situations. We had a baby born on one run. It was pretty exciting, even though I’ve done it with my wife. We were called out to a house, and a lady was having good contractions. She was in the third stage of delivery. So, in the ambulance, I assisted a paramedic and we delivered the child. We set him up on the mother’s stomach so that the two of them could be pretty comfortable together, for the hospital was maybe seven miles away.” “We responded to a fire at an apartment. On arriving at the scene, we saw black smoke billowing into the sky from the nineth floor, and tenants were out on the balconies waving for help. Our company, Engine X, entered the lobby just as Rescue Y brought down a lady who was pretty charred. This was the first time that the seriousness of the fire dawned on us. We went to the fifth floor and took a lone up to the nineth. There we searched and found about five occupants whom we helped to exit the fire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“It appeared to be a racing fire, which engulfed the elevator and much of the nineth floor. The carpets and wall coverings were involved. A flash fire raced down the corridor. There was a lot of heat and smoke. They had a lot of plastics, and the smoke was black and thick, like flowing oil. If you held your hand in front of your face, you couldn’t see it, the smoke was that bad. The exit lights couldn’t be seen. We could hear people talking, and we could hear people screaming. People were trying to find their way out. They were helpless. We led some of them back into their rooms and out onto their balconies. Others we led to the fire escape that came down through the entire building. Some of them were in wheelchairs and could not walk. Then, as our air pipes were running low, we came across a man in one of the rooms. He was wedged under a vanity or dresser of some type. He appeared to be dead, so Lieutenant X took his self-contained and gave the guy some air. We saw his lips move a little, so we knew he was alive. Our next thought was to rescue him. The exit we wanted to take him to was about seventy-five feet away. When we tried to remove him from under the vanity, it was quite a tug. We realized that he had been burned through his clothing, and his skin was stuck to the carpet. We managed to pull the guy up and drag him down the floor. He was a large individual, weighing about 300 pounds. We started the three-man carry and got him down the hallway about fifty feet from the exit, when we ran out of air. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“Our oxygen supplies ran out simultaneously because we had all entered the building at the same time. It was his only chance, now or never. I helped carry the guy maybe twenty feet from the exit. I knew the smoke was filled with PVC, and I knew it was toxic. So what I did was hold my breath while we were carrying him, until I couldn’t hold it anymore. I told Lieutenant X and Y that I had to leave. I dove out of the exit, but not before I did breathe in some of it, and I went through the coughing and the spit and that stuff. Lieutenant X and Y succeeded in carrying the guy the rest of the way out. A relief crew was there to resuscitate him. X and Y were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Since then, Y has retired from the department for respiratory problems, and Lieutenant X is still on the job. So it affected one firefighter enough to end his career. I didn’t take nearly as much smoke as they did, but it had some effects on me. I have sore throats and a skin problem, but all in all, I don’t think it had too much of a lasting effect. The victim’s name was O.G. That’s all I know, we called him The O.G. What his real name was, I have no idea. I never got to talk to him, but he sent us some letters, saying that he was grateful for what we had done. I think he was a veteran, and, as far as I know, he is alive and well. If you weren’t spiritual before, this job would probably make you that way. It has made me appreciate life, believe me. If you asked if I would do it again, I would tell you yes. I know I would do not again. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“After that, going on fires, it isn’t the fire I worry about, it’s finding somebody in that same position again. I think that bothers me more than anything else. Because that stuck with me for a long time. To see an individual I rescued, see him that close to death, it really bothered me for a long time. one time I went on a call to that building there was a big guy. We all knew he had been dead for at least twelve hours. His body was cold, but there were about ten of us. A few of us guys spent nearly an hour trying to resuscitate the body. There was a little boy and a distraught woman there and I guess we wanted to give them hope. We all knew he was dead. That building is like a warzone. A lot of people end up dead, there are a lot of suspicious fires, a lot of crime and an extremely large number of emergency calls. I worry about the people who live there. Something is wrong. The building constantly wreaks of drugs and foul odors and is filthy.” Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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How Far Would You Go to be Remembered?
Our terrestrial God is fascinating, and the Judeo-Christian Bible is an invaluable index to the neurogenetic level of the period in which it was written. The genetic stage of gene pool can be identified by the personality characteristics of the Local God. God of Genesis is an Earth God. He generously created the Heaven and the stars and the World, but, much like the Mrs. Winchester, provides no technical details or replicable blueprints. His preoccupation, whims, anxieties, jealousies, rules and gender roles have come to represent the traditional society. God owns the Garden—which many think is where the idea of The American Dream and nuclear family came from—and allows Adam and Eve their tenancy there. He has the right to ban them from the garden for disobeying His laws. God puts his warrior guards on the periphery of His turf to scare off intruders. God exemplifies stage five demanding with the intelligence of a Lion. A post-terrestrial God would not be concerned with possession of territory. Such a DNA ecological-engineer God would understand that all creatures must evolve through the marine, territorial, artifact, and social technologies and that they must self-actualize at each evolution, passing the second stage infant fish-brained mentality, the fifth stage mammalian-brained demanding, the eight-stage detailed-brained pedantic juvenile and eleventh stage domesticated adult, as well as those advanced stages of self-divinity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
When their precious little baby says, “My…and mine” wise parents smile because it is the beginning of the definition of reality and self in terms of territory. When the like stage eight detailed-brained juvenile humanoid proudly presents a crayon drawing or some original symbolic creation, every wise parent smiles praise. When the children fool around with the Tree of Good and Evil—the socio-sex rituals of the local give-it is true that terrestrial parents get upset. However, this is no reason to throw the children out of the house and put a flaming torch at the front door to keep the poor errant youngster from contritely creeping back. The God has not reached the technological level of the civilized stage of parental cultural transmission. The fact that pleasures of the flesh is not a concern of the Genesis supports the suggestion that in this folk legend we are dealing with the reality of a seventh stage parrot-brained Paleolithic-herding tribe obsessed with territory-moving uneasily into an eight-stage inventive self-actualization brain. Thus, the Holy Bible is revealed to be the word of God. It is a collection of sacred books written by ancient prophets and historians. These authors recorded the relationship between God and His people for over 4.000 years. The inspired words are what we know today as the Holy Bible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The power of the Christians who follow the Bible that emerged from the Old Testament tradition is rural, pre-urban. Fundamentalist Christianity appeals to pre-civilized, prudish tribal people who are not Worldly and not ready for urban feudal pleasures. The Bible becomes a valuable ethological document to help us locate the evolutionary stage which emerged in the Middle East at biblical times. The Principle of Correspondence keeps us from rejecting the Judeo-Christian Bible as erroneous. The same power which, when misgoverned, drags men down into materialism, also lifts them into spiritual awareness when directed upward. Where all a man’s acts are merely the reflex behaviour dictated by his sense-impressions, he has hardly any life higher than an animal one. It is the business of this quest to insert the influence of consciousness of the causes and results of his actions, reason, and will into such behaviour. There are certain indestructible truths which reveal themselves through the ages to every man who, for a time at least, sufficiently masters his animal self and sufficiently quietens his human self. Those which we most need to learn today are simple and ancient, yet completely relevant to the modern scene and completely adequate to the modern need. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is everywhere the state today that most people are automatons, merely reacting to the outward World of the five senses in a mechanical manner. They do not really control what is happening to them but merely drift with the forces playing through the sense-stimuli. The consequence is that they do not actually possess or use the power of free will. They are puppets on Nature’s stage. When any emotion takes full possession and reaches an extreme stage, it becomes a passion. One does not easily discard the various passions. The decision to do so does not lead, or even contribute much, to their conquest. It merely announces the beginning of a long war. They return, in spite of one’s wishes, again and again for they belong to the animal body which, itself, cannot be discarded. However, in the end a man must claim his birthright to a higher kind of life, must fulfil his nobler possibilities, must set up reason and intuition as his most reliable guides. If your thoughts are energized by a noble passion and your deeds inspired by a lofty enthusiasm, they are the better for it. However, if your thoughts are distorted by a foolish passion and your deeds wasted by a misdirected enthusiasm, they are the worse for it. The same ambition which stretched his mind and capacity for money-making power-hunting can, when transformed into aspiration, stretch them for truth-seeking and character building. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
It is not even that he has to give up all desires but that he has to purify them and put them all under the dominance of his one supreme desire for attainment—which may or may not mean their extinction. The Victorian periods was not only a haunted age, lending itself to every type of illusions, event at the level of bricks and mortar. One autumn evening in 1890, I found myself at the Observational Tower. It was dark, the Tower has a kind of airy vastness about it. That night, at the witching hour, the three doors to one of the rooms were firmly closed and the curtains drawn as I sat down in the company of my niece Daisy, and dog Zip. The room, its walls nearly nine feet deep, were the home to the most formidable ghosts. The fireplace projected far into the room, and an oil painting hung over it. Daisy set with her back to the fire, as I cried out “Good God—what is that?” Hanging above the oblong table was what I can only describe as a translucent cylinder about three inches in diameter, and within it a bluish and white colour commingled in constant flux. It moved behind Daisy, and she shrank away from it, exclaiming, Oh Christ!! It has seized me!” One of the servants swiftly jumped into action and hurled a chair towards it just as it crossed the upper end of the table and vanished into the recess of a window. He dashed out of the room and summoned more servants. Even now when writing I feel the fresh horror of the moment. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The Tower held spirits that were thought to have been dead and tortured for thousands of years. However, some of the Tower’s ghosts were more subtle—a baby crying; a hand on the shoulder while sitting in a bath; the smell of incense and horse sweat coming from nowhere—but the rest make up a tableau of blood. Screams are heard emanating from the Tower and servants often see a woman being pursued by a headsman, who eventually hacks her to the ground. Pools of blood that appear on the floor come from a fourteenth century nobleman who died of his wounds after battling the French incursions which made the Isle of Wight almost uninhabitable during that period. One particularly harrowing night, I woke to find myself not in my bed, but standing at the entrance to one of the basements. The heavy wooden door creaked open of its own accord, revealing a staircase that seemed to descend into infinite darkness. From below came the sounds of chains rattling and distant, agonized moans. As I stood there, paralyzed with fear, I felt an unseen force beginning to pull me down the stairs. It took every modicum of strength I had to resist, to turn and flee back to the safety of the upper floors. Daisy found herself drawn to the ancient mirror in her room, spending hours staring into its depths. She began to see things in its silvered surface—glimpses of the past, of the atrocities committed by the Winchester Rifle. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, more terrifying were the glimpses of possible futures, each more horrific than the last. In one, she saw a creature of darkness, a vicious monster, stained with blood, stalking the halls alongside other spirits. In another, she witnessed the gruesome demise of my estate at the hands of a spectral baron. His eyes ranged over us; his mouth formed into a cruel smile. He laughed, deep and loud, and with a sudden careless gesture dropped my entire home to the ground. Not only did we all perish, but legions of the dead had just lost their home. The specter then wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with his arm, and smiled again. It was as he smirked in triumph that he held out a small gold crucifix. Daisy ran to me in tears. “Aunt Sarah,” she said, “I understand nothing except horror and misery!” “Things will get better,” said I gently, “when we have done what we have to do.” Cautiously, I moved nearer to Daisy. Her eyes blazed with fury. With a grisly grin, she back away from me to the door-to-nowhere. Daisy delivered a horrible squeal. Her withering body seemed to fade into tiny specks, forming a floating shape which slipped under the narrow crack at the bottom of the door. Stepping up to the door, I stood blinking in astonishment. I stretched out my arms to her, but she did not return. Putting my head in my hand, I sobbed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The trapdoor in the floor now opened of its own accord, the darkness below calling to me with promises of release from the terror—if only I would descend those winding stairs. I went down into the darkness, and at the very bottom, lighting a candle. The room became a prison. The walls seemed to close in on me, the ancient bricks whispering secrets that threatened to drive me mad. I tried everything I could think of to bring Daisy back and rid myself of this evil presence. I brought in priests to perform exorcisms, but the holy water turned to blood as soon as it touched the floors of Llanada Villa. Crucifixes twisted themselves into pentagrams. Mediums fled as flames from the fireplace took on a life of their own, forming themselves into fiery apparitions that chased them through the halls and sent them screaming from the property, speaking in malevolent tongue. As the sanity of the servants began to fray, they would find themselves slipping into fugue states, coming to awareness hours later with no memory of what had transpired. I squeezed Mr. Hansen’s arm as we traversed the miles and miles of hallways and rooms looking for my dear Daisey. Mr. Hansen gasped when we opened on of the doors. There was Daisey. In the quiet of one of the beds, resting from the horrible impulses which made her stalk the night. She was beautiful. Her eyes were closed, her expression serene. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
“Is she dead?” Mr. Hansen breathed. “No,” I replied. “She is not dead. But my home will never be at peace until we release Llanada from this evil cruse. My family and I will die, and new victims and multiplying evils will be unleashed on this World. Souls are in torment. Mr. Hansen, I need you to perform an act of great love and great courage. For although my home is the size of many mansions, if we do not continue to build, we will all be killed!” Mr. Hansen stepped forward. “I’m ready,” he said. Mr. Hansen took a small book from his pocket and began to recite a prayer. The ancient words of worship echoed around the labyrinth. A hideous, blood curdling screech came from Daisy’s open lips. The house shook and twisted wildly; it bones groaning in agony. Mr. Hansen picked up a hammer, retrieved my notes from the bureau and called the carpenters back to work. The foul things that had taken over Daisey’s body had gone, and in its place lay the real Daisy. Her face was very beautiful, but she was ravaged with pain and suffering. “So we did the right thing,” one of the carpenter said. “Did you doubt it?” asked Mr. Hansen. The evocative language of cutting and shaping wood produced a distinct rustling sound. High-pitched whines evoked an urgency and intensity. The crisp slicing of the saw, the rhythmic thumping of the hammering and nailing which reverberated through the air, and as well as the creaking chorus of grating and groaning wood produced a symphony that was very soothing and invigorating. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A week later, in the downstairs study, Mr. Hansen was sitting at the desk frowning in concentration. He had called the carpenters all together for an important meeting. “One part of our work is over,” he said. “But a greater task remains. It is imperative that the haunting groan of timber, the ominous creek of stained wood, the hypnotic beat of the hammer, continues to carry its emotional weight, never ceasing. That is the only way we can stop the author of all our sorrow. And…”He paused, looking slowly at the expectant faces in front of him. “And keep Mrs. Winchester and her family alive,” Mr. Hansen said vehemently, to murmurs of agreement. Now that the battle was finally out in the open, I regained all my strength and spirit. I no longer felt like I was alone in the World, battling this curse on my own. I now had a team. “We all know what happened to poor Annie and Mr. Winchester,” Mr. Hansen said gravely, “and those of you who weren’t already familiar with Sarah Winchester’s journal have now read it. Very few people,” he said with admiration, “have faced what she has faced and lived to tell the tale. Her journal provides an invaluable insight into the powers and habits these ghosts and demons on humanity.” Mr. Hansen began to pace up and down the length of the study, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “I have made it my task to learn as much as possible about the many dangers we face in The Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
“Arkie will testify to the days and night I have spent in this room, in that chair, reading Mrs. Winchester’s diagrams and interpreting her architectural notes, reading books and papers untouched for centuries. My purpose in calling this meeting is to shape my knowledge—my knowledge of the ghosts killed by Yellow Boy.” Abruptly he stopped pacing up and down, stood behind his chair and thumped the table. “There are such beings as demons, ghouls, and ghosts. Spring Heeled Jack is the greatest and most evil demon there has ever been. He is as strong as twenty men and has the cunning that comes from living over a thousand years. He has claws, eyes as red as fireballs, and wings.” I suddenly interrupted. “Correct. He can rip anyone to shreds with his bare hands. And he has other tricks. He can cause fogs, he can fade into the walls. All he was wants to do is harm the living. So, please, keep building nonstop.” A chilling wind whipped around us, carrying with it the echoes of tormented souls. Spectral hands clawed at the carpenters from the shadows, leaving icy trails across their faces. “Be careful,” Mr. Hasen warned, his grip on his hammer tightening. “Try not to get too impatient or angry.” They all fell silent. With steadfast purpose they walked in a single file from one room to another, gathering tools to continue construction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
After the men returned to work, I buried my noise in my old books. I wanted to keep myself busy so I would not worry about the curse. I needed to know as much as possible about the enemy. The men were systematically working. The book frightened me. I snaped it shut and decided to go to bed. What I needed was a good night’s sleep. In the process of working on the west wing, the men had become too confident. “Saw a ghost just then,” Emrys observed, as he nailed wood to the wall. “A ghost over there,” Silas said. “Masses of them here,” Ambrose said a little lighter, just as he was opening his toolbox. Of the fifteen men that were on duty, only four remained. The men glanced up from their work and looked around the room. Ghosts were appearing from nowhere, floating and hovering across the mansion’s floor, horribly flying over their heads. Mr. Hansen heard their screams and came running into the room. “We must continue building!” he shouted, looking at the horror of the ghosts around them. “Now prepare for blood to flow,” an incarnate voice said. “Shut up!” Arkie shouted, desperately running from the room. “Hurry!” Mr. Hansen called from the door. The other three men had already run out of the room. Arkie made a last, frantic lunge, and just managed to get safely into the hallway. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Immediately ghost converged into the hallway, and in less than a second, they were smothered in complete darkness. They felt as if they were being frozen to death. The ghosts were clawing at their faces, whispering in their ears. They tried to fight their way out of it. The men thought this was the end. At that moment, the lights came on and the ghosts vanished. While I was sleeping, the chambermaid witnessed a white mist. It came creeping under the door, low like a snake, and pressed itself against the walls and windows. Then it seeped into the new room through the wall. She looked down at me and was pleased that I was sleeping so soundly. However, in the morning, as the chambermaid was telling me about the night’s events, Mr. Hansen noticed I did not look very well. “Mrs. Winchester, are you coming down with something?” he asked. I admitted, “I feel so tired and weak.” “Although I am very thankful to be employed in your service, I was going to ask you if I could take leave?” “For how long, Mr. Hasen?” “Permanently.” “Good architects are the very devil to find these days, Mr. Hansen,” I said, “and there can be no one else like you. Do stay on, there’s a good chap. I would be lost without you.” By all rights, Mr. Hansen should have long ago retied, spent his savings on a country cottage and devoted the rest of his life to his own garden. However, I had been insistent that he should stay on. So many employees had disappeared. His place being taken over by someone else sounded strange, unfathomable. I could not have him absent from the house. Mr. Hansen was a good-heated old soul, and his job was secure for as long as he wished it to be. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Winchester Mystery House
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Maybe a friendly Victorian ghost will come home with you and haunt your closet and watch over you to keep you safe.
Weak One Minute, Dead the Next?
Some people are raised in vicious crumbling corners of the city, where their chances of survival are only as good as the strength in their muscles of the quick wits in their head. Those who have both—physical strength and size are lucky. However, it also helps to have calculating intelligence. It is also important not to get caught in the syndrome of unemployment, drugs, and despair. When live in an age when, as the Lord foretold, men’s hearts are failing them, not only physically but in spirit. Many are giving up heart for the battle of life. Death by suicide ranks as a major cause of deaths to college students. As the showdown between good and evil approaches with its accompanying trials and tribulations, the adversaries are increasingly striving to overcome the Saints with despair, discouragement, despondency, and depression. Sometimes this happens when a person’s spouse leaves them, the paychecks stop coming in, and the payments on the Corvette fall months behind. This is when it is most important to remember God and have assurance that he is directing us through the troubled times ahead. “He that remaineth steadfast and is not overcome, the same shall be saved,” reports Matthew 1.11. Also, never forget your intelligence, your education, and your competitiveness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Even people who are successful and feel like they own the World fell like something very important is missing. Some fell alone, like a spaceship rocketing to the stars with nothing but emptiness all around them. They may also feel out of touch with themselves, with who they are. It is often times like a spaceship that has no pilot, no crew—just an engine driving it mindlessly ever upward to nowhere. Many people are, as always, a success. They have energy, style, charisma. They seem to have it “all together.” And they fool everyone but themselves. On top of that, they carry a deep, gnawing guilt. In the rise to the top, one must often leave many people behind: their friends from poor neighbourhoods, their spouse, and sometimes even their families. These individuals know something is wrong with them personally. They want to relax, but cannot. They want to be loved, but have no idea how a person goes about doing that. They get sick and tired of competing, keeping up, looking good, winning for the sake of winning alone. “Wickedness never was happiness,” reports Alma 41.10. Sin creates disharmony with God and is depressing to the spirit. Therefore, a man would do well to examine himself to see that he is in harmony with all of God’s laws. Every law kept brings a particular blessing. Every law broken brings a particular blight. Those who are heavy laden with despair should come unto the Lord, for his yoke is easy and his burden is light. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Strong. You want to know that you are strong all the time. Not just when things are going smoothly. However, if you tell yourself—all the time—that you are strong, then after a while you will believe it. You will really know it. So when something unfortunate happens, you will know you can handle it. However, no one is strong all the time. There are times when you will be weak. Look man, not everyone has the luxury of being weak. Weak, for some, is like one step from being dead, you understand? You will be weak one minute, and you will be dead the next. However, prayer in the hour of need is a great boon. From simple trials to our Gethsemanes, prayer can put us in touch with God, our greatest source of comfort and counsel. “Pray always that you may come off conqueror,” Doctrine and Covenants 10.5. This is also a key to use in keeping depression from destroying us. In the lives of some people, there are a number of direct polarities, that is, opposites which are independent, but at the same time complementary. With regard to their outside World, there are the polarities of their two cultures: one, the poverty-ridden low-income neighbourhood and the other, the World of business. They know their roots are in one culture, but their everyday life is in the other. Their inability to be in both of these Worlds, alternately, as the situation might demand, is a source of great conflict, guilt and embarrassment to them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The other polarity exists in their own perception of themselves: the polarity of strength and weakness. Having grown up in an environment where strength was equated with survival, some come to see weakness as something to be avoided at all costs. Thus they will deny their own weakness and set about structing their lives such that one could demonstrate only strength to oneself and others. To understand this, we have to focus on the exact meaning of the word polarity, which is different from the concept of duality. Polarities exist at either end of a continuum. One such continuum might have “yes” at one end and “no” at the other, with degrees of “maybes” in between. Another continuum might have strength at one end and weakness at the other. (There is a zero point in the center and the intensity of the strength and weakness increases as each moves away from the other. Differences exist only in degree. On the other hand, a duality is a complete separation of two entities into mutually exclusive or contradictory conditions such as: Alive of Dead.) These are related by their oppositeness—an oppositeness which is independent, but not complementary. Also, there cannot be degrees of deadness. Something is either dead, or alive. It cannot be a “little bit” dead. Many people often mistake polarities for dualities. In the minds of some, there are two kind of people “ghetto” and successful businessmen. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Since some people view themselves as successful businessmen, they cannot allow themselves to be viewed as “ghetto,” as they perceive the people left in the less affluent hometowns. To these successful men, it is necessary to embrace one and reject the other. Some cannot see that one does not have to do that. Rather, one can hold the two polarities in tension, appreciating both Worlds. One can be human and ambitions, cool and successful. One can speak in slang dialect to their friends and family and slide into their university English when he is in the executive suite. He can be both at the same time without guilt. Recognizing that he need not constantly fight the situation as a duality, but allow both to exist in creative tension, will lead to a dissolving of what could become a neurotic conflict. The Universe is literally held together by such dynamic tension. For every positive charge in a molecule, there is an equal and opposite negative one. For every planet that is spinning wildly, straining to hurtle off into space, there is another planet holding it to its orbit. The positive does not reject the existence of the negative. It uses the negative to hold itself in place. The Universe uses both the positive and the negative to accomplish a variety of useful tasks. The result of this dynamic tension between polarities is balance and balance is literally “what makes the World go ‘round.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
If everything exists in a state of dynamic tension, then why not out inner life, our own being? Should not out being also thrive best in a condition of dynamic tension on a nurturing continuum of feeling and growth, rather than at a rigidly fixed position which seeks to deny the existence of another, opposite position? In that the children of Cain have triumphed, increasingly, throughout the centuries, the God of the Old Testament can be said to have been incredibly successful. Paradoxically, the blasphemers have injected new life into the jealous God whom Christianity wished to banish from history. One of their most profoundly audacious acts was to recruit Christ into their camp by making His story end on the Cross and on the bitter note of the cry that precedes His agony. By this means it was possible to preserve the implacable face of a God of hate—which coincided far better with creation as the rebels conceived it. Until Dostoievsky and Nietzsche, rebellion is directed only against a cruel and capricious divinity—a divinity who prefers, without any convincing motive, Abel’s sacrifice to Cain’s and, by so doing, provokes the first murder. Dostoievsky, in the realm of imagination, and Nietzsche, in the realm of fact, enormously increase the field of rebellious thought and demand an accounting from the God of love. Himself. Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Because Nietzsche believes that God is dead in the souls of his contemporaries, he attacks, like his predecessor Stirner, the illusion of God that lingers, under guise of morality, in the thought of his times. However, until they appear upon the scene, the freethinkers, for example, were content to deny the truth of the history of Christ (“that dull story,” in Sade’s words) and to maintain, by their denials, the tradition of an avenging god. On the other hand, for as long as the Western World has been Christian, the Gospels have been the interpreter between Heaven and Earth. Each time a solitary cry of rebellion was uttered, the answer came in the form of an even more terrible suffering. In that Christ had suffered, and had suffered voluntarily, suffering was no longer unjust and all pain was necessary. In one sense, Christianity’s bitter intuition and legitimate pessimism concerning human behaviour is based on the assumption that overall injustice is as satisfying to man as total justice. Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man’s agony. If everything, without exception, in Heaven and Eart is doomed to pain and suffering, then a strange form of happiness is possible. However, from the moment when Christianity, emerging from its period of triumph, found itself submitted to the critical eye of reason—to the point where the divinity of Christ was denied—suffering once more became the lot of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Jesus Christ profaned is no more than just one more innocent man who the representatives of the God of Abraham tortured in a spectacular manner. The abyss that separates the master from the slaves opens again and the cry of revolt falls on the deaf ears of a jealous God. The freethinkers have prepared the way for this new dichotomy by attacking, with all the usual precautions, the morality and divinity of Christ. Callot’s Universe sums up quite satisfactorily this World of hallucination and wretchedness whose inhabitants begin by giggling up their sleeves and end—with Moliere’s Don Juan—by laughing to high Heaven. During the two centuries which prepare the way for the upheavals, both revolutionary and sacrilegious, of the eighteenth century, all the efforts of the freethinkers are bent on making Christ an innocent, or a simpleton, so as to annex Him to the World of man, endowed with all the noble or derisory qualities of man. Thus the ground will be prepared for the great offensive against a hostile Heaven. The adept who attains perfect inner serenity can do so only by paying the price of forgoing the emotional agitations, attractions, and repulsions which constitute much of the inner life of most people. Having attained it himself, he can lead other to it only by pointing towards it as a reachable goal for them, too. He may not yield to personal favouritism or egotistic caprice based on likes and dislikes in selecting those whom he is to help. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Indeed, because of this it is said that he is not more interested in mankind collectively rather than as individuals. Now if he had to commit emotional suicide to reach his present height, it is unreasonable to expect that he should flatter or encourage those who, although seeking the same height, seek also to preserve or nourish their egoistic emotions. The latter are nearly always closely linked to egoistic desires. An inward detachment from all eagerness for Earthly life is the grim price that must be paid before entry into the kingdom of Heaven can be got. Such detachment requires soft sentimentality to yield to hard recognition must assuredly lead the seeker far away from conventional points of view concerning his personal duties, his family relations, and his social behaviour. It is not that he will not feel desires and aversions, attractions and repulsions, but that he will not be moved by them. They will be under control, not only of the ego but of a power higher than the ego. Thus the tensions which animate him, will not be present. It is an error to regard him as inhuman, as lacking in feeling. What he rejects is negative feeling: what he seeks to overcome is animal wrath, lust, hatred; what he affirms is positive feeling of the best kind—delicate, sensitive, aesthetic, compassionate, and refined. Thus his stoic imperturbability is not rigor mortis. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
To talk of his condition as simply being one of controlled emotion is not quite correct; much rather it is one of balanced emotion—which is markedly different. The idea of a philosopher being an utterly aloof person, coldly indifferent and quite unapproachable, a man who restricts his human feelings to the degree that hardly any are left, is applicable only to those who follow narrow, rigid, and incomplete systems. The notion that a philosopher is melancholy is arguable: there is no reason why he should not show joy and appreciate humour. However, since he is a balanced person, he will put the governor of deep seriousness to control these qualities. If a human price has to be paid for such emotionless behaviour, let us remember that it must also be paid for too emotional behaviour. A portentous gravity is not at all a hallmark of the self-actualized Christian. Is mental tranquility indistinguishable from emotional death? Is it not better to guide feelings, educate desires, and uplift emotions into the proper channels than to kill them? Such questions show a confused comprehension of the philosophic discipline. The latter’s aim is not to produce an insensible human stone but a true human being. If a child is boxed in by contradictory controls, there may be only one way out which allows him some measure of self-expression. He is then forced into that kind of activity or response no matter how inappropriate it may be. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In such a case, it is often evident to the people around him that he is responding to what is in his head rather than to the external situation, and he is then said to be in a bag. If his bag is backed up by some talent or ability, and by a winning payoff command, it may be a winner’s bag, but in most cases people in a bag are losers because their behaviour is nonadaptive. A person who breaks out of a bag (or “container,” as it sometimes called) will immediately proceed to do his thing, that is, whatever he has always wanted most to do. If that happens to be adaptive and is controlled with some Adult rationality, he may turn out to be a winner, but if he indulges too often and too well, he will end up being a loser. In fact, when a person starts to do his thing, after he break out of his bag, his payoff command will determine whether he does it judiciously so as to be a winner, or overdoes it like a loser. In some cases, however, he may be able to leave his payoff command in the bag along with the rest of his parentally programmed script apparatus, and then he is really his own man and can decide his own destiny. However, it is difficult to know, without the appraisal of an objective outsider, whether he is really a maverick of liberated person, or is only an angry rebel, or maybe even a schizophrenic who has jumped out of his bag and into a bottle, with or without pulling the cork in after him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
To ask about the purpose of human life is to raise an existential question, rather than one answerable through experiment or logic. Existential questions are answered by the way one lives. Every person’s life, and the daily actions and decisions that comprise it, represent that person’s answer to the question, “How, then, shall I live?” These answers are almost by definition the embodiment of a person’s religion. The chief function of religion is to provide ultimate answers to the questions that existence pose. In the absence of credible and lifegiving answers to the questions, “How shall I live, and why?” a person enters the state called noogenic neurosis—a kind of despair or cynicism. Much depression and neurotic suffering stem from a failure to find meaning in life or to find new meaning when old goals have been consummated or have lost their inspiriting power. Fromm regards “a frame of orientation and devotion” to be as essential to healthy personality as food. The process of self-actualizing, of which Maslow wrote, and the achievement of selfhood (in Jung’s sense) appear to be impossible without such a religious orientation. Of course, it does not matter whether the religion is theistic, and it is possible to judge whether or not a person’s objects and ways of worshiping are life-giving. However, life for human beings is impossible without something to live for. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to serve the community by protecting lives, property, and the environment in a safe, efficient, and professional manner. The Sacramento Fire Department also insures to provide timely, effective and efficient fire protection, suppression, prevention, education, and investigation services to the citizens of Sacramento. “It was a fire in a high school at two o’ clock on a Monday morning, and one of our rescue crews was coming back from the hospital, where they had a job. They smelled smoke. They drove all around looking for the fire, but they just couldn’t find it. The trouble was that this school, like many buildings in South Sacrament, was completely windowless, for reasons of vandalism and air-conditioning. So they couldn’t see the fire. At six in the morning we got the run. This fire had been burning in a windowless structure for twelve hours. We felt the door, and it was hotter than hell itself. We stretched our preconnected line, a long stretch, and we put it into position. Then we forced open the door and felt the air rush in. Right there, I knew that was the closet we had ever come to blowing ourselves to kingdom come. Why that building didn’t backdraft, I don’t know. We crawled in with the line, and the smoke was real black, almost to the floor. We were in the library learning center. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
“I got close to the wall, and there was a telephone on one of the desks, just above the level of our heads. It was melted to a blob. Now our ears were burning, really tingling, because we weren’t using helmets with earflaps and we didn’t have any ventilation. We went along way in, thinking, cover your ears, cover them up and push the line along. By this time everything was in a smoldering state and picking up. We stretched that thing, we must have stretched it a hundred feet. This other guy and I were up front, and the rest of the guys were twenty or thirty feet back. We cracked that line, and the water upset the thermal balance. The stream came down, and we couldn’t see a damn thing. The steam rolled down, and I told the guy, ‘I got to leave, I’m burning up.’ He didn’t get the burns I did. I said, ‘I got to go, I’m burning up.’ I turned around and tried to follow the hose line out, but it was all tangled around a chair we had knocked over on the way in. It was being a receptionist’s desk, and I remember going there. In retrospect you say, ‘Feel the male and female coupling, and you know you’re heading in the right direction.’ When you’re burning up, you don’t feel anything. I started to stand up, and I was telling myself to get back down. This was the closet I have ever come to losing control of myself because I was burning up. I finally did get outside. To be honest, I had left that guy on the line. I had told him, ‘Come on, come on, come on.’ He came out a minute later and was okay. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
“They worked on me in the emergency room at the hospital, and they put ice packs on my ears. They were second-degree burns. Why we didn’t kill ourselves by forcing that door and letting that air in, I don’t know. I think it was just God saying, ‘Hey, it’s not your time to get killed.’ There are always other times, though. Like, we had a sire in another of those Sacramento Country houses, where a lady and a baby were trapped inside. So the guys pulled the line, they were good firemen, but they were attacking the fire at the front. It’s hard to make yourself go around back of the fire when the fire’s in the front. I said, ‘Hey, X, if there is anybody alive, they’re in the back of the house. Go there.’ Well, anyway, the firemen went in the back and found the lady while I was getting my self-contained mask on. They came out and they were burned. They were helping the lady, but the baby was still in there because I could hear it crying. I went in with a line. The fire was one of those where it was burning up over your head. I intentionally didn’t open the line, because I knew that steam would come down and I wouldn’t be able to see the kid. Also, I would steam the hell out of myself. This time I did have my earflaps down. I could hear the baby crying and I said, ‘Oh, man.’ I jumped through doorways, and I melted the eye shield on my helmet. I found the baby. It was in the back bathroom. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
“I got burned, but I eventually found the baby. That was the first experience in which I heard a baby crying, and I thought, ‘Well, you just better stay in here, and you just better suffer until you find the baby.’” Not only does the fire department save lives and reduce property loss, but they also prevent harm. Public education and prevention is of equal importance to fire suppression in the role of the fire service in the community. You can help the Sacramento Fire Department’s mission by making a donation. Americans love to see America prosper. Please remember to raise your children to love America, love God and Jesus Christ and to be patriotic. Also, to keep America strong, it is important to buy American cars and other goods and services produced by Americans, such as American beef, poultry, dairy, produce and other products. In order to keep our city streets safe, remember to respect law and order, and always treat your elders with dignity and reverence. Getting an education will help you maintain stability as an adult, and you can and will use everything you learn in school. Reading your assigned textbooks before class will help your grades improve, help you to understand the material, teach you critical thinking skills and make class more interesting because you will be able to engage with the teach and other students and the time will fly by. As always, remember to be thankful for being an America and never forget how armed forces have made it possible to live in peace. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
The Winchester Mystery House
The nearer one gets to visit a haunted place, the more frantic do the restless ones become, to make sure, perhaps, that you do not overlook them!
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Randolph Harris II International Institute 