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May the Nations, in the Efforts to Keep Peace in Being, Go to the Farthest Limits!
Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live. The fact that after awakening the mind picks up the thoughts of the day before, that the individuality connects with the old individuality of presleep, proves the continuity of existence of a part of the Self both and during sleep as during waking. We have not taken proper notice of history; and, in consequence, we no longer know what is just—or what is useful. The most flagrant violation of the rights of history—and, above all, of the rights of humans—occurs when a people is deprived of the right to the land on which it lives and has to move elsewhere. At the end of the second World War the victorious powers decided to impose this fate upon hundreds of thousands of people, and to impose it in the cruelest conditions; in this they showed how little they understood their task, and how unfitted they were to carry out a reorganization which would be reasonably equitable and might guarantee a more prosperous future. And now—what exactly is this problem of peace in the modern World? Its conditions are quite new—as different from those of former times as is the war which we seek to avert. Modern warfare is fought with weapons which are incomparably more destructive than those of the past. War is, in fact, a greater evil than ever before. It was once possible to regard it as an evil to which we could resign ourselves, because it was the servant of progress—and was even essential to it. It could be argued in those days that, thanks to war, those nations which were strongest got the better of their weaker neighbours and thus determined the march of history. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
It is worth remembering that for the generation which grew up before 1914, the enormous increase in the destructive power of modern armament was regarded as advantageous to humanity. It was argued that outcome of any future conflict would be settled much more quickly than in previous ages, and that any such wars would therefore be very brief. It was also thought that the harm done by any future conflict would be relatively slight, since a new element of humanity was being introduced into the rules of war. This arose from the obligations established by the Geneva Convention of 1864 as a result of the efforts of the Red Cross. The nations had entered int a mutual agreement to look after each other’s wounded, to ensure that prisoners of war were treated humanely, and to see that the civil populations were disturbed as little as possible. This convention did, in point of fact, have substantial results, and hundreds of thousands of men, civilians and combatants alike, have profited by it for the last one hundred and fifty years. However, these advantages are trifling when set beside the immeasurable harm which has been inflicted by modern methods of death and destruction. There cannot, at the present time, be any question of “humanizing” war. Now that we know how terrible an evil war is in our time, we should neglect nothing that may prevent its recurrence. Above all, this decision must be based on ethical values: during the last two wars we were guilty of atrocious acts of inhumanity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
In any future war, we shall do yet more terrible things. This must not be. Let us be brave and look the facts in the face. Humans have become superhuman. One is a superhuman not only because one has at one’s command innate physical forces, but because, thanks to science and to technical advancement, one now controls the latent forces of nature and can bring them, if one wishes, into play. When quite on one’s own one could kill only at a distance by calling upon the personal strength one communicated to the arrow by suddenly unleashing one’s bow. Superhumans, on the other hand, have contrived to unleash something quite different: the energy released by the deflagration of a particular mixture of chemicals. This allows one to use a vastly more formidable projectile, and one can send it a great deal father. However, this superhuman suffers from a fatal imperfection of mind. One has not raised oneself to that superhuman level of reason which should correspond to the possession of superhuman strength. Today, once again, we live in a period that is marked by the absence of peace; today, once again, nations feel themselves menaced by other nations; today, once again, we must concede to each the right to defend oneself with the terrible weapons which are now at our disposal. I believe that I have here given voice to the thoughts and hopes of millions of human beings in our part of the World who live in the fear of a future war. May my words be those on the far side of the barrier who are haunted by this same fear. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
May those who have in their hands the fate of the nations take care to avoid whatever may worsen our situation and make it more dangerous. And may they take to heart the words of the Apostle Paul: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, lice peaceably with all men.” His words are valid not only for individuals, but for whole nations as well. May the nations, in their efforts keep peace in being, go to the farthest limits of possibility, so that the spirit of humans shall be given time to develop and grow strong—and time to act. Can one live in a society that is out of control? That is the question posed for the concept of future shock. For that is the situation we find ourselves in. If it were technology alone that had broken loose, our problems would be serious enough. The deadly fact is, however, that many other social processes have also begun to run free, oscillating wildly, resisting our best efforts to guide them. Urbanization, ethic conflict, migration, population crime—a thousand examples spring to mind of fields in which our efforts to shape change seem increasingly inept and futile. Some of these are strongly related to the breakaway of technology; others partially independent of it. Then uneven, rocketing rates of change, the sifts and jerks in direction, compel us to ask whether the techno-societies, even comparatively small ones like Sweden and Belgium, have grown too complex, too fast to manage? #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
How can we prevent mass future shock, selectively adjusting the tempos of change, raising or lowering levels of stimulation, when governments—including those with the best intentions—seem unable even to point change in the right direction? Thus a leading American urbanologist writes with unconcealed disgust: “At a cost of more than three billion dollars, the Urban Renewal Agency has succeeded in materially reducing the supply of low cost housing in American cities.” Similar debacles could be cited in a dozen fields. Why do welfare programs today often cripple rather than help their clients? Why do college students supposedly a papered elite, riot and rebel? Why do expressways add to traffic congestion rather than reduce it? In short, why do so many well-intentioned liberal programs turn rancid so rapidly, producing side effects that cancel out their central effects? No wonder Raymond Fletcher, a frustrated Member of Parliament in Britain, recently complained: “Society’s gone random!” If random means a literal absence of patter, he is, of course, overstating the case. However, if random means that the outcomes of social policy have become erratic and hard to predict, he is right on target. Here, then, is the political meaning of future shock. For just as individual future shock results from an inability to keep peace with the rate of change, governments, too, suffer from a kind of collective future shock—a breakdown of their decisional processes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
With chilling clarity, Sir Geoffery Vickers, the eminent British social scientist, has identified the issue: “The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed, without a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings us nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost.” The United State is equipped with what are at least called planning departments. Why, therefore, despite all these efforts, should the system be spinning out of control? The problem is not simply that we plan too little; we also plan too poorly. Part of the trouble can be traced to the very premises implicit in our planning. First, technocratic planning, itself a product of industrialism, reflect the values of that fast-vanishing era. In both its capitalist and communist variants, the age of information is a system focused on the maximization of material welfare. Thus, for the technocrat in the Silicon Valley as well as Kiev, economic advance is the primary aim; technology the primary tool. The fact that in one case the advance redounds to private advantage and in the other, theoretically, to the public good, does not alter the core assumptions common to both. Technocratic planning is econocentric. Second, technocratic planning reflects the time-bias of the age of information. Struggling to free itself from the stifling past-orientation of previous societies, the age of information is focused heavily on the future. This means, in practise, that it is planning for the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
However, the idea of a five-year plan struck the World as insanely futuristic when it was first put forward by Soviets in the 1920’s. Even today, except in the most advanced organizations on both sides of the ideological curtain, one- or two-year forecasts are regarded as “long-range planning.” A handful of corporations and government agencies, as we shall see, have begun to concern themselves with horizons ten, twenty, even fifty years in the future. The majority, however, remain blindly biased toward next Monday. Technocratic planning is short-range. Third, reflecting the bureaucratic organization of the digital age, technocratic planning is premised on hierarchy. The World is divided int manager and worker, planner and plannee, with decisions made by one for the other. This system, adequate while change unfolds at a digital tempo, breaks down as the pace reaches super-age of information speeds. The increasingly unstable environment demands more and more non-programmed decisions down below; the need for instant feedback blurs the distinction between line and staff; and hierarchy totters. Planners are too remote, too unenlightened of local conditions, too slow in responding to change. As suspicious spreads that top-down controls are unworkable, plannees begin clamouring for the right to participate in the decision-making. Planners, however, resists. For like the bureaucratic system it mirrors, technocratic planning is essentially undemocratic. The forces sweeping us toward the super-age of information can no longer be channeled by these bankrupt industrial-era methods. For a time, they may continue to work in backward, slowly moving industries or communities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
However, their misapplication in advanced industries, in universities, in cities—wherever change is swift—cannot but intensify the instability, leading to wilder and wilder swings and lurches. Moreover, as the evidences of failure pile up, dangerous political, cultural and psychological currents are set loose. One response to the loss of control, for example, is a revulsion against intelligence. Science first gave humans a sense of mastery over one’s environment, and hence over the future. By making the future seem malleable, instead of immutable, it shattered the opiate religions that preached passivity and mysticism. Today, mounting evidence that society is out of control breeds disillusionment with science. In consequence, we witness a garish revival of mysticism. Suddenly astrology is the rage. Zen, yoga, seances, and witchcraft have become popular pastimes. Cults form around the search for Dionysian experience, for non-verbal and supposedly non-linear communication. We are told it is more important to “feel” than to “think,” as though there were a contradiction between the two. Existentialist oracles join Catholic mystics, Jungian psychoanalysts, and Hindu gurus in exalting the mystical and emotional against the scientific and rational. This reversion to pre-scientific attitudes is accompanied, not surprisingly, by a tremendous wave of nostalgia in the society. Antique furniture, posters from a bygone era, games based on the remembrance of yesterday’s trivia, the revival of Art Nouveau, the spread of Queen Anne styles, the rediscovery of such faded pop-cult celebrities as Brad Pitt or Michael Jordan, all mirror a psychological lust for the simpler, less turbulent past. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Powerful fad machines spring into action to capitalize on this hunger. The nostalgia business becomes a booming industry. The failure of technocratic planning and the consequent sense of lost control also feeds the philosophy of “now-ness.” Songs and advertisements hail the appearance of the “now generation,” and learned psychiatrists, discoursing on the presumed dangers of repression, warn us not to defer our gratifications. Acting out and a search for immediate payoff are encouraged. “We’re more oriented to the present. I got this. Live out load,” says a teenage girl to a reporter after the mammoth Coachella rock music festival. “It’s like do what you want to do now…If you stay anywhere very long you get into a planning thing…So you must just move on.” Spontaneity, the personal equivalent of social planlessness, is elevated int a cardinal psychological virtue. All this has its political analog in the emergence of a strange coalition of right wingers and New Leftists in support of what can only be termed a “hang loose” approach to the future. Thus we hear increasing calls for anti-planning or non-planning, sometimes euphemized as “organic growth.” Among some radicals, this takes on an anarchist coloration. Not only is it regarded as unnecessary or unwise to make long range plans for the future of the institution or society they wish to overturn, it is sometimes even regarded as poor taste to plan the next hour and a half of a meeting. Planlessness is glorified. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Arguing that planning imposes values on the future, the anti-planners overlook the fact that non-planning does so, too-often with far worse consequence. Angered by the narrow, econoncentic character of technocratic planning, they condemn systems analysis, cost benefit accounting, and similar methods, ignoring the fact that, used differently, these very tools might be converted into powerful techniques for humanizing the future. When critics charge that technocratic planning is anti-human, in the sense that it neglects social, cultural and psychological values in its headlong rush to maximize economic gain, they are usually right. When they charge that it is shortsighted and undemocratic, they are usually right. When they charge it is inept, they are usually right. However, when they plunge backward into irrationality, anti-scientific attitudes, a kind of sick nostalgia, and an exaltation of now-ness, they are not only wrong, but dangerous. Just as, in the main, their alternatives to industrialism call for a return to pre-industrial institutions, their alternative to technocracy is not post-, but pre-technocracy. Nothing could be more dangerously maladaptive. Whatever the theoretical arguments may be, brute forces are loose in the World. Whether we wish to prevent future shock or control populations to check pollution or defuse the arms race, we cannot permit decisions of Earth-jolting importance to be taken heedlessly, witlessly, planlessly. To hang loose is to commit collective suicide. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
We need not a reversion to the irrationalism of the past, not a passive acceptance of change, not despair or nihilism. We need, instead, a strong new strategy. For reasons that will become clear, I term this strategy “social futurism.” I am convinced that, armed with this strategy, we can arrive at a new level of competence in the management of change. We can invent a form of planning more humane, more far-sighted, and more democratic than any so far use. In short, we can transcend technocracy. A scientifically or oriented psychology is bound to proceed abstractly; that is, it removes itself just sufficiently far from its object not to lose sight of it altogether. That is why the findings of laboratory psychology are, for all practical purposes, often so remarkably unenlightening and devoid of interest. The more the individual object dominates the field of vision, the more practical, detailed, and alive will be the knowledge derived from it. This means that the objects of investigation, too, become more and more complicated and that the uncertainty of the individual factors grows in proportion to their number, thus increasing the possibility of error. Understandably enough, academic psychology is scared of this risk and prefers to avoid complex situations by asking ever simpler questions, which it can do with impunity. It has full freedom in the choice of questions it will put to Nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Medical psychology, on the other hand, is very far from being in this more or less enviable position. Here the object puts the question and not the experimenter. The analyst is confronted with facts which are not of one’s choosing and which one probably never would choose is one were a free agent. It is the sickness or the patient oneself that puts the crucial questions—in other words, Nature experiments with the doctor in expecting an answer from one. The uniqueness of the individual and of one’s situation stares the analyst in the face and demands an answer. One’s duty as a physician forces one to cope with a situation swarming with uncertainty factors. At first one will apply principles based on general experience, but one will soon realize the principles of this kind do not adequately express the facts and fail to meet the nature of the case. The deeper one’s understanding penetrates, the more the general principles lose their meaning. However, these principles are the foundation of objective knowledge and the yardstick by which it is measured. With the growth of what both patient and doctor feel to be “understanding,” the situation becomes increasingly subjectivized. What was an advantage to begin with threatens to turn into a dangerous disadvantage. Subjectivation (in technical terms, transference and countertransference) creates isolation from the environment, a social limitation which neither party wishes for but which invariably sets in when understanding predominates and is no longer balanced by knowledge. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
As understanding deepens, the further removed it becomes from knowledge. An ideal understanding would ultimately result in each party’s unthinkingly going along with the other’s experience—a state of uncritical passivity coupled with the most complete subjectivity and lack of social responsibility. Understanding carried to such lengths is in any case impossible, for it would require the virtual identification of two different individuals. Sooner or later the relationship reaches a point where one partner feels one is being forced to sacrifice one’s own individuality so that it may be assimilated by that of the other. This inevitable consequence breaks the understanding, for understanding also presupposes the integral preservation of the individuality of both partners. It is therefore advisable to carry understanding only to the point where the balance between understanding and knowledge is reached, for understanding at all costs is injurious to both partners. This problem arises whenever complex, individual situations have to be known and understood. It is the specific task of the medical psychologist to provide just this knowledge and understanding. It would also be the task of the “director of conscience” zealous in the cure of souls, were it is not that one’s office inevitably obliges one to apply the yardstick of one’s denominational bias at the critical moment. As a result, the individual’s right to exist as such is cut short by a collective prejudice and often curtailed in the most sensitive area. The only time this does not happen is when the dogmatic symbol, for instance the model life of Christ, is understood concretely and felt by the individual to be adequate. How far this is the case today I would prefer to leave to the judgment of others. At all events, the analyst very often has to treat patients to whom denominational limitations means little or nothing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
One’s profession therefore compels one to have as few preconceptions as possible. Similarly, while respecting metaphysical (id est, non-verifiable) convictions and assertions, one will take care not to credit the with universal validity. This caution is called for because the individual traits of the patient’s personality ought not to be twisted out of shape by arbitrary interventions from outside. The analyst must leave this to environmental influences, to the patient’s own inner development, and—in the widest sense—to fate with its wise or unwise decrees. Many people will perhaps find this heightened caution exaggerated. In view of the fact, however, that there is in any case such a multitude of reciprocal influences at work in the dialectical process between two individual, even if it is conducted with the most tactful reserve, the responsible analyst will refrain from adding unnecessarily to the collective factors to which one’s patent has already succumbed. Moreover, one knows very well that the preaching of even the worthiest precepts only provokes the patient into open hostility or secret resistance and thus needlessly endangers the aim of the treatment. The psychic situation of the individual is so menaced nowadays by advertising, propaganda, and other more or less well-meant advice and suggestions that for once in one’s life the patient might be offered a relationship that does not repeat the nauseating “you should,” “you must” and similar confession of impotence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Against the onslaught from outside no less than against its repercussions in the psyche of the individua the analyst sees oneself obligated to play the role of counsel for the defence. Fear that anarchic instincts will thereby be let loose is a possibility that is greatly exaggerated, seeing that obvious safeguards exist within and without. Above all, there is the natural cowardice of most humans to be reckoned with, not to mention morality, good taste and – last but not least – the penal code. This fear is nothing compared with the enormous effort it usually costs people to help the first stirrings of individuality into consciousness, let alone put them into effect. And where these individual impulses have broken through too boldly and unthinkingly, the analyst must protect them from the patient’s own clumsy recurse to shortsightedness, ruthlessness, and cynicism. Amid the tumult of ego-directed thoughts and feelings, the distress brought on by an adverse circumstance which the ego has not been able to endure or set right can be lessened and relived by relaxing, letting go, pausing, lying physically and mentally still, whether in a prayer for inner peace or a simple meditation, but in any case turning the affair over to the higher power as a sign of having let go. Such temporary withdrawal gives the Overself its change to break through the ego’s crust and to bring its ministering peace, help, guidance, or healing. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If you want to heal a human do not concentrate upon the nature of one’s disease, or you may strengthen it. Concentrate rather upon the nature of one’s Overself, that its might grace may be released to one. Do not even pray that one will be cured. Pray rather that the power of the Overself’s grace may work within one, and do what it will. The nape of the neck is one of these important—physically sensitive—centers. It can receive through the hand-touch of a healer the magnetism which affects the health condition. The Old World physicians use the prolonged fast treatment for advanced illnesses; other use mud packs. Thus both turn to Mother Nature, and do not always turn in vain. After one has felt the divine power and presence within oneself as the reward of one’s meditative search, one may turn it towards the healing of one’s body’s aliments. This could be impossible if one were less than relaxed, peaceful, assured, if either fear or desire introduce their negative presence and thus obstructed one’s receptivity to the healing-power’s penetration. When the contact is successfully made, one should draw the power to every atom of one’s body and let it be permeated. The cure could be had at a single treatment, if one could sit still and let the work go n to completion. However, although the power is unlimited, one’s patience is not. And so one must treat oneself day after day until the outer and physical result matches the inner and spiritual achievement. The lift of deep meditation reduces the need of sleep shown by the case of the Spanish Saint John of the Cross. Three or four hours of repose at night were quite enough for him. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
If it is adopted more enthusiastically, a new bodily regime can be adopted more quickly and more easily. Some people play with the thought of it for years but never actually started on it. Others, frightened into it by some dire necessity or taking to it through strong yearning for its benefits, make up their mind to the point of getting excited about it. For them action is the direct consequence of aspiration. Chemical changes in every cell of one’s body are the outer physical result of this inner second birth. That word “normal” is a deceptive and even dangerous one to use in these matters. For the human race’s present condition is an unevolved and, from the philosophic standpoint, unclear one. To accept this as the norm, the ideal to be attain by individuals, is to prevent growth. Pleasures of the flesh, wrathful temperament, and despondent outlook may have their source in the body or in the mind, or in both together. If a lasting result is to be gained, where the physical origin exists, the physical treatment should be given. How proudly and how carefully a cat cleans, washes, and combs its fur coat! A clean body is more responsive to the finer feelings and nobler thoughts. However, we must remember that skin cleanness is only small part of the whole. The intestinal tract, the tissues, and the organs are the larger part. To the extent that one has transgressed the laws of moral, mental, and physical hygiene, to that extent one might reasonably be asked to preform penance in proportion. However, Nature is not so exacting as that. She will cooperate with and help one from the moment one repents and does some of the required penance. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Even if these physical plane methods offer only contributory help and secondary values, they will still be worth using by those who need all the help they can get. Those who want the higher degree of knowledge and pace must but their way into it. The purchase price is high, no less than abstinence, continence, self-denial, and self-mastery—alike in the realm of thoughts as that of acts. Constipation is specifically blamed as a hindrance to the practice of meditation by some teachers. They require it to be cured before allowing students to proceed with the practice itself. They prescribe certain exercises and dietetic changes to remove the condition. These regimes are intended to remove some obstacles to the occurrence of Glimpses, obstacles which are physical and emotional. They are methods of cleansing the body and feelings to permit the intuitive element to enter awareness more easily. They constitute the preliminary part of the Quest, preceding or accompanying mediation. It is better to eliminate bad habits, stop unhygienic ways of living, and cultivate willpower if meditation is to take its full and proper effect. We deep on trees and animals, we depend on the Earth. Our minds open with wisdom and insight. We live in all things; all things live in us. We dedicate our practice to others. We include all forms of life. We celebrate the joy of living-dying. We live in all things; all things live in us. We are full of life. We are full of death. We are grateful for all beings and companions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
O Heavenly Father, the approach of another month reminds us of the flight of time and the change of seasons. Month follows month; the years of human’s life are few and fleeting. Please teach us to number our days that we may use each precious moment wisely. May no day pass without bringing us close to some worthy achievement. Please grant that the new month bring life and hope and peace to all Thy children. Amen. Our God and God of our fathers, we invoke Thy blessing upon our country, on the government of this Republic, the President of the United States of America and all who exercise just and rightful authority. Do Thou instruct them out of Thy Law, that they may administer all affairs of state in justice and equity, that peace and security, happiness and prosperity, right and freedom, may forever abide among us. Unite all the inhabitants of our country, whatever their origin and creed, into a bound of true brotherhood to banish hatred and bigotry and to safeguard the ideals and free institutions which are our country’s glory. May this land under Thy Providence be an influence for good throughout the World, uniting humans in peace and freedom and helping to fulfill the vision of Thy Prophets: “Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall human learn war anymore. For all humans, both great and small shall know the Lord.” Amen. The dictionary defines individuality as separate and distinct existence. Both ego and the Overself have such an existence. However whereas the ego has this and nothing, more, the Overself has this consciousness within the Universal existence. That is why we have called it the higher individuality. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
Winchester Mystery House
Museums employ security guards to keep watch over property. Normally, where surveillance is concerned, the “buck stops” with those employees. At the Winchester Estate, however, the ghosts keep a watchful eye out for the guards. In the Summer of 1985, several new security guards were hired. One guard, perhaps an especially sensitive person, reported feeling that he was being watched. Upon careful inspection, he determined that no one else was in the mansion. Even so, he would suddenly feel uncomfortable and would hurry down the hall, hoping to see another person. He never did. Oftentimes it would feel like someone had been standing in the next doorway but had suddenly stepped back inside the room just as he approached. The guard did not see or hear anything–it was just something that he sensed. The mansion even hast its own “ghost writer.” As a release issued by the mansion indicates, “Late one evening on 18th April of 1989, the Night Supervisor of Housekeeping was passing the Personnel Office and heard the electric typewriter being used. Knowing that the staff leaves at 5PM, she knocked on the door to see who was in the office There was no response. Several times she knocked and called out, but there was still no response–only the steady tap-tap-taping of the typewriter. Next morning, when the personnel staff arrived, the typewriter was still turned on, a chair that had been left at a desk was now arranged in front of the typewriter, and the papers on all of the desk had been neatly arranged.
A few months later, Sales Coordinator Merrick Montgomery got a real surprise when he entered his own office early one July morning. His electric typewriter was, as he put it, “typing all by itself.” When Merrick expressed his alarm, the typing stopped. After taking a deep breath, the man informed whatever force was at work, “That is fine, you keep working on that.” The activity resumed. He lifted the letter from the typewriter, it said: “And tonight, as I passed the cemetery, a lost child wandering dangerously alone for all the World to pity me, I bought these chrysanthemums, and lingered for some time within the scent of the fresh graves and their decaying dead, wondering what death life would have had for me had I been let to live it. Wondering if I could have loved as much as I love now?” A legible messages from beyond was certainly intriguing! It was dated 18 April 1906. Ghosts and electrical equipment have often proved to be a volatile combination, and this was certainly the case when a film crew came into the Winchester mansion to shoot a documentary about the residents spirits just before Halloween, on 16 October 1989. Each time the camera operators moved to the corridor outside the blue séance room, where Mrs. Winchester used to contact the spirits, lights would inexplicably go out, and explode. The camera was on a tripod and it started to shake and fell to the ground and broke. Sound equipment broke down while the operators were tying to work on another floor, and when the team moved to the grand ballroom, the audio equipment was also affected–but only within the cold spot.
At another point in the shoot–and for no reason that anyone could discern–film jammed in the cameras. Perhaps the most interesting moment in the filming ordeal came when the crew set up to capture some footage of a particular mirror, seconds into the shooting the scene, something triggered the alarm in a nearby smoke detector. The crew never did get that shot recorded. Then they saw a man standing about halfway down the hall. Thinking he was lost or in need of some kind of assistance, Merrick called out to him. The man did not answer but he kept looking from side to side as if he was not sure which way to go, the concerned employee approached him. The man turned and walk toward the the east end of the hall. Then he turned and walked through the door! He did not open it and walk out–he went through the door! Merrick tried to follow, but his feet were rooted to the spot. The very next day was the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake, which occurred which was magnitude 6.9, resulting in 63 deaths and 3,757 injuries. The mansion did not withstand any damage. The Loma Prieta segment of the San Andreas Fault System had been relatively inactive since the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Some took the recent spiritual activity as an omen that something was coming, which was more obvious in retrospect. Mysterious symbols hidden in the details. What’s your favorite lesser-known-detail in the house? Despite the elegance and great location of the property, it has remained empty for decades. Over the years, numerous legends are associated with the home. This has lead to the property becoming known as “Ghost Mansion” and “Casa Delle Streghe” (The House of Witches). The mansion is full of secrets. Do we really want to unlock those secrets, and how will we deal with the darkness that lies inside?
The spiderweb pattern is a common design found throughout Mrs. Winchester’s mansion. Appearing on fireplace mantles, stained-glass windows, and windows like these. What do you think this design meant to Sarah? Maybe they represent a spiritual prison. Much like the boarded up rooms and wings, perhaps Mrs. Winchester was trying to keep something from escaping? Over the years, the property has gained further attention thanks to its alleged paranormal activity. So much so, it has become known as California’s most haunted house. A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻
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Mr. William Wirt Winchester Believes in the Sanctity of Property Because He is a Millionaire!
The fine women of Salem had some extracurricular activities that were hardly orthodox. Men have been burned at the stake for speaking ill of the Christian creed. People fought, not only verbally but physically, over their religious beliefs. Most people of that day used alcohol liquors. In almost every home liquor could be found. If a man was drunk it was not considered indecent, nor was his reputation injured by such conduct. Ministers, as well as doctors, were given a drink whenever they made a call at a home. It was almost impossible for them to make their daily calls without becoming intoxicated. Wine was generously served at religious ceremonies–marriages, christenings, funerals, and ordinations. Joseph Smith might have noted the conduct of members in a revival meeting. People would come from miles around to attend these meetings, camping in cabins and tents. At daybreak a trumpet was sounded to awaken the people. Services were held almost all day long, scarcely allowing time to eat, and giving no time at all for recreation and play. Singing and shouting during sermons was common. Men, women, children often fell to the floor in trances, sometimes barking like dogs. Now and then some would get what was know as the “jerks” and their heads would jerk back and forth rapidly. There seemed no way to stop these “jerks” though persons would run, dance, pray to escape them. As they listened to the thundering voice of the evangelist, many would cry and scream. Some ministers believed that the wilder the crowd became the more successful was the revival. Meantime, the FBI could find no DNA material from the site which matched the material of any current missing persons. Nevertheless, they were deeply courteous about having been called in, and they did confirm that the DNA of several persons was present in the evil morass and that the whole resembled an antiquated but gruesome crime scene. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Were these some of the things which were displeasing in the sight of the Lord? Were these people drawing near to God with their lips but keeping their hearts from them. Undoubtedly these were puzzling questions of fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith. Listening to the bird’s sing on this cool spring morning, I was reminded of how excitement used to fill this time of the year because it was near the end of a school year, and ever closer to graduation and adult life. Joy, sorrow, tears, lamentations, laughter—to all these music gives voice, but in such a way that we are transported from the World of unrest to the World of peace, and see reality in a new way, as if we were sitting by a mountain lake and contemplating hills and woods and clouds in the tranquil and fathomless water. The work and the worry that fell to my lot through the practical interest I took in organ building, made me sometimes wish that I had never troubled myself about it, but if I do not give it up, the reason is that the struggle for the good organ is to me a part of the struggle for truth. An organ is like a cow; one does not look at its horns so much as its milk. God is with us. The light of the knowledge of glory of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ. From the days of eternity, the Lord Jesus Christ was one with the father; He was the image of God, the image of His greatness and majesty, the outshining of His glory. It was it was to manifest this glory that He came into our World. To this sin-darkened Earth He came to reveal the light of God’s love–to be God with us. Therefore it was prophesied of Him. By coming to dwell with us, Jesus Christ was to reveal God both to humans and to angels. He was the Word of God—God’s thoughts made audible. If we are not grateful to God, we can never see the greatness in our lives. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When we start to appreciate, we will begin to elevate! Some people regard logical thinking as the deadest and driest of our activities and may therefore be repelled by the privileged position. However, logical thinking—Reasoning—is valid and no one can deny it (philosophically speaking). You cannot, as we already know, prove that there are no proofs. However, if you wish to regard all human ideals as illusions and all human love as biological by-products, you can. That is, you can do so without running into flat self-contradiction and nonsense. Whether you can do so without extreme umplausibility—without accepting a picture of things which no one really believes—is another matter. Besides reasoning about matters of fact, humans also make moral judgments—“I ought to do this”—“I ought not to do that”—“This is good”—“That is evil.” Two views have been held about moral judgments. Some people think that when we make them we are not using our Reason, but are employing some different power. Other people think that we make them by our Reason. I myself hold this second view. That is, I believe that the primary moral principles on which all others depend are rationally perceived. We “just see” that there is no reason why my neighbour’s happiness should be sacrificed to my own, as we “just see” that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. If we cannot prove either axiom, that is not because the irrational but because they are self-evident and all proofs depend on them. Their intrinsic reasonableness shines by its own light. It is because all morality is based on such self-evident principles that we say to a human, when we would recall one to right conduct, “Be reasonable.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
However, this is by the way. For our present purposes it does not matter which of these two views you adopt. The important point is to notice that moral judgments raise the same sort of difficulty for Naturalism as any other thoughts. We always assume in discussions about morality, as in all other discussions, if they can be fully accounted for by some non-moral and non-rational cause, that the other human’s views are worthless. When two humans differ about good and evil we soon hear tis principle being brought into play. “Mr. William Wirt Winchester believes in the sanctity of property because he is a millionaire”—“He believes in Pacifism because he is a coward”—“He approves of corporal punishment because he is a necrophile.” Such taunts may often be untrue: but the mere fact that they are made by the one side, and hotly rebutted by the other, shows clearly what principle is being used. Neither side doubts that if they were true, they would decisive. No one (in real life) pays attention to any oral judgment which can be shown to spring from non-moral and non-rational causes. The Freudian and the Marxist attack traditional morality precisely on this ground—and with wide success. All humans accept the principle. However, of course, what discredits particular moral judgments must equally discredit moral judgments as a whole. If that fact that humans have such ideas as ought and ought not at all can be fully explained by irrational and non-moral causes, then those ideas are an illusion. The Naturalist is ready to explain how the illusion arose. Chemical conditions produce life. Life, under the influence of natural selection, produces consciousness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Conscious organisms which behave in one way live longer than those which behave in another. Living longer, they are more likely to have offspring. Inheritance, and sometimes teaching as well, pass on their mode of behaviour to their young. Thus in every species a pattern of behaviour is built up. In the human species conscious teaching plays a larger part in the building it up, and the tribe further strengthens it by killing individuals who to not conform. They also invent gods who are said to punish departures from it. Thus, in time, there comes to exist a strong human impulse to conform. However, since this impulse is often at variance with the other impulses, a mental conflict arises, and the human expresses it by saying “I want to do A but I ought to do B.” This account may (or may not) explain why humans do in fact make moral judgments. It does not explain how they could be right in making them. It excludes, indeed, the very possibility of their being right. For when humans say “I ought” they certainly think they are saying something, and something true about the nature of the proposed action, and not merely about their own feelings. However, if Naturalism is true, “I ought” is the same sort of statement as “I itch” or “I am going to be sick.” In real life when a human says “I ought” we may reply, “Yes. You are right. That is what you ought to do,” or else, “No. I think you are mistaken.: However, in a World of Naturalists (if Naturalist really remembered their philosophy out of school) the only sensible reply would be, “Oh, are you?” All moral judgments would be statements about the speaker’s feelings, mistaken by him for statements about something else (the real moral quality of actions) which does not exist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Such a doctrine, I have admitted, is not flatly self-contradictory. The Naturalist can, if one chooses, brazen it out. One can day, “Yes. I quite agree that there is no such thing as wrong and right. I admit that no moral judgment can be ‘true’ or ‘correct’ and, consequently, that no one system of morality can be better or worse than another. All ideas of good and evil are hallucinations—shadows cast on the outer World by the impulses which we have been conditioned to feel.” Indeed many Naturalists are delighted to say this. However, then they must stick to it; and fortunately (though in consistently) most real Naturalists do not. A moment after they have admitted that good and evil are illusion, you will find them exhorting us to work for posterity, to educate, revolutionise, liquidate, live and die for the good of the human race. A Naturalist like Mr. H. G. Wells spent a long life doing so with passionate eloquence and zeal. However, surely this is very odd? Just as all the books about spiral nebulae, atoms and cave men would really have led you to suppose that the Naturalists claimed to be about to know something, so all the books in which Naturalists tell us what we ought to do would really make you believe that they thought some ideas of good (their own, for example) to be somehow preferable to others. For they write with indignation like humans proclaiming what is good in itself and denouncing what is evil in itself, and not at all like humans recording that they personally like concentrated cranberry juice, but some people prefer sweetened cranberry juice. Yet if the “oughts” of Mr. Wells and, say, Franco are both equally the impulses which Nature has conditioned each to have and both tell us nothing about any objective right or wrong, whence is all the fervour? Do they remember while they are writing thus that when they tell us we “ought to make a better World” the words “ought” and “better” must, on their own showing, refer to an irrationally conditioned impulse which cannot be true or false any more than a vomit or a yawn? #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
My idea is that sometimes they do forget. That is their glory. Holding a philosophy which excludes humanity, they yet remain human. At the sight of injustice they throw all their Naturalism to the winds and speak like humans and like human of genius. They know far better than they think they know. However, at other times, I suspect, they are trusting in a supposed way of escape from their difficulty. It works—or seems to work—like this. They say to themselves, “Ah, yes. Morality”—or “bourgeois morality” or some such addition—“Morality is an illusion. However, we have found out what modes of behaviour we are pressing you to adopt. Pray, do not mistake us for moralists. We are under an entirely new management” …just as if this would help. It would help if only we grant, firstly, that life is better than death and, secondly, that we ought to care for the lives of our descendants as much as, or more than, for our own. And both these are moral judgments which have, like all others, been explained away by Naturalism. Of course, having been conditioned by Nature in a certain way, we do feel thus about life and about posterity. However, the Naturalists have cured us of mistaking these feelings for insights into what we once called “real value.” Now that I know that my impulse to serve posterity is just the same kind of thing as my fondness for cheese—now that its transcendental pretensions have been exposed for a sham—do you think I shall pay much attention to it? When it happens to be strong (and it has grown considerably weaker since you explained to me its real nature) I suppose I shall obey it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
When it is weak, I shall put my money into cheese. There can be no reason for trying to whip up and encourage the one impulse rather than the other. Not now that I know what they both are. The Naturalists must not destroy all my reverence for conscience on Monday and expect to find me still venerating it on Tuesday. There is no escape along these lines. If we are to continue to make moral judgments (and whatever we say we shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of humans is not a product of Nature. Only if it is an offshoot of some absolute “on its own” and is not a product of non-moral, non-rational Nature. We must acknowledge the supernatural source for our ideas of good and evil. In other worse, we now know something more about God. If you hold that moral judgment is a different thing from Reasoning you will express tis new knowledge by saying “We now know that God has at least one other attribute than rationality.” If, like me, you hold that moral judgment is a kind of Reasoning, then you will say, “We now know more about the Divine Reason.” And with this we are almost ready to begin our main argument. However, before doing so it will be well to pause of the consideration of some misgivings of misunderstandings which may have already arisen. Happiness is related to good and bad life events, but the impact is smaller than you might imagine. The reason for this is that happiness tends to come from within a person. Subjective well-being is affected by our goals, choices, emotions, values, and personality. The way you perceive, interpret, and manage events is as important as the nature of the events themselves. People who are good a dodging the life’s rough, unsparing treatment (hard knocks) tend to create their own “luck.” As a result, they are happier and seem to negotiate life’s demands more smoothly. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is tempting to think that wealth brings happiness. However, does it? To a small degree wealthier people are happier than poorer people. Yet, the overall association between money and happiness is weak. In fact, people who win lotteries are often less happy than they were before, and imagine how much unhappier ill begotten gain might make them. Instant riches usually bring new stresses into a person’s life that tend to cancel out any beneficial effects of wealth. Essentially, money can make it possible to buy the good things in life, but money cannot buy a good life. Happiness usually must become from other sources More educated people tend to be a little happier than the less educated. However, this is most likely just another way of saying that there is a small connection between wealth and happiness. Higher education generally results in higher income and more social status. As education levels rise, more parents ae intellectually equipped to assume some responsibilities now delegated to schools. With the move toward knowledge-based industy and the increase of leisure, we can anticipate a small but significant tendency for highly educated parents to pull their children at least partway out of the public education systems, offering them home instruction instead. This trend will be sharply encouraged by improvements in computer-assisted education, Cisco Telepresence, electronic video recording, holography and other technical fields. Parents and students might sign short-term “learning contracts” with the nearby school, committing them to teach-learn certain courses or course modules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Students might continue going to school for social and athletic activities or for subjects they cannot learn on their own or under the tutelage of parents or family friends. Mobile education is also a proposal, which would take students out of the classroom not merely to observe but to participate in significant community activity. Curricula would be shaped by students and community groups as well as professional educators. The former United States Commissioner of Education, Harold Howe, II, has also suggested the reverse: bringing the community into the school so that local stores, beauty parlors, prints shops, architecture firms, be given free space in the schools in return for free lessons by the adults who run this. President Trump and other want to keep the schools and class rooms open, so children are being supervised by adults during work hours, which allows the parents to work and the kids to get an education. This reduces crime rates and helps increase income earnings in the future for students. School also serves as a nice social club for children where they make life long friends and memories. Also, school provides nutrition for students and proper nutrition helps to raise the IQ of students and keeps them healthy. Children also learn how to respect authority figures and learn that behaviour has bad consequences, whereas good behaviour and hard work is rewarded. People who live in the age of information must have new skills in three crucial areas: learning, relating, and choosing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Students will need an enhanced human adaptability. By instructing students how to learn and unlearn and relearn, a powerful new dimension can be added to education. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the person who cannot read; one will be the human who has not learned how to learn. By speeding the turnover of people in our lives, we allow less time for trust to develop, less time for friendships to ripen. Thus we witness a search for ways to cut through the polite “public” behaviour directly to the sharing of intimacy. Presented with numerous alternatives, an individual chooses the one most compatible with one’s values. As overchoice deepens, the person who lacks a clear grasp of one’s own values (whatever these may be) is progressively disabled. Worse yet, students are seldom encouraged to analyze their own values and those of their teachers and peers. Millions pass through the education system without once having been forced to search out the contradictions in their own value systems, to probe their own life goals deeply, or even to discuss these matters candidly with adults and peers. Students hurry from class to class. Teachers and professors are harried and grow increasingly remote. Even the “bull session”—informal, extra-curricular discussion about pleasures of the flesh, politics, or religion that helps participants identify and clarify their values—grown less frequent and less intimate as transience rises. Married people report a greater happiness than people who are divorces, separated, or single. It could be that happiness people are simply more likely to get married than to remain sleepless in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
However, better explanation for this association is that marriage partners can act as emotional and economic buffers against the hardships of life and a faithful marriage also helps keep people chaste in the eyes of the Lord, in most cases, as long as you are not sleeping with the enemy. There is a beneficial association between happiness and holding spiritual beliefs. Religious beliefs may add to feelings of purpose and meaning in life, resulting in greater happiness. Marriage between partners is a vital part of God’s plan. The Lord has said, “Whoso forbiddeth to marry is not ordained of God, for marriage is ordained of God unto man,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 49.15. Since the beginning, marriage has been a law of the gospel. Marriages are intended to last forever, not just for our mortal lives. Adam and Eve were married by God before there was any death in the World. They had an eternal marriage. They taught the law of eternal marriage to their children and their children’s children. As the years passed, wickedness entered the hearts of the people and the authority to perform this sacred ordinance was taken from the Earth. Through the Restoration of the gospel, eternal marriage has been restored to Earth. Many people in the World consider marriage to be only a social custom, a legal agreement between two people in love together. However, to Latter-day Saints, marriage is much more. Our exaltation depends on marriage, along with other principles and ordinances, such as faith, repentance, baptism, and receiving the gift of the holy Ghost. We believe that marriage is the most sacred relationship that can exist between two loving people. This sacred relationship affects our happiness now and in the eternities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Heavenly Father has given us the law of eternal marriage so we can become like Him. The Lord has said: “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees: and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-3. Another possibility is that church membership may simply provide social support that softens that impact of life’s negative events. Incubation is the term applied to the sleeping in a temple—usually a special shrine or sanctuary used for healing and healing-dreams and dream-oracles alone—as a means of healing. This was practiced by ancient Greek and Babylonians. It was also frequently practiced in ancient Egypt at the temples of Isis and Serapis with effects similar to those of hypnotism. Five hundred years before Christ at the temple of Epidaurus, where the inspiring spirit or god was Aesculapius (the patron saint of modern medicine still), sick patients were put to sleep by priests at the foot of the Aesculapius’ statue. In many cases, they awoke suddenly cured. That the real effectiveness of incubation was not the work of a departed spirit but of Nature in the sleep state combined with the sufferer’s faith, was shown by the custom which still prevails in Greece. Here sleep in a temple of Aesculapius was simply replaced by sleep in the church associated with a Christian saint. Consider a cut had and how Nature at once sets to work to repair the damage. The anatomist tells us that the leucocytes in the blood automatically build a bridge of tissue over the wound’s surface. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
However, what orders the leucocytes to make the needed adjustments? What shows them how to make it? There is obviously an intelligence behind them, a mind within the body outside and apart from the conscious mind. There are miracles in Nature, and at this time, happenings to which science possesses no key. The human consciousness, for instance, is capable of manifesting power which contradict psychological knowledge, just as the human body is capable of manifesting phenomena which contradict medical knowledge. Both powers and phenomena may seem miraculous, but they really issue forth from the hidden laws of human’s own being. The process take pace in the dark only to us. This life-force, this invisible energy, is behind and within, around and above the physical body. Under certain circumstances its rea can be seen and traced out and its recuperative healing power drawn upon. It forms an aura, the etheric or vital body of light, but not the still more elusive and subtle divine body of Light nor the aura of various colours, the astral body. The stereotype of the crotchety antiquated person who id dissatisfied with everything is inaccurate. Life satisfaction and happiness generally do not decline with age. People are living longer and staying healthier, which has greatly delayed age-related declines. When declines do occur, mature people seem better able to cope with them. The hindrances which wrong bodily regimes put in one’s Quest are not only physical but also psychic, emotional, and mental. The condition of a human’s health, the medical state of one’s body, may contribute to one’s spiritual outlook, may enfeeble or enliven one’s faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
If union with the Overself-consciousness is to be achieved, or progress to that goal made, the body ought also to share in the benefits received. It too ought to be freer from discordant elements, organs, or operations. The wise student will recognize that one gains more than one loses by such sacrifices as this discipline of the body calls for. The benefits of resisting custom’s dominance are both disproportionate and durable, with a value so high as to make the discipline bearable and the sacrifices smaller. Wen one hears about these ascetic-sound regimes a chill sets in. However, what is it that rebels against them? It is the ego, the weakness of human will. Yet the rebellion is ill-founded, for the body is not tortured by being brought under control—only its perverted, exaggerated, or enslaving appetites suffer by doing so. The regimes themselves are sensible and are not fantastical fads. They are simply indication of the quester’s need to live more carefully than other people, and to change habits which are bad. They are hygienic recommendations offered to those who want to advance their spiritual journey more quickly. The bodily cells are so pervaded with toxic materials, clogged with them, so contaminated by them, that this purificatory work is an essential preliminary to the mystical work, proper for most aspirants except those who have the inborn capability of quickly rising to an intense concentration which frees the cells from such poisons. There is a mass of improperly digested, half-decayed food material lying in the intestines in a fermenting condition, while farther on here are accumulated deposits of petrified impurities on the lining of the colon and the membrane of the bowels. These substances are rejected by they body, which suffers by their presence but is unable to free itself from the without conscious and willing co-operation on the part of its owner. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The body’s physiological processes are clogged and encumbered by them and its nervous system and brain organ polluted by the inferior blood brought to nourish them. To achieve this aim, a certain preparation as well as purification of the body is required. The spine must be cleared of adhesions, congestions, distortions, shrinkings, and nerve branch pressures. The tissues and blood have to be cleansed of the toxic material accumulated in them. The salvation which frees a human from enslavement to one’s lower nature is necessary and good, but it goes only part of the way to fulfilling one’s needs. One’s fleshly body also requires salvation. It ought to be freed from its poisoned, clogged, and unnatural condition. If it is saturated wit destructive acids or clogged wit decaying material, the body cannot respond so freely to the subtle forces, nor can the brain and nervous system respond so freely if they are stupefied by alcohol or drugs. As the consciousness evolves to a higher level, so the body it functions through must become more refined in quality and purified in nature. Mental equilibrium, deep prayer, cannot be attained without changing the habits which obstruct it. Even if the requisite purification of the body’s cells and blood from all toxins has been achieved, a human must still refrain from starting on those ways which caused toxemia. There is a common error that drugs and medicines are enough to keep us in good health. They are not. The only things that can do so are correct living habits, righting thinking habits, and proper eating habits. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
A knowledge of personal hygiene will keep us in better health than a hundred boxes of pills. We must learn to conform to the laws of hygienic living—mental and physical—if we want to achieve a sound mind in a should body. We may not break those laws with impunity, nor believe that because we have been spiritually healed once we are exempt from the always. The desire to gain purity must provide the power to follow the regimes needed for it. The sediment of egotism in the mind and animality in the flesh cannot be cleared out unless this desire grows strong and remains enduring. The mental courage to cast out those wrong habits of living which unenlightenment of spiritual hygiene has allowed one to pick up, must show itself. People who are satisfied with their jobs tend to be happier, but the association is weak. If fact, it probably just reflects the fact that job satisfaction is a large part of greater life satisfaction. With respect to happiness and personality, it may be fair to paraphrase Paris Hilton, “I am a star and I was born to shine. I am happy, powerful, strong and confident.” To a degree, some people are more temperamentally disposed to be happy, regardless of life events. In general, happier people also tend to be extraverted (outgoing), optimistic, and worry-free. This combination probably influences the balance of beneficial and negative emotions. In general, if they are meeting their personal goals, people tend to be happy. If you feel you are making progress, on a day-to-day basis, on smaller goals that relate to long-term, life goals, this is especially true. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, achieving one’s goals does not always lead to happiness. Consider the highly successful person who is absorbed in one’s accomplishments. All it may take is a crisis, like a child’s illness or the death of a friend, to make life feel meaningless. However, if the person begins to act with integrity, meaning can be restored and the crisis resolved. Thus, optimal human functioning involves integrity as well as an ability to accomplish goals. “Doing well,” they say, is associated with happiness. In contrast, “being yourself” is associated with leading a meaningful life. In short, if we are to live with integrity, the goals we purse must express our core interests and values. Examples of the kinds of personal projects (short-term goals) and long-term goals that occupy us: for architect’s the job is usually spent on location. When a project is located nearby, architect may leave the office periodically to stop by the project site. Some short-term goals involved checking in with building developers and engineers to ensure the client’s objectives are met, review projects, and check on any potential obstacles in construction. Many architects believed that if they did great work, somehow society would recognize the contributions and value they were making to the World and reward them with an endless stream of passion projects to grow their firm. However, the truth when it comes to long term goals, running an architecture firm is exactly the same as running any other business. You have to work just as hard to win business as you do to deliver it. An important long-term goal to remember is that your costs of running a business increase over the years. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Your money goals should define the revenues and profits you will need to accommodate these increased costs, and support the growth you want. Also another long-term goal should be to become innovative and sometimes that requires a history lesson. For an architecture firm, stepping back into the past the Victorian America and seeing what was popular back them, like butler’s pantries, multiple parlors, patio spaces, and yards with green spaces, mixed with some modern style designs is a long-term way to stay relevant. People goals typically focus on who you want to work with. This can include the employees you want on your staff, and it may also include the type of clients you want to attract. Sometimes working with non-profits has provided some firms with not only a great sense of fulfillment but also a deeper connection to their local community. Working with one firm allowed the nonprofit client to connect with an ideal prospect and close a $6,000,000 group up non-profit project, at the height of the COVID-19 crisis pandemic. Who we work with can greatly affect our enthusiasm and motivation on the job, so setting goals around who we choose to work with can have an immense impact on our attitude towards our work. Such goals are crucial because overall well-being is a combination of happiness and meaning. Pursuing goals that are inconsistent with personal interests and values can leave a person feeling uneasy, bothered, and uncomfortable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Happier persons tend to be married, comfortable with their work, extraverted, religious, optimistic, and generally satisfied with their lives. They also are making progress toward their goals. However, attain goals that do not express our deeper interests and values may add little to happiness. When, then, makes a good life? Purpose and meaning are important sources of well-being at any point in life. As we have seen, a good life is one that is happy and meaningful. We are most likely to experience a meaningful life when we act with integrity. It is interesting that while achievement and external goals may preoccupy younger persons, integrity becomes increasingly important later in life. “To thine own self be true” may seem like a cliché, but it is actually not a bad place to begin a search for a happy and a satisfying life. “God is not the author of confusion, but of peace. Let all things be done decently and in order,” reports 1 Corinthians 14.33 and 40. Our little World is the lesson book of the Universe. God’s wonderful purpose of grace, the mystery of redeeming love, is the theme into which “angels desire to look,” and it will be their study throughout endless ages. Both the redeemed and the unfallen beings will find in the cross of Christ their science and their song. It will be seen that the glory shining in the face of Jesus is the glory of self-sacrificing love. In the light from Calvary it will be seen that the law of self-renouncing love is the law of life for Earth and Heaven; that the love which “seeketh not her own” has its source in the heart of God; and that in the meek and lowly One is manifested the character of Him who dwelleth in the light which no human can approach unto. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Sometimes, when a bird cries out, or the wind sweeps through a tree, or an angel whispers in a far-off farm, I hold still and listen a long time. My World turns and goes back to the place where, a thousand forgotten years ago, the bird and the blowing wind were like me, and were my brothers. My soul turns into a tree, and an animal, and a cloud bank. Then changed and odd it comes home and asks me questions. What should I reply? Faithful art Thou, O Lord our God, and faithful are Thy words, for no word of thine shall remain unfulfilled. Thou art a faithful and merciful God and King. Blessed art Thou, O Lord God, who art faithful in fulfilling Thy words. Please be merciful unto America, for it is the fountain of our life, and mayest Thou soon in our day deliver Zion that is grieved in spirit. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who makest America rejoice with her children. Make us rejoice, O Lord our God, with Elijah the prophet, Thy servant, and with the kingdom of the house of David, Thine anointed. Soon may Elijah come and bring joy to our hearts. May no stranger occupy David’s throne and may no usurper inherit his glory. For by Thy holy name Thou hast promised unto one that one’s light will never be extinguished. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the Shield of America. We give Thee thanks and bless Thee, O Lord our God, for the Torah, and for the worship of this day and for the prophets, as well as for this Sabbath day which Thou, O Lord our God, hast given us for holiness and for rest, for glory and delight. Evermore may Thy name be continually praised by every living being. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who hallowest the Sabbath. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
It’s May 1st which means it’s halfway to Halloween! We are hard at work dreaming up a new experience for Halloween 2021 that will feature a projection mapped show on the front of the mansion. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!
“Lord God,” said Mrs. Sarah Winchester, as the flames rose and the fire crackled. “We got a dead girl, a huge mansion that is too big to heat, too big to maintain, too expensive to sale, a bunch of weird books, and a regular tomb of gold with an empty iron coffin in it, and a half-ghost boy standing here. Now this translation just arrived. ‘Here sleeps Annie Winchester, whose mortal hands once made the most beautiful cameos, even for emperors and and kings. Guard me, ye gods and goddesses whose images I render so well. A curse on those who attempt to disturb my resting place.'”
Watch your step in the séance room! There are three exits in this room, The main door, a secret passageway leading into an unfinished closet, and this door that opens to an 8-ft drop into the kitchen below.
Self-Guided Mansion Tour:
👉 Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Success Means Never Having to Admit You are Unhappy!
As one went to Europe to see the living past, so one must visit Southern California to observe the future. They say in Hollywood if you want messages, you go to Western Union. The doctors thought you should really stay a few centuries more to be sure we have stabilized your condition. I really do not recommend you leaving us at this time. In Hollywood, success is relative. The closer the relative, the greater the success. Many people are recommending that California comes with a warning sign of the city limits: WARNING! PROCEED NO FURTHER! WARD O FOR BIPLOAR CONDITIONS. OCCUPANTS MAY BE VIOLENT. THEY NEED VRAYLAR However, I am telling you to ignore that and come on in. Look, buddy, it is dangerous to get out of bed in the morning. Are you a mortal in a desperate situation or are you not? Then come in here. This is your last resort, babe. However, of course it is up to you. The primary insight is a human’s awareness that one’s destiny is not synonymous with one’s daily experiences. You who have been through so much suffering, have tasted this inner freedom from outward events. You know there have been times when, according to the rules, you should have been smashed to the ground by what occurred. In such moments you were surprised by yourselves. You have the feeling you were being lifted up inwardly, as though the spiritual were triumphing over the material. You recognized a sort of happiness—if it can be called that—a happiness which would have been hidden by an unbroken succession of good days. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
You began to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he said, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day.” The peace of God begins when this fleeting experience can be preserved and turned into a permanent conviction. It is harder for us today to feel near God among the streets and houses of the city than it is for country folk. For them the harvested fields bathed in the autumn mists speak of God and His goodness far more vividly than any human lips. If we really want to labour in the true spirit, to hope, to keep silent, and to work alone—that is what we must learn to do. However, what exactly does it involve, this plowing? The plowman does not pull the plow. He does not push it. He only directs it. This is just how events move in our lives. We can do nothing but guide them straight in the direction which leads to our Lord Jesus Christ, striving toward him, and the furrow will plow itself. The paths into which God leads humankind are shrouded in darkness for us. There are only two ground rules. They go together, and each taken by itself is enigmatic. The first is that all sin requires atonement. The second is that all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen to be offered up. We sense this more than we understand. We do not subscribe to the belief that the divine soul has somehow gone astray and got enslaved by the terrestrial body. One’s higher self is not polluted by one’s own pollutions any more than sunlight is affected by the foul places in which it often shines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The natural kiss is the kiss which will be given if moral or prudential considerations do not intervene. In all the examples of Natures means what happens “of itself” or “of its own accord”: what you do not need to labour for; what you will get if you take no measures to stop it. The Greek work for Nature (Physis) is connected with the Greek verb “to grow”; Latin Natura, which the verb “to be born.” The Natural is what springs up, or comes forth, or arrives, or goes on, of its own accord: the given, what is there already; the spontaneous, the unintended, the unsolicited. The higher self affects the ego but is not affected by it. Its existence goes on quite independently of the serialized Earth appearances of the ego, and persists when the other ceases. The insensitive can never know it, and may roundly deny it, but the others sometimes receive unforgettable glimpses for which they give thanks to God for years after. Just as space is unaffected equally by evil deeds or virtuous actions of humans, so the Overself is unaffected by the character or conduct of the ego. It is neither made worse by the ego’s wrong-doing nor better by its righteousness. “I am the way, the Truth,” announced Jesus Christ. Who is this I? In the narrow and shallower sense, it is the master. In the broader and deeper sense, it is the Christ-self within the spiritual consciousness. Why did Jesus Christ say, “I am my Father are one,” but yet a little later add, “The Father is greater than I?” The answer is that Jesus the man had attained complete harmony with His higher Self and felt himself one with it, but the universal Christ-principle will always be greater than the man himself; the Overself will always transcend the person. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Although I is still identified with one, since it is one’s own mind at its best level, it is immensely grander, wiser, and nobler than one. It is an entity greater, nobler, wiser, and stronger than oneself yet mysteriously and inseparably linked to oneself; it is indeed one’s super-self. Our bodies are born at some point of time and somewhere in space but their essence, the Overself, is birthless, timeless, and placeless. This is a human’s true individuality, not that mentally constructed “I” (which deludes one into acceptance as such). It is never anything else than its own perfect self, never contrary to its own unique and infinite nature. It is true that we are but poor and faulty, sadly limited, and miserably shrunken expressions of the divine spirit. Nevertheless, we are expression of it. Thus no thoroughgoing Naturalist believes in free will: for free will would mean that humans beings have the power of independent action, the power of doing something more or other than what was involved by the total series of events. And any such separate power of originating events is what the Naturalist denies. Spontaneity, originality, actions “on its own,” is a privilege reserved for “the whole show,” which one calls Nature. The Supernaturalist agrees with the Naturalist that there must be something which exists in its own right; some basic Fact whose existence it would be nonsensical to try to explain because this Fact is itself the ground or starting-point of all explanations. However, one does not identify this Fact with “the whole show.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
There is a tendency of Christian Science to enter a region of misunderstanding the moment it attempts to apply its true principles to things of this Earth. There is a time in the far past of the human race, a time now lost in the dim mists of antiquity, when the life of humans was stretched to a number of years far in excess of hat it is today. That time has been hinted at by horary legends of a Golden Age and by biblical stories of a pre-Flood race. Such a time will return in the cyclic course of our planet’s history, but naturally it is far-off in the future. Nature herself is in no hurry. She has plenty of time to accomplish her purposes. And in those days humans will again have a normal life-span of maybe one thousand years. There exists in the Old World a certain ancient knowledge—which promises its votaries astonishing benefits in longevity. This age-old art is similar to alchemy of medieval Europe, when humans sought rigorously in experiments for the elixir of life. It is of such antiquity that those who hand it down tell us it was born just after the time when the legendary gods had ceased to walk this Earth. The exponents have almost disappeared from the World, but the tradition is so widespread throughout the Old World that solitary individuals still practise it in remote and unfrequented places. So difficult are the exercises which belong to this system, so labourious are its practices, so ascetic the self-discipline which it involves, that one can understand why it has almost faded out of existence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
It performs strange feats such as reanimating dead bodies, stopping blood circulation and lung action, permitting knives and daggers to be run like skewers through living flesh without harming it and with an extremely rapid drying of blood (do NOT try this!), and even the burial alive of an enriched body beneath the ground and its safe resurrection several hours or some day later. The principal basis of these feats consists in making certain changes in the breath rhythm, changes which involve such risk to life and health that we are not prepared to assume the responsibility of describing here the exercises for the development of such powers. It is also necessary to live a celibate and chaste existence, to refrain from expending energy in Worldly work and business, and to reduce diet to an astonishing minimum. Because they demand a special and severely ascetic training which is the work of several years devoted wholly to this austere task, such feats are necessarily uncommon. The ordinary layperson could hardly be expected to find the time for such training, nor is there any necessity for one to do so. These displays are certainly spectacular but have primarily only scientific, medical, and theatrical values rather than a general one. Meanwhile, Nature has set her brief term to the human body, and those whose attachment to the body is not overweening will resignedly accept that terms while the others must do so unwillingly. However, this is a different matter—living in the flesh body for ever and ever, a notion which must seem insupportable to many who find the present brief term of human’s existence quite enough for them to cope with. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
If Nature cared so much to preserve the physical body of humans, she would not introduce Earthquakes, eruptions, hurricanes, famines, pestilences, and floods into the scheme of things. The fact that she does do so indicates rather that she regards one’s body as being only a fragment of the human, not as the full human oneself. Some had the idea, of course, that in ancient times, sin and sickness would also have disappeared from the World, so that our existence would be a halcyon one. It is a pretty picture, but human’s true home is not in the tabernacle of flesh; it is elsewhere. The fleshly body is but a temporary abiding place at best, and when humans have arrived at a state of perfect spirituality one will abandon it and use a vehicle more consonant with one’s higher condition, an electromagnetic body that will more easily and more faithfully represent one. Yes, death will be conquered, but not in the way that Christian Scientists imagine. It will be conquered firstly, by extending the duration of human life to a constantly increasing period; and secondly, by completely abandoning the physical body for a subtler one. The clear real inner human—one’s spiritual being—is undying and immortal. When many began to consider that inner being in relation to its transient Earthly tenement, the body, they become confused and misunderstand the nature of that relationship. The hour of every human’s death is fixed by a higher will than one’s own, by that power which some call destiny but which itself takes its rise out of the Infinite Power, and no Christian Science practitioner or ordinary physician has ever “saved” the life of anyone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
A human’s own Overself fixes the dates of certain major events in one’s life prior to the moment when one utters one’s first cry as a babe, and the date of one’s death is but one of those appointed hours. Perhaps, if the choose, some people have the option to reschedule; others do not. At this point, not in the sky, nor in the depths of the ocean, nor by entering the caverns of the mountain, nowhere in the World can such a place be found where a human might dwell without being overpowered by death. However, “in those days humans will seek death and will not find it; they will desire to die, and death will flee from them,” Revelation 9.6. We are as birds on the wheel of the Universe. For all our loud tweeting, it still rolls along on its own path. And yet these people confidently imagine they set the great Laws of Destiny at naught, and interfere with the workings of the Cosmic Plan. In that sense there might be several “Natures.” This conception must be kept quite distinct from what is commonly called “plurality of Worlds”—id est, different solar systems or different galaxies, “island Universes” existing in widely separated parts of a single space and time. These, however remote, would be parts of the same Nature as our own sun: it and they would be interlocked by being in relations to one another, spatial and temporal relations and causal relations as well. Ans it is just this reciprocal interlocking within a system which makes it what we call a Nature. Other Natures might not be spatio-temporal at all: or, if any of them were, their space and time would have no spatial or temporal relation to ours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
It is just this discontinuity, this failure of interlocking, which would justify us in calling them different Natures. This does not mean that there would be absolutely no relation between them; they would be related by their common derivation from a single Supernatural source. They would, in this respect, be like different novels by a single author; the events in one story have no relation to the events in another except that they are invented by the same author. To find a relation to between them you must go right back to the author’s mind: there is no cutting across from anything. However, God might bring the two Natures into partial contact at some particular point: that is, He might allow selected events in the one to produce results in the other. There would thus be, at certain points, a partial interlocking; but this would not turn the two Natures into one, for the total reciprocity which makes a Nature would still be lacking, and the anomalous interlocking would arise not from what either system was in itself but from the Divine act which was brining them together. If this occurred each of the two Natures would be “supernatural” in relation to the other: but the fact of their contact would be supernatural in a more absolute sense—not as being beyond this or that Nature but beyond any and every Nature. It would be one kind of Miracle. The other kind would be Divine “interference” not by bringing together of two Natures, but simply. However, God may never interfere with the natural system He created. He may never cause His natural systems to impinge on one another. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
If the movements of the individual units are events “on their own,” events which do not interlock with all other evens, then these movements are not part of Nature. It would be, indeed, too great a shock to our habits to describe them as super-natural. I think we should have to call them sub-natural. However, all our confidence that Nature has no doors, and no reality outside herself for doors to open on, would have disappeared. There is apparently something outside her, the Subnatural; it is indeed from this Subnatural that all events and all “bodies” are, as it were, fed into her. And clearly if she thus has a back door (door to nowhere) opening on the Subnatural, it is quite on the cards that she may also have a front door opening on the Supernatural—and events might be fed into her at that door, too. The movements of individual units are permanently incalculable to us, not that they are in themselves random and lawless. All possible knowledge, then, depends on the validity of reasoning. Unless human reasoning is valid, no science can be true. To be caused is not to be proved. Wishful thinkings, prejucides, and delusions of madness, are all caused, but they are ungrounded. Indeed to be caused is so different from being proved that we behave in disputation as if they were mutually exclusive. The mere existence of causes for a belief is popularly treated as raising a presumption that it is groundless, and the most popular way of discrediting person’s opinion is to explain them causally—“You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or a woman.” This implication is that is causes fully account for a belief, then, since causes work inevitably, the belief would have had to arise wither it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The Universal and Infinite cannot be packed into the personal and finite, your demand, natural though it be, is unreasonable. God Himself knows not what He is, for He is not a “what.” So why ask a mere human? Just as there is a sun hidden behind the sun, the divinity which animates it, so in the human being there is a Mind within the mind—and that is one’s Overself. The personality is always limited and chained, the higher individuality always infinite and free. Each human is the expression of this infinite life-power. One’s awareness of life in the five senses will rest upon another and inner awareness. A second and hidden self will thus seem to support one’s outer one. The true I yields quite a different feeling, experience, and consciousness from the familiar physical ego. There is a deeper level of every human’s mind which is not subject to one’s passions, not moved by one’s desires, not affected by one’s sense. It is not possible for the timeless, spaceless, formless Overself to be degraded into activity by its time-bound, space-tied, form-limited offspring the person. The essence of human beings is not one’s Earthly body. Nor is it the ghostly duplicate of that body, as many spiritists and some religionists think. The Overself is the Higher mind in humans, one’s divine soul as distinguished from one’s human-terrestrial nature. It is the same as Plato’s “nous.” The true unchanging self is apart from any historical era and is not dependent on outer changes of custom and form. The aim of the mystic is to know what one is, apart from one’s physical body, one’s lower emotion, one’s personal ego; it is to know one’s inner-most self. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
When this aim is successfully realized, one knows then with perfect certitude that one is a ray of the divine sun. How shall one know and understand that this very awareness, of which so small is the fragment that one experiences, is a limited and conditioned part of the Great Awareness itself, of God? The inhabitant of this fleshly body, including its accompanying invisible “ghost,” is a sacred one. There, within and yet behind one’s personal consciousness, is this other sphere of one’s own being into which one must one day be re-born as a Blue Jay from an egg. This is one’s best self; this is what one really is under all the defects. The relation between response and stimulus is utterly different from that between knowledge and truth known. Our physical vision is a far more useful response to light than that of the cruder organisms which have only a photo-sensitive spot. God is older than Nature, and from it the orderliness of Nature, which alone enables us to know her, is derived. The human mind in the acts of knowing is illuminated by Divine reason. It is set free, in the measure required, from the huge nexus of non-rational causation; free from this to be determined by the truth known. And, if there were any, the preliminary processes within Nature which led up to this liberation were designed to. At the frontier where the “outer World” ends and what I should ordinarily call “myself” begins, we find a great deal of traffic but it is all one-way traffic. It is a matter of daily experience that rational thoughts induce and enable us to alter the course of Nature—of physical nature when we use mathematic to build bridges, or of psychological nature when we apply arguments to alter our own emotions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We succeed in modifying physical nature more often and more completely than we succeed in modifying psychological nature, but we do at least a little to both. On the other hand, Nature is quite powerless to produce rational thought: not that she never modifies our thinking but that the moment she does so, it ceases (for that very reason) to be rational. The problem is whether you or I can be such a self-existent Reason. This question almost answers itself the moment we remember what existence “on one’s own” means. It means that kind of existence which Naturalists attribute to “the whole show” and Supernatiralists to God. Human minds, then, are not only supernatural entities that exist. They do not come from nowhere. Each has come into Nature from Supernature: each has its tap-root in an eternal, self-existent, rational Being, whom we call God. Each offshoot, or spearhead, or incursion of that Supernatural reality into Nature. It seems that human thought is not God’s but God-kindled. I must hasten, however, that we are considering miracles, not about everything. I am attempting no full doctrine of man: and I am not in the least trying to smuggle in an argument for the “immortality of the soul.” The earliest Christian documents give a casual and unemphatic assent to the belief that the supernatural part of a human survives the death of the natural organism. However, they are very little interested in the matter. What they are intensely interested in is the restoration or “resurrection” of the whole composite creature by a miraculous divine act: and until we have come to some conclusion about miracles in general, we shall certainly not discuss that. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
At this stage the supernatural element in humans concerns us solely as evidence that something beyond Nature exists. The dignity and destiny of humans has, at present, nothing to do with the argument. We are interested in humans only because their rationality is the little tell-tale rift in Nature which shows that there is something beyond or behind her. In a pond whose surface was completely covered with scum and floating vegetation, there might be a few waterlilies. And you might of course be interested in them for their beauty. However, you might also be interested in them because from their structure you could deduce that they had stalks underneath which went down to roots in the bottom. The Naturalist thinks that the pond (Nature—the great event in space and time) is of an indefinite depth—that there is nothing but water however far you go down. My claim is that some of the things on the surface (id est, in our experience) show the contrary. These things (rational minds) reveal, on inspection, that they at least are not floating but attached by stalks about the bottom. Therefore the pond has a bottom. It is not pond, pond for ever. Go deep enough and you will come to something that is not pond—to mud and Earth and then to rock and finally the whole bulk of Earth and the subterranean fire. God and Nature have come into a certain relation. They have, at the very least, a relation—almost, in one sense, a common frontier—in every human mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Reason saves and strengths my whole system, psychological and physical, whereas that whole system, by rebelling against Reason, destroys both Reason an itself. The military metaphor of a spearhead was apparently ill-chosen. The supernatural Reason enters my natural being not like a weapon—more like a beam of light which illuminates or a principle of organization which unifies and develops. Our whole picture of Nature being “invaded” (as if by a foreign enemy) was wrong. When we actually examine one of these invasions it looks much more like the arrival of a king among his own subjects or a mahout visiting his own elephant. The elephant may run amuck, Nature may be rebellious. However, from observing what happens when Nature obeys it is almost impossible not to conclude that it is her very “nature” to be a subject. All happens as if she had been designed for that very role. Not all help from the individual can, or necessarily should come from groups. In many cases, what the change-pressed person needs most is one-to-one counseling during the crisis of adaption. In psychiatric jargon a “crisis” is any significant transition It is roughly synonymous with “major life change.” Today, persons in traditional crisis turn to a variety of experts—doctors, marriage counselors, psychiatrists, the pastor, witches, warlocks, the spirits, God, Jesus Christ, vocational specialists and others—for individualized advice. Yet for many kinds of crisis there are no appropriate experts. Who helps the family or the individual faced with the need to move to a new city for the third time in five years? #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Who is available to counsel a leader who is up- or down-graded by a reorganization of one’s club or community organization? Who is there to help the secretary just bounced back to the typing pool? People like these are not sick. They neither need nor should receive psychiatric attention, yet there is, by large, no counseling machinery available to them. Not only are there many kinds of present-day life transitions for which no counseling help is provided, but the invasion of novelty will slam individuals up against wholly new kinds of personal crises in the future. And as the society races toward heterogeneity, the variety of problems will increase. In slowly changing societies the types of crises faced by individuals are more unfirm and the sources of specialized advice more easily identifiable. Sometimes you just need to turn to God, Allah, Buddha, or whoever your peaceful, confident, all-loving and powerful Overself is for healing. The crisis-caught person went to one’s priest, Paris Hilton, one’s witch doctor or one’s local chief. Today personalized counseling services in the high technology countries have become so specialized that we have developed, in effect, second-layer advice-givers who do nothing but counsel the individual about where to seek advice. These referral services interpose additional red tape and delay between the individual and the assistance one needs. By the time help reached one, one may have already made a crucial decision—and done so badly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
So long as we assume that advice is something that must come from evenmore specialized professionals, we can anticipate ever greater difficulty. Moreover, so long as we base specialties on what people “are” instead of what they are “becoming” we miss many of the real adaptive problems altogether. Conventional social service systems will never be able to keep up. The answer is a counterpart to the situational grouping system—a counseling set-up that not only draws on full-time professional advice givers, but on multitudes of lay experts as well. We must recognize that what makes a person an expert in one type of crisis is not necessarily formal education, but the very experience of having undergone a similar crisis oneself. To help tide billions of people over the difficult transitions they are likely to face, we shall be forced to “deputize” large numbers of non-professional people in the community—business people, students, teachers, workers, and others—to serve as “crisis counselors.” Tomorrow’s crisis counselor will be experts not in such conventional disciplines as psychology or health, but in specific transitions such as conventional disciplines as psychology or healthy, but in specific transitions such as relocation, job promotion, divorce, or subcult-hopping. Armed with their own recent experience, working on a volunteer basis or for minimal pay, they will set aside some small part of their time for listening to other people talk out their problems, apprehensions, and plans. In return, they will have access to others for similar assistance in the course of their own adaptive development. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Once again, there is nothing new about people seeking advice from one another. What is new is our ability, through the use of computerized systems, to assemble situational groups swiftly, to match up individuals with counselors, and to do both wit considerable respect for privacy and anonymity. We can already see evidence of a move in this direction in the spread of “listening” and “caring” services. In Davenport, Iowa, lonely people can dial a telephone number and be connected with a “listener”—one of a rotating staff of volunteers who control the telephone twenty-four hours a day. The program, initiated by a local commission on the aging, is similar to, but not the same as, the Care-Ring service in New York. Care-Ring charges its subscribers a fee, in return for which they receive two check-in calls each day at designated times. Subscribers provide the service with the names of their doctors, a neighbour, their building superintendent, and a close relative. In the even they fail to respond to a call, the service tries again half an hour later. If they still do not respond, the doctor is notified and a nurse is dispatched to the scene. Care-Ring services are now being franchised in other cities. In both these services we see forerunners of the crisis-counseling system of the future. Under that system, the giving and getting of advice becomes not a “social service” in the usual bureaucratic, impersonal sense, but a highly personalized process that not only helps cement the entire society together in a kind of “love network”—an integrative system based on the principle of “I need you as much as you need me.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
Situational grouping, and person-to-person crisis counseling are likely to become a significant part of everyone’s life as we all move together into the uncertainties of the future. There is a powerful, life-changing revelation God wants you to understand! The Principle of Stewardship. Good stewardship will lead to health, favour, and responsibility that God desires to put into your hands for the Kingdom of God! May each of us chose to love the Lord and follow His paths to happiness. More than anything else, Heavenly Father desires our true and lasting happiness. Our happiness is the design of all the blessings God gives us—gospel, teachings, commandments, priesthood ordinances, family relationships, prophets, temples, the beauties of creation, and even the opportunity to experience adversity. He sent His Beloved Son to carry out the Atonement so we can be happy in this life and receive a fulness of joy in the eternities. People everywhere are looking for something. In their own way, what they are really looking for is happiness. As with truth itself, however, many are kept from happiness “because they know not where to find it,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 123.12. Because they do not know where to find true and lasting happiness, they look for it in things that actually bring temporary pleasure only—buying things, seeking honour and praise from the World through inappropriate behaviour, or focusing on physical beauty and attractiveness. Pleasure is often confused with happiness. It seems that the more people seek temporary pleasure, the less happy they become. Usually, pleasure endures for only a short time. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
You may get that transitory pleasure, yes, but you cannot find joy, you cannot find happiness. Happiness is found only along that well beaten track, narrow as it is, though straight, which leads to eternal life. Unfortunately for many, happiness is elusive. Scientists know that it is more than simply positive mode, happiness is a state of well-being that encompasses living a good life—that is, wit a sense of meaning and deep satisfaction. Research shows that happiness is not the result of bouncing from one experience to the next. Instead, achieving happiness typically involves a long-sustained effort for something more important in life. Happiness is determined by habits, behaviours, and thought patterns that we can directly address wit intentional actions. Much of our happiness is actually under personal control. God’s love speaks to us in our hearts and tries to work through us in the World. We must listen to it as to a pure and distant melody that comes across the noise of the World’s doings. Some say, “When we are grown up, we would rather think of other things.” However, the voice of love with which God speaks to us in the secret places of the heart, speaks to us when we are young so that our youth may be really youth, and that we may become the children of God. Happy are those who listen. Virtue, which is a pattern of thought and behaviour based on high moral standards. It encompasses chastity and moral purity, which qualify you to enter the Lord’s holy temples. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Virtuous people possess a quiet dignity and inner strength. They are confident because they are worthy to receive and be guided by the Holy Ghost. Virtue begins in the heart and mind, and it is the accumulation of thousands of small decisions and actions each day. “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distil upon thy soul as the dews from Heaven. The Holy Ghost shall be thy constant companion, and thy scepter an unchanging scepter of righteousness and truth; and they dominion shall be an everlasting dominion, and without compulsory means it shall flow unto thee forever and ever,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 121.45-46. If you listen, you will hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation ever could before. The ultimate questions of our life transcend knowledge. One riddle after another surrounds us. However, the final question of our being has but one concern, and it decides our fate. Again and again, we are thrown back to it. What will become of our will? How does it find itself in the will of God? The highest insight humans can attain is the yearning for peace, for the union of one’s will with an infinite will, one’s human will with God’s will. Such a will does not cut itself off and live in isolation like a puddle that is bound to dry up when the heart of summer comes. No, it is like a mountain stream, relentlessly splashing its way to the river, there to be swept on to the limitless ocean. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
You know of the disease in Central Africa called sleeping sickness, there also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take its as a warning. If you live superficially, you should realize that your soul suffers. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most human have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally, when they hear the inner voice they do not want to listen anymore. They carry on as before so as not to be constantly reminded of what they have lost. However, as for you, resolve to keep a quiet time both in your homes and where within these peaceful walls when the bells ring on Sundays Then your souls can speak to you without being drowned out by the hustle and bustle of everyday life. Do not let your hearts grow numb. Stary alert. It is your soul which matters. O Lord our God, on this festive day we recall that on Sinai Thou didst reveal Thyself, and through Thine immortal words didst weld our people into a nation through Torah. Standing before the sacred scrolls of Thy law, we here renew the ancient covenant with our fathers, pronouncing again their memorable words: “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do.” Help us t discern the wisdom of Thy precepts so that we may heed Thy commandments. May Thy Torah ever inspire us, guiding and leading us in the paths of justice and peace. Amen. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
Llanada Villa has changed quite a bit since Sarah Winchester began construction in 1884. Despite a tragedy-ridden life, her generosity, ingenuity, and passion left an endless mark on the Santa Clara Valley. How many times have you visited Mrs. Winchester’s creation?
Even after months of distancing, the air of bizarre energy still flows through the house after the sun sets.
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A Miraculously Great Gift of Grace May Depart Equally Miraculously—PRAISE HIM!
Dignity and humility are the cornerstones of compassion. Compassion for myself is the most powerful healer of all. When it comes to behaviour, everybody is one’s own best physician. Case studies can provide special opportunities to answer interesting questions. For instance, how do you know what kind of person you are? If you lost for memory of past events, would your self-image change? To answer these questions, psychologist did a case study of J.S., and 17-year-old male college student. After he suffered a head injury, J.S. had amnesia for about a month. During that time, J.S. could recall little of what had occurred during the previous 6 months. Nevertheless, his rating of his own personality appeared to be unaffected by his memory loss. This suggests that an awareness of one’s own personal characteristics is based on memories that are more lasting than those of everyday events. The careful recording of cases like J.S.’s is essential to psychology. Case studies often provide insight into human behaviour that could not be obtained through any other method. The treatment of unpleasant realities by not including them in one’s picture of the World comforts but at the same time befools humans. None of the great prophets like Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith, and Buddha denied the existence of sickness, the reality of pain, or the significance of suffering in the cosmos. No—they acknowledged them as being inseparable from human life but pitied the victims and offered them inward comfort which was based on truth and reality. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
The terrestrial part of us, at this time, is doomed to oblivion, the spiritual part is ageless and deathless. The physical body belongs to the terrestrial part. All attempts to perpetuate it must fail and arise from confusing the two levels of being, the transient and the eternal. People ask Why, if all is mind, if—as you say—our bodies are only ideas, can we not control regulate and improve our bodies by controlling, regulating, and improving our minds? Why not go further still, with Christian Science, and play with the possibility, not only of these achievements, but also of rendering the body immortal by thinking it so? The answer is that nobody can deny the creative power of the mind. It may do all these things, except the last. That it will never do. Why? Because we live in a World whose fundamental law of beings—and Buddha discovered and Jesus Christ taught—is decay and death, change and transition—at this point in our evolution. Indeed, it was because they were so painfully aware of these truths that they sought and found the only true way of escape for a human and that was into Nirvana, into Utopia, into the Kingdom of Heaven—not into the physical again! No Christian Scientist from the first founder down to the latest follower has ever achieved physical immortality, but in the future that may change. Yet, immortality is not the same as eternal life. Immortality can be achieved on the Earth; it can allow the human body to live indefinitely. However, you have to understand how it is for a deity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
Some of these gods have been here so long they can no longer care for themselves. Earth people think that immortality means you can go on forever just as you are. It does not work that way. Physically, yes, a god or goddess can continue indefinitely. It is built into the situation. However, mentally—psychologically—you must realize that being a god takes a terrible toll. When you are a god, people’s thoughts, hopes, dreams, and fears re beating at you all the time. Gods have direct apprehension of the feelings of their worshippers. It can be taxing. After a while all those prayers and petitions from humans take their toll. It is all very well at the beginning. Most gods, even the compassionate ones, just let it all roll over them. However, after a while it get to even the toughest. They get sick of the daily drudgery of hearing desperate pleas, and, in most cases being unable to do very much about them. Gods live in longer timelines than mortals. It takes them longer to do things. By the time something comes to a god’s attention, and by the time one decides to do something about it, the human most likely is dead and buried. It is frustrating for a god, having to work in such a short time frame. They try their best. However, remember, gods can make exceptions for only a very few. A god has a lot more on one’s mine than the troubles of one’s constituents. It would be fair to say that most gods end up hating humans because they are so needy, always with the hand out, always with the gimmie, gimmie, gimmie, gimmie more. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
Eternal life, n the other hand, is the phrase used in scripture to define the quality of life that our Eternal Father lives. They Lord declared, “This is my work and my glory—to brings to pass the immortality and eternal life of humans,” reports Moses 1.39. Immortality is to live forever as a resurrected being. Through the Atonement of Jesus Christ, everyone will receive this gift. Eternal life, or exaltation, is to live in God’s presence and to continue as families. “In the celestial glory there are three Heavens or degrees; and in order to obtain the highest, a human must enter into this order of the priesthood [meaning the new and everlasting covenant of marriage]; and if one does not, one cannot obtain it. One may enter into the other, but that is the end of one’s kingdom; one cannot have an increase,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 131.1-4. Like immortality, this gift is made possible through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. However, to inherit eternal life requires our “obedience to the laws and ordinances of the Gospel,” reports Articles of Faith 1.3. “Wherefore, do the things which I have told you, you and I have seen the Lord and your Redeemer should do; for, for this cause have they been shown unto me, that ye might know the gate by which ye should enter. For the gate by which ye should enter is repentance and baptism by water; and then cometh a remission of your sins by fire and by the Holy Ghost. And then are ye in this strait and narrow path which lead to eternal life; yea, ye have entered in by the gate,” reports 2 Nephi 31.17-18. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
After we are baptized and receive the gift of the Holy Ghost, much of our progress toward eternal life depends on our receiving other ordinances of salvation: for men, ordination to the Melchizedek Priesthood; for men and women, the temple endowment and marriage sealing. When we receive these ordinances and keep the covenants that accompany them, we prepare ourselves to inherit eternal life, and there we will live in spiritual form, forever, with God. However, while on Earth, “Humans will never tire of seeking immortality,” reports Dr. Alexis Carrel, whose biological researchers, yet mystical sympathies, entitle him to speak with high authority. The possibilities of spiritual healings of pathological conditions, miraculous mental cures of disease, and rapid acceleration of organic repairs through concentrated thinking, I repeat that we do not deny them. They have always existed, always been demonstrated. If our doctrine is true, the relation between psychological and physical processes must certainly exist. However, there are two other factors at work in human life which must also be considered and must not be ignored. What are they? The first is the factor of destiny, self-earned in previous lives and now awaiting physical expression in the present life. It has something to say, whether we like it or not. As we progress in our mortal probation and become more like the Saviour, we can strengthen every group with whom we associate, including families and friends. #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The Lord places us in these communities of Saints where we can learn and apply gospel principles to our everyday lives. These groups are at the same time both a school, a proving ground, and a laboratory where we both learn and do as we practice living the gospel. Very common, ordinary people, who accept the gospel from the lips of some humble Mormon missionary become so changed by those enlightening truths of the gospel that they are not the same people any longer. As we progress through mortality, we make mistakes and get ff course. If we should continue in our errors, we get father and father from where we ought to be. We can compare our lives with the flight of a spaceship. When its motor is started up, its trajectory is monitored precisely. If not corrected, any deviation from its decreed course is corrected immediately. Even a fraction of a degree off course would carry it many light years from its destination. The longer the correction is delayed, the greater will be the required adjustment. Can you imagine how far off course we can become without course corrections? The Lord has provided for us prophets, scriptures, parents, and other wise leaders to teach us the course we should be following. When necessary, much the same as tracking stations monitor a satellite’s progress and keep in on the right path, they can help us monitor our progress and correct the direction we are going. Our course on Earth is so important. It is determined by the decisions we make each day. We cannot separate our thoughts and actions now from their effects on the future. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
The second factor is renunciation. Let every hidden enemy in your life, let every trap or demonic setup be exposed in the name of Jesus Christ! When you accept the doctrine that all is mind and each individual thing is but an ephemeral idea, you must perforce accept the doctrine that you as an individual, as the ego, are also an ephemeral idea. Now when you go further and declare that you want reality, you want to find eternal and not ephemeral life, you will have to abandon the fleeting idea for the eternal Mind in which it occurs: that is, you will have to sink the ego and merge its will in the greater universal will of the Infinite Being. Do this! What will you find next? That your personal desires have sunk with it, that your individual wishes and hopes and fears have dissolved and disappeared. The desire for bodily betterment, however very attractive, would have gone too. You cannot have a single desire and yet enter the Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus pointed out. So good health, the care of your painful diseases, the healing of your disturbed organs—right, necessary, and desirable as they undoubtedly are—are nevertheless matter which you must try to effect in a desireless way; you may try to cure them but you must leave the result to the higher will. If you insist that the body must yield to your desires of a cure, to your personal desires, then your ego, not the real universal self, has got the upper hand and is directing you. In that case you will be no better off, for your have no guarantee of success even then. Most Christian Scientists experience a score of failures for every cure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Whereas if you do your best mentally and physically to put your body right, but do it impersonally—accepting failure, if it comes, with as much equanimity as you can—you will certainly be n worse off than the Christian Scientist so far as the possibilities of sure are concerned, and you will be infinitely better off so far as realizing truth is concerned, with all the wonderful peace that will bring in its train. This is one meaning of the words “Not my will but Thine be done.” Do you think, having seen so much illness around you for so many years, that life is forever striving to instill into us through pain what Jesus Christ learned through reflection—that both body and World are doomed to decay and die, without God and Science, being subject to the law of universal incessant change? The experiences of life are the lessons of a guru, for we get just the kind of universal seeds whose silent instruction is needed at the time. The whole World, more or less, is having to learn this great truth at present but it is too blind and too unenlightened to grasp the lesson in its clarity and eternity. How far the duration of human life can be extended is not known. However, Methuselah, a biblical patriarch and a figure in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was essential immortal, he died at the age of 969; he lived the longest of all human figures mentioned in the Christian Bible. Remember that just because humans began to live shorter lives after the Biblical flood does not mean that God set a limit on human’s life span. The fact is that some people still lived well over 120 years until the time of Moses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
Perhaps that is why God gave human beings the gift of science, so they can learn how to restore their immortality, after the mature enough to see how precious life is and stop being so wicked. It is truth that stories of centenarians being found in different parts of the World are not few and often pass unquestioned. However, the difficulty of proving the date of birth usually remains. Most centenarians belong to undereducated classes, to those who have not taken care to retain correct knowledge of their age, for it was not so important to them as it is to the educated classes. There is hardly a record of payment by life insurance companies for the life of a centenarian. It is reasonable to ask, however, why, if the reparative and destructive elements in the body could be balanced, humans should not live for centuries. In the absence of authenticated cases, we may only take the stand that Nature seems to have set her own limits to human life. Some “back-to-nature” schools of therapy assert that all diseases are the consequences of transgressing the laws of health, just as some esoteric schools assert they are the consequences of incurring karmic debts. The first often point to the wild beasts as being perfectly healthy examples of living according to Nature. However, those who have firsthand acquaintance with jungle life will refute this claim. Not only are all animals—whether domesticated or wild—subject to sickness, but even plants, grain crops, trees, fruits, and vegetables are subject to it by blight and rust. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
The young and the strong may glory in the satisfaction of being alive, but the old and decrepit, the sick and in infirm, feel no such response to their existence. The pain and unpleasantness which beset human experience at times—mentally or physically—are not without their complementary pleasure and joy at other times. We would all like a happy beginning, a happy middle, and a happy ending to our story, but life betrays us: only in fiction is the craving really fulfilled. If the pain is there, racking the physical life, the peace exists behind it, permeating the inner life. The New World stands with its heritage of Roman law, the treasures of Judaeo-Christian ethics grounded on metaphysics, and its ideal of the inalienable rights of humans. Anxiously it asks itself the question: How can this development be brought to a standstill or put into reverse? It is useless to pillory the socialist dictatorship as utopian and to condemn its economic principles as unreasonable, because, in the first place, the criticizing New World has only itself to talk to, its arguments being heard only on this side of the Iron Curtain, and, in the second place, any economic principles you like can be put into practice so long as you are prepared to accept the sacrifices they entail. If you like, you can carry through any social and economic reforms you please, Like Mr. Stalin, you let three million peasants starve to death and have few million unpaid labourers at your disposal. A State of this kind has no social or economic crises to fear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
So long as the State’s power is intact—that is to say, so long as there is a well-disciplined and well-fed police army in the offing—it can maintain its existence for an indefinitely long period and can go on increasing its power to an indefinite extent. Thanks to its excess birth-rate, it can multiply the number of its unpaid workers almost at will in order to compete its rivals, regardless of the World market, which is to a large measure dependent on wages. However, this strategy also has some disadvantages. The convergence theory (or catch-up effect) suggests that poorer countries will experience a higher rate of economic growth and, over time get closer to the income levels of the developed World. In other words, there will be a reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor because low-income countries have more opportunities to experience a rapid rate of growth. Potential reasons for the convergence theory are: Law of diminishing returns, replicate technology from other countries, globalization and movement of labour and capital. The law of diminishing returns states a decline in productivity improvements from a fixed capital. When you have very low productivity in agriculture, a small investment (exempli gratia motorized tractor) can give a high rate of return and significantly increased output. For a developed economy, which is already highly mechanized increased investment will give smaller marginal gains. In effect, if the Indian agriculture sector is mainly labour intensive—then there are “easy gains” from a small amount of fertilizer and investment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Replicate technology—one advantage that poorer countries have is that they can replicate existing technology and working practices developed by advanced economies. For example, in Africa, many citizens never had a landline or fax machine, but jumped straight to the mobile phone with the internet, and essentially they now have hand held computers with Internet access that can also make phone calls, so they have the access to vast resources now. This new technology has significantly improved their communication, education, and allows them to access the global economy, and they were able t skip out most levels of investment. In fact, they can even benefit from perfect good phones that Americans are throwing away for newer models. Global forces—the World is increasingly globalized and multinational companies in the developed World are will to shift production to areas of lower labour costs. Therefore, developing economics have benefitted from inward investment and global companies moving manufacturing factories to the developing World. This force tends towards raising wages in the developing World. Even if wages seem very low by the developed World standard, they are higher than previous jobs/subsistence farming. Inward investment also leads to knock-on benefits. For example, China has invested in the infrastructure of African economies to improve its access to raw materials. This infrastructure will be a boost to the African economy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
Another example is that the nature of the Internet means it is easier to outsource even small-scale jobs. For example, a doctor in the Middle East can be paid to diagnose patients and answer an American doctor’s electronic messages for less and perhaps receive the same standard of care, which has become popular to reduce traffic in hospitals during COVID. Also, for developing counties like India, there has been a growth in skilled workers able to gain employment opportunities in writing software and IT skills. This is why President Trump was lowering taxes, stopped illegal immigration, and was putting tariffs on goods and services produced overseas. So while wages are going down in America, real estate and rent prices rising, and the cities and infrastructure are getting older, countries like Dubai are getting what used to be high paying middle management jobs in America, for lower wages and are able to use the income and tax revenue to build housing developments, roads, skyscrapers and increase their quality of life. Whereas in America, cities are decaying and dying out and only professionals and couples can afford to purchase property and rent. This is leading to the Great Affordability Crisis in America and will reduce its competitiveness in the Global Market. Americans are being bled dry by landlord, hospital administrators, cost of education, fuel, energy, child-care and food prices. Many Americans now have to struggle to come up with just $400. It helps explain why 20 percent of Americans are unable to pay the current month’s bills in full. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
It demonstrates why a surprise car-repair bill, parking ticket, court fee, or medical expense remains ruinous for so many America families, despite all the wealth this country has generated. In fact, 50 percent of households in American is classified at “financially fragile.” Meanwhile, Jafza, the Jebel Ali Free Zone, which at 52 square kilometers (20 square miles) and located in the Middle East looks a futuristic Manhattan, New York on the beach. The economy is up and coming, students are going to school, not dropping out, and want to learn, people are driven to go to work, not sit home and smoke marijuana and watch TV, and make babies they cannot afford to take care of. This Jebel Ali Free Zone is a big attraction for global businesses, which today take advantage of the emirate’s 30 free sones that offer take breaks, custom duty benefits and lack of restrictions for international owners. Several thousand Jafza companies make up 20 percent of foreign investment in Dubai, and the estimated 144,000 employees are generating $80 billion in non-oil money. That is 21 percent of the city’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). GDP measures two things at once: the total income of everyone in the economy and the total expenditure on the economy’s output of goods and services. The reason that GDP can perform the task of measuring both total incomes and total expenditure is that these two things are really the same. For an economy as a whole, income must equal expenditure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
The United Arab Emirates is the third richest country in the World, below Luxemburg at number two and Qatar at number one, with GDP per capita of $57,744. The bulk of its money comes from the production of goods and provision of services related to petroleum, petrochemical, aluminum and cement. Furthermore, Iran is producing the third highest level of engineers in the World with 233,695 engineering graduates. In comparison, America’s GDP per capita is $65,298, and is producing 237,826 engineering graduates a year, so that is encouraging. As long as Americans keep working hard, going to school, they can still remain number one in the global economy, but they will also need to motive their peers to work and go to school to stay ahead. However, as prices continue to rise, more Americans may take their skills and talents overseas, or down south to Mexico. A real danger can only come to these developing nations from outside, through the threat of military attack. However, this risk grows less every year, firstly because the war potential of the dictator States is steadily increasing, and secondly because the West cannot afford to arouse latent Russian or Chinese nationalism and chauvinism by an attack which would have exactly the opposite effect to the one intended. So far as one can see, America faces threats from the outside and also from the inside. If there is a break-down of power from within, which must, however, be left to follow its own inner development. Any support from outside at present would have little effect, in view of the existing security measures and the danger of nationalistic restriction. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The absolute State has an army of fanatical missionaries to do its bedding in matters of foreign policy, and these in their turn can count on a fifth column who are guaranteed asylum under the laws and constitutions of the Western States. In addition the communes of believers, very strong in places, considerably weaken Western governments’ powers of decisions, whereas the West has no opportunity to exert a similar influence on the other side, though we are probably not wrong in surmising that there is a certain amount of opposition among the masses in the Old World. There are always upright and truth-loving people to whom lying and tyranny are hateful, but one cannot judge whether they exert any decisive influence on the masses under the police regimes. In the view of this uncomfortable situation the question is heard again and again in the West: What can we do to counter this threat from the Old World? Even though the New World has considerable industrial power and a sizable defence potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest armaments have the heaviest industry coupled with a relatively high living standard are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism. The West has unfortunately not yet woken up to the fact that our appeal to idealism and reason and other desirable virtues, delivered with so much enthusiasm, is mere bombination in the void. It is a puff of wind swept away in the storm of religious faith, however twisted this faith may appear to us. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
We are faced, not with a station that an be overcome by rational or moral arguments, but with an unleashing of emotional forces and ideas engendered by the spirit of the times; and these, as we know from experience, are not much influenced by rational reflection and still less by moral exhortation. It has been correctly realized in many quarters that the alexipharmic, the antidote, should in this case be an equally potent faith of a different non-materialistic kind, and that the religious attitude grounded upon it would be the only effective defence against the danger of psychic infection. Unhappily, the little word “should,” which never fails to appear in this connection, points to a certain weakness, if not the absence, of this desideratum. Not only does the West lack a uniform faith that could block the progress of a fanatical ideology, but, as the father of Marxist philosophy, it makes use of exactly the same intellectual assumptions, the same arguments and aims. Although the Churches in the West enjoy full freedom, they are not less full or empty than in the East. Yet they exercise no noticeable influence on the broad course of politics. The disadvantage of creed as a public institution is that it serves two masters: on the one hand, it derives it existence from the relationship of humans to Gd, and on the other hand, it owes a duty to the State, id est, to the World, in which connection it can appeal to the saying “Render unto Caesar…” and various other admonitions in the New Testament. #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
In early times and until comparatively recently there was, therefore, talk of “powers ordained by God,” reports Romans 13.1. Today this conception is antiquated. The Churches stand for traditional and collective convictions which in the case of many of their adherents are no longer based on their own inner experiences but on unreflecting belief, which is notoriously apt to disappear as soon as one begins thinking about it. The content of belief then comes into collision with knowledge, and it often turns out that the irrationality of the former is no match for the ratiocinations of the latter. Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which came miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience, but they do not stop to consider that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled into us—that is, trust and loyalty. This experience has definite content that can be interpreted in terms of one or other of the denominational creeds. However, the more this is so, the more the possibilities of these conflicts with knowledge mount up, which in themselves are quite pointless. That is to say, the standpoint of the creeds is archaic; they are full of impressive mythological symbolism which, if take literally, comes into insufferable conflict with knowledge. However, if, for instance, the statement that Christ rose from the dead is to be understood not literally but symbolically, then it is capable of various interpretations that do not conflict with knowledge and do not impair the meaning of the statement. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
The objection that understanding it symbolically puts an end to the Christian’s hope of immortality in invalid, because long before the coming of Christianity humankind believed in a life after death and therefore had no need of the Easter event as a guarantee of immortality. The danger that a mythology understood too literally, and as taught by the Church, will suddenly be repudiated lock, stock and barrel is today greater than ever. Is it not time that the Christian mythology, instead of being wiped out, was understood symbolically for once? It is still too early to say what might be the consequences of a general recognition of the fatal parallelism between the State religion of the Marxists and the State religion of the Church. The absolutist claim of a Civitas Dei that is represented by man bears an unfortunate resemblance to the “divinity” of the State, and the moral conclusion drawn by Ignatius Loyal from the authority of the Church (“the end sanctifies the means”) anticipates the lies a political instrument in an exceedingly dangerous way. Both demand unqualified submission to faith and thus curtail human’s freed, the one one’s freedom before God and the other one’s freedom before the State, thereby digging the grace for the individual. The fragile existence of this—so far as we know—unique carrier of life is threatened on both sides, despite the respective promises of spiritual and material idylls to come—and how many of us can in the long run fight against the proverbial wisdom of “a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush”? Besides which, the West cherishes the same “scientific” and rationalistic Weltanschauung with its statistical levelling-down tendency and materialistic aims as the State religion of the Eastern bloc as I have explained above. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
What, then, has the West, with its political denominational schisms, to offer to modern man in his need? Nothing, unfortunately, except a variety of paths all leading to one goal which is practically indistinguishable from the Marxist ideal. It requires no special effort of understanding to see where the Communist ideology gets the certainty of its belief that time is on its side, and that the World is ripe for conversion. The fact speaks a language that is all too plain in this respect. It will not help us in the New World to shut our eyes to this and not to recognize our fatal vulnerability. Anyone who has once learned to submit absolutely to a collective belief and to renounce one’s eternal right to freedom and the equally eternal duty of individual responsibility will persist in this attitude, and will be able to march with the same credulity and the same lack of criticism in the reverse direction, if another and manifestly “better” belief is foisted upon one’s alleged idealism. What happened not so long ago to a civilized European nation? We accuse the Germans of having forgotten it all again already, but the truth is that we do not know for certain whether something similar might not happen elsewhere. If it did and if another civilized nation succumbed to the infection of a uniform and one-sided idea, it would not be surprising. We see this happening in America. People are passing laws to protect illegal immigrants, and sending billions to other countries in aid, while their own people are going bankrupt, without homes and food and being killed, all because of media propaganda so a political party can have a super majority and enforce tyranny by stripping citizens of their rights and locking them in their homes. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
We permit ourselves the questions: which countries have the biggest Communist parties? America, which—O quae mutation rerum! – forms the real political backbone of Western Europe, seems to once have been immune because she once was not controlled by a media that is anti-American and spews lies so other nations become the World power, as that is where the news draws its funding from. America once used to be outspoken and had a counterposition she adopted, but in point of fact she is perhaps now and even back then more vulnerable than Europe, since her educational system is the most influences by the scientific Weltanschauung with statistical truths, and her mixed population finds it difficult to strike roots in a soil that is practically without history. The historical humanistic type of education so sorely needed in such circumstances leads, on the contrary, a Cinderella existence. Through Europe possess this latter requirement, she uses it to her own undoing in the form of nationalistic egoism and paralysing scepticism. Common to both is the materialistic collectivist goal, and both lack the very things that expresses and grips the whole human, namely, an idea which puts the individual human being in the center as the measure of all things. This idea alone is enough to arouse the most violent doubts and resistances on all sides, and one could almost go so far as to assert that the valuelessness of the individual in comparison with large numbers is the one belief that meets with universal and unanimous assent. To be sure, we all say that this is the century of the common man, that he is the lord of the Earth, the air, and the water, and that on his decision hangs the historical fate of the nations. #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
This proud picture of human grandeur is unfortunately an illusion and is counterbalanced by a reality that is very different. In this reality man is the slave and victim of the machines that have conquered space and time for one; one is intimidated and endangered by the might of the military technology which is supposed to safeguard one’s physical existence; one’s spiritual and moral freedom, though guaranteed within limits in one half of one’s is threated with chaotic disorientation, and in the other half is abolished altogether. Finally, to ass comedy to tragedy, this lord of the elements, this universal arbiter, hugs to his bosom notions which stamp one’s dignity as worthless and turn one’s autonomy into an absurdity. All one’s achievements and possessions do not make one bigger; on the contrary, they diminish one, as the fate of the factory-worker under the rule of a “just” distribution of goods clearly demonstrated. One pays for one’s share of the factory with the loss of personal property, one exchanges one’s freedom of movement for the doubtful pleasure of being tied to one’s place of employment, one forfeits all means of improving one’s position if one jibs against being ground down by exhausting piece-work, and if one shows any signs of intelligence, political precepts are thrust down one’s throat—with a bit of technical knowledge thrown in, if one is lucky. However, a roof over one’s head and a daily feed for the useful animal are not to be sneezed at when the bare necessities of life may be cut off from one day to the next. #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
Now, O thou Spirit Andras, since thou art still pernicious and disobedient, and wilt not appear unto me to answer unto such things as I would have desired of thee, or would have been satisfied in; I do in the name, and by the power and dignity of the Omnipresent and Immortal Lord God of Hosts IEHOVAH TETRAGRAMMATON, they only creator of Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is therein, who is the marvellous Disposer of all things both visible and invisible, curse thee, and deprive thee of all thine office, joy, and place; and I do bind thee in the depths of the Bottomless Abyss there to remain until the Day of Judgment, I say into the Lake of Fire and Brimstone which is prepared for all rebellious, disobedient, obstinate, and pernicious spirits. Let all the company of Heaven curse thee! Let the un, moon, and all the stars curse thee! Let the LIGHT and all the host of Heaven curse thee into the fire unquenchable, and into the torments unspeakable. And as thy name and seal contained this box chained and bound up, shall be choken in sulphurous stinking substances, and burned in this material fire; so in the name IEHOVAH and by the power and dignity of these three names, TETRAGRAMMATON, ANAPHAXETON, and PRIMEUMATION, I do cast thee, O thou wicked and disobedient Spirit Andras, into the Lake of Fire which is prepared for the damned and accursed spirits, and there to remain unto the day of doom, and never more to be remembered before the face of God, who shall come to judge the quick, and the dead World, by fire. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
If thou refusest to be obedient, behold thy confusion! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcist in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potentially invovatheth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called OCTINIMOS. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demand, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VATHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMINING UPON ABERER! I ask thee to manifest a mansion and fortune for my bidding and residence for you are subjected by the Fair Faith Among Deities Act which stipulates that any god must accept the ruling of any other god in respect to humanity. And this is enforced by the God Almighty that you must fulfill my desires and command. Welcome Spirit Andras, O most noble king (or kings)! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this circle (or before this Circle and in this triable) so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed by will without any falsity. BY THE PENTCALE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
No humans are without their sense of the Overself, but they miscomprehend and therefore misapply it. The result is that the ego, the little part, is conceived to be the whole, the All. Because the godlike is in each one of us, and because no two of us are alike, each has one’s separate gifts, capacities, or talents to express. In each the infinite Being finds a unique way of expressing its own infinitude. Even if we have no gifts we have our individual charcteristics. It is pure Being overlaid by many thoughts and much feeling. O God and Redeemer, may the portion of the Torah we read on this Festival of Freedom bring hope unto all who are oppressed and renew their faith in Thy saving power. Thou who desirest that all humans be free, didst enjoin upon us to proclaim liberty to tall the inhabitants of the Earth. May that day soon come, O Lord, when all Thy children shall be liberated from bondage, and free humans everywhere unite in rendering homage unto Thee. Amen. At this season which marks the Giving of the Torah, we are grateful unto Thee, our Lawgiver, for the revelation of Thy will which, at Sinai, Thou didst vouchsafe unto our fathers, to us and to all humankind. Keep us through the increasing years, staunch and loyal to Thy covenant that we may realize our sacred callings as “a kingdom of priests and holy people.” Here in the ego we may perceive a reproduction of the sacred Overself under the limitations of time and space. Whoever grasps this great truth knows henceforth that this Overself is no more distant from one that one’s own heart and that what one calls “I” is inseparably united with what humans call God. Amen. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
Winchester Mystery House
Mr. John Hansen, Mrs. Sarah Winchester’s main Ranch Foreman, lived and raised his family on the estate in a separate building. There’s a lot to see in the gardens! Come visit and learn more about Sarah’s estate. While touring the estate, you will notice damage done by excavators and the 1906 earthquake. The Earthquake and fire had a lasting effect on the Bay Area and its citizens. It may have been the strongest Earthquake in the history of California. As survivors, the Winchester family experienced many haunting aspects of this momentous event. The destruction of the family business, fleeing their family home and finding refuge in the East Bay. This history is commemorated by damages left unrepaired.
Open all weekend until 4PM!
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Link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Be Wise With Speed–We are Living in Our Once Upon a Time!
Never say there is nothing beautiful in the World anymore. There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf, or a rambling Victorian. The deeper we look into nature the more we recognize that is it full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret, and we are all united to this life. We can begin our battle to prevent future shock at the most personal level. It is clear, whether we know it or not, that much of our daily behaviour is, in fact, an attempt to ward off future shock. We employ a variety of tactics to lower the levels of stimulation when they threaten to drive us above our adaptive range. For the most part, however, these techniques are employed unconsciously. We can increase their effectiveness by raising them to consciousness. We can, for example, introvert periodically to examine our own bodily and psychological reactions to change, briefly turning out to the external environment to evaluate our inner environment. This is not a matter of wallowing in subjectivity, but of coolly appraising our own performance. In the words of Hans Selye, whose work on stress opened new frontiers in biology and psychiatry, the individual can “consciously look for signs of being keyed up too much.” Heart palpitations, tremours, insomnia or unexplained fatigue may well signal overstimulation, just as confusion, unusual irritability, profound lassitude and a panicky sense that things are slipping out of control are psychological indications. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
By observing ourselves, looking back over changes in our recent past, we can determine whether we are operating comfortably within our adaptive range or pressing its outer limits. We can, in short, consciously assess our own life pace. Having done this, we can also begin consciously to influence it—speeding it up or slowing it down—first with respect to small things, the micro-environment, and then in terms of the larger, structural patterns of experience. We can learn how by scrutinizing our own unpremeditated responses to overstimulation. We employ a de-stimulating tactic, for example, when we storm into the teen-ager’s bedroom and turn off a stereo unit that has been battering our eardrums with unwanted and interruptive sounds. When the noise level drops, we virtually sign with relief. We act to reduce sensory bombardments in other ways, too—when we pull down the blinds to darken a room, or search for silence on a deserted strip of the beach. We may flip on an air conditioner not so much to loser the temperature as to mask novel and unpredictable street sounds with a steady, predictable drone. When we want to decrease novel sensory input, we close doors, wear sunglasses, avoid smelly places and shy away from touching strange surfaces. Similarly, when we choose a familiar route home from the office, instead of turning a fresh corner, we opt for a sensory non-novelty. We employ “sensory shielding”—a thousand subtle behavioural tricks to “turn off” sensory stimuli when they approach our upper adaptive limit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
We use similar tactics to control the level of cognitive stimulation. Even the best of students periodically gazes out the window, blocking out the teacher, shutting off the flow of new data from the source. Even voracious readers sometimes go through periods when they cannot bear to pick up a book or a magazine. Why, during a gregarious evening at a friend’s house, odes one person in the group refuse to learn a new card game while others urger one on? Many factors play a part: the self-esteem of the individual, the fear of seeming foolish, and so on. However, one overlooked factor affecting willingness to learn may well be the general level of cognitive stimulation in the individual’s life at the time. “Do not bother me with new facts!” is a phrase usually uttered in jest. However, the joke often disguises a real wish to avoid being pressed too hard by new data. This accounts in part for our specific choices of entertainment—of leisure-time reading, movies or television programs. Sometimes we seek a high novelty ratio, a rich flow of information. At other moments we actively resist cognitive stimulation and reach for “light” entertainment. The typical detective yarn, for example, provides a trace of unpredictability—whodunnit? —within a carefully structured ritual framework, a set of non-novel, hence easily predictable relationships. In this way, we employ entertainment as a device to raise or lower stimulation, adjusting our intake rates so as to not overload our capacities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
By making more conscious use of such tactics, we can “fine-tune” or micro-environment. We can also cut down on unwanted stimulation by acting to lighten our cognitive burdens. “Trying to remember too many things is certainly of one the major sources of psychological stress,” writes Dr. Selye. “I make a conscious effort to forget immediately all that is unimportant and to jot down data of possible value. This technique can help anyone to accomplish the greatest simplicity compatible with the degree of complexity of one’s intellectual life.” We also act to regulate the flow of decisioning. When we are suffering from decision overload, we postpone decisions or delegate the to others. Sometimes we “freeze up” decisionally. I have seen a sociologist, just returned from a crowded, highly stimulating professional conference, sit down in a restaurant and absolutely refuse to make any decisions whatever about one’s meal. “What would you like?” her husband asked. “You decide for me,” she replied. When pressed to choose between specific alternatives, she still explicitly refused, insisting angrily that she lacked the “energy” to make the decision. Through such methods we attempt, as best we can, to regulate the flow of sensory, cognitive and decisional stimulation, perhaps also attempting in some complicated and as yet unknown way to balance them with one another. However, we have stronger ways of coping with the threat to overstimulation. These involve attempts to control the rates of transience, novelty and diversity in our milieu. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
All thinking must renounce the attempt to explain the Universe. The spirit of the Universe is at once destructive and creative—it creates while it destroys, and destroys while it creates, and we must inevitably resign ourselves to this. As we acquire more knowledge, things do not become more comprehensible but more mysterious. On several occasions I have mentioned that perhaps the most important primary good is that of self-respect. We must make sure that the conception of goodness as rationality explains why this should be so. We may define self-respect (or self-esteem) as having two aspects. First of all, as we noted earlier, it includes a person’s sense of one’s own values, one’s secure conviction that one’s conception of one’s good, one’s plan of life, is worth carrying out. And second, self-respect implies a confidence in one’s ability, so far as it is within one’s power, to fulfill one’s intentions. When we feel that our plans are of little value, we cannot purse them with pleasure or take delight in their execution. Nor plague by failure and self-doubt can we continue in our endeavours. It is clear then why self-respect is a primary good. Without it nothing may seem worth doing, or if some things have value for us, we lack the will to strive for them. All desire and activity becomes empty and vain, and we sink into apathy and cynicism. Therefore the parties in the original positions would wish to avoid at almost any cost the social conditions that undermine self-respect. The fact that justice as fairness gives more support to self-esteem than our principles is a strong reason for them to adopt it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
The conception of goodness as rationality allows us to characterize more fully the circumstances that support the first aspect of self-esteem, the sense of our own worth. These are essentially two: having a rational plan of life, and in particular one that satisfies the Aristotelian Principle (other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of their realized capacities, their innate or trained abilities, and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity is); and finding our person and deeds appreciated and confirmed by others who are likewise esteemed and their association enjoyed. I assume then that someone’s plan to life will lack a certain attraction to one if it fails to call upon one’s natural capacities in an interesting fashion. When activities fail to satisfy the Aristotelian Principle, they are likely to seem dull and flat, and to give us no feeling of competence or a sense that they are worth doing. When one’s abilities are both fully realized and organized in ways of suitable complexity and refinement, a person tends to be more confident of one’s value. However, the companion effect of the Aristotelian Principle influences the extent to which others confirm and take pleasure in what we do. For while it is true that unless our endeavours are appreciated by our associates it is impossible for us to maintain the conviction that they are worthwhile, it is also true that others tend to value them only if what we do elicits their admiration or gives them pleasure. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Thus activities that display intricate and subtle talent, and manifest discrimination and refinement, are valued both the person oneself and those around one. Moreover the more someone experiences one’s own way of life as worth fulfilling, the more likely one is to welcome our attainments. One who is confident in oneself is not grudging n appreciation of others. Putting these remarks together, the conditions for persons respecting themselves and one another would seem to require that their common plan be both rational and complementary: they call upon their educated endowments and arouse in each a sense of mastery, and they fit together into a scheme of activity that all can appreciate and enjoy. Now it may be thought that these stipulations cannot be generally satisfied. One might suppose that only in a limited association of highly gifted individual united in the pursuit of common artistic, scientific, or social ends is anything of this sort possible. There would seem to be no way to establish an enduring basis of self-respect throughout society. Yet this surmise is mistaken. The application of the Aristotelian Principle is always relative to the individual and therefore to one’s national assets and particular situation. It normally suffices that for each person there is some association (one of more) to which one belongs and within which the activities that are rational for one are publicly affirmed by others. In this way we acquire a sense that what we do in everyday life is worthwhile. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Moreover, associative ties strengthen the second aspect of self-esteem, since they tend to reduce the likelihood of failure and to provide support against the sense of self-doubt when mishaps occur. To be sure, humans have varying capacities and abilities, and what seems interesting and challenging to some will not seem so to others. Yet in a well-ordered society anyway, there are a variety of communities and associations, and the members of each have their own ideals appropriately matched to their aspirations and talents. Judged by the doctrine of perfectionism, the activities of many groups may not display a high degree of excellence. However, not matter. What counts is that the internal life of these associations is suitably adjusted to the abilities and wants of those belonging to them, and provides a secure basis for the sense of worth of their members. The absolute level of achievement, even if it could be defined, is irrelevant. However, in any case, as citizens we are to reject the standard of perfection as a political principle, and for the purposes of justice avoid any assessment of the relative value of one another’s way of life. Thus what is necessary is that there should be for each person at least one community of shared interests to which one belongs and where one finds one’s endeavours confirmed by one’s associates. And for the most part this assurance is sufficient whenever in public life citizens respect one another’s ends and adjudicate their political clams in way that also support their self-esteem. It is precisely his background condition that is maintained by the principles of justice. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Th parties in the original position do not adopt the principle of perfection, for rejecting this criterion prepares the way to recognize the good of all activities that fulfill the Aristotelian Principle (and are compatible with the principles of justice). This democracy in judging each other’s aims is the foundation of self-respect in a well-ordered society. Now we may characterize shame as the feeling that someone has when one experiences an injury to one’s self-respect or suffers a blow to one’s self-esteem. Shame is painful since it is the loss of a prized good. There is a distinction however between shame and regret that should be noted. The latter is a feeling occasioned by the loss of most any sort of good, as when we regret having done something either imprudently or inadvertently that resulted in harm to ourselves. In explain regret we focus say on the opportunities missed of the means squandered. Yet we ma also regret having done something that put us to shame, or even having failed to carry out a plan of life that established a basis for our self-esteem. Thus we may regret the lack of a sense of our own worth. Regret is the general feeling aroused by the loss of absence of what we think good for us, whereas shame is the emotion evoked by shocks to our self-respect, a special kind of good. Now both regret and shame are self-regarding, but shame implies an especially intimate connection with our person and with those upon whom we depend to confirm the sense of our own worth. Also, shame is sometimes a moral feeling, a principle of right being cited to account for it. We must find an explanation of these facts. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Let us distinguish between things that are good primarily for us (for the ones who possess them) and attributes of our person that are good both for us and for others as well. These two classes are not exhaustive but they indicate the relevant contrast. Thus commodities and items of property (exclusive goods) are goods mainly for those who own them and have use of them, and for others only indirectly. On the other hand, imagination and wit, beauty and grace, and other natural assets and abilities of the person are goods for others too: they are enjoyed by our associates as well as ourselves when properly displayed and rightly exercised. They form the human means for complementary activities in which person join together and take pleasure in their own and one another’s realization of their nature. This class of good constitutes the excellences: they are the characteristics and abilities of the person that it is rational for everyone (including ourselves) to want us to have. From our standpoint, the excellences are goods since they enable us to carry out a more satisfying plan of life enhancing our sense of mastery. At the same time these attributes are appreciated by those with whom we associate, and the pleasure they take in our person and in what we do supports our self-esteem. Thus the excellences are a condition of human flourishing; they are goods from everyone’s point of view. These facts relate them to the conditions of self-respect, and account for their connection with our confidence in our own value. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Considering first natural shame, it arises not from a loss or absence of exclusive goods, or at least not directly, but from the injury to our self-esteem owning to our not having or failing to exercise certain excellences. The lack of things primarily good for us would be an occasion for regret but not for shame. Thus one may be ashamed of one’s appearance or slow-wittedness. Normally these attributes are not voluntary and so they do not render us blameworthy; yet given the tie between shame and self-respect, the reason for being downcast by them is straightforward. With these defects our way of life is often less fulfilling and we receive less appreciative support from others. Thus natural shame is aroused by blemishes in our person, or by acts and attributes indicative thereof, that manifest the loss or lack of properties that others as well as ourselves would find it rational for us to have. However, as qualification is necessary. It is our plan of life that determines what we feel ashamed of, and so feelings of shame are relative to our aspirations, to what we try to do and with whim we wish to associate. Those with no musical ability do not strive to become musicians and feel no shame for this lack. Indeed it is no lack at all, not least if satisfying assocations can be formed by doing other things. Thus we should say that given our plan of life, we tend to be ashamed of those defects in our person and failures in our actions that indicate a loss or absence of the excellences essential to our carrying out our more important associative aims. We are like waves that do not move individually but rise and fall in rhythm. To share, to rise and fall in rhythm with life around us, is a spiritual necessity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When one prizes as excellences of one’s person those virtues that one’s plan of life requires and is framed to encourage, someone is liable for moral shame. One regards the virtues, or some of them anyway, as properties that one’s associates want in one and that one wants in oneself. To possess these excellences and to express them in one’s actions are among one’s regulative aims and are felt to be a condition of one’s being valued and esteemed by those with whom one cares to associate. Actions and traits that manifest or betray the absence of these attributes in one’s person are likely then to occasion shame, and so is the awareness of recollection of these defects. Since shame springs from a feeling of the diminishment of self, we must explain how moral shame can be so regarded. First of all, the Kantian interpretation of the original position means that the desire to do what is right and just is the main way for persons to express their nature as free and equal rational beings. And from the Aristotelian Principle it follows that this expression of their nature is a fundamental element of their good. Combined with the account of moral worth, we have, then, that the virtues are excellences. They are good from the standpoint of ourselves as well as from that of others. The lack of them will tend to undermine both our self-esteem and the esteem that our associates have for us. Therefore indications of these faults will wound one’s self-respect with accompanying feelings of shame. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
Love cannot be put under a system of rules and regulations. It issues absolute commands. Each of us must decide for oneself how far one can go towards carrying out the boundless commandment of love without surrendering one’s own existence and must decide, too, how much of one’s life and happiness one must sacrifice to the life and happiness of others. A man and a woman have not experienced everything together in life unless, looking at each other, they have involuntarily asked the questions: What would become of you without me? It is instructive to observe the differences between the feelings of moral shame and guilt. Although both may be occasioned by the same action, they do not have the same explanation. Imagine for example someone who cheats or gives int o cowardice and then feels both guilty and ashamed. One feels guilty because one has acted contrary to one’s sense of right and justice. By wrongly advancing one’s interests one has transgressed the rights of others, and one’s feelings of guilt will be more intense if one has ties of friendship and association to the injured parties. One expects others to be resentful and indignant at one’s conduct, and one fears their righteous anger and the possibility of reprisal. Yet one also feels ashamed because one’s conduct shows that one has failed to achieve the good of self-command, and one has been found unworthy of one’s associates upon whom one depends to confirm one’s sense of one’s own worth. One is apprehensive lest they reject one and find one contemptible, an object of ridicule. In one’s behaviour one has betrayed a lack of the moral excellences one prizes and to which one aspires. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
We see, then, that being excellences of our person which we bring to the affairs of social life, all of the virtues may be sought and their absence may render us liable to shame. However, some virtues are joined to shame in a special way, since they are peculiarly indicative of the failure to achieve self-command and its attendant excellences of strength, courage, and self-control. Wrongs manifesting the absence of these qualities are especially likely to subject us to painful feelings of shame. Thus while the principles of right and justice are used to describe the actions disposing us to feel both moral shame and guilt, the perspective is different in each case. In the one we focus on the infringement of the just claims of others and the injury we have done to them, and on their probable resentment or indignation should they discover our deed. Whereas in the other we are struck by the loss to our self-esteem and our inability to carry out our aims: we sense the diminishment of self from our anxiety about the lesser respect that others may have for us and from our disappointment with ourself for failing to live up to our ideals. Moral, shame, and guilt, it is clear, both involve our relation to others, and each is an expression of our acceptance of the first principles of right and justice. Nevertheless, these emotions occur within different points of view, our circumstances being seen in contrasting ways. We must become good plowmen. Hope is the prerequisite of plowing. What sort of farmer plows the furrow in the autumn but has no hope for the spring? #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
So, too, we accomplish nothing without hope, without a sure inner hope that a new age is about to dawn. Hope is strength. The energy in the World is equal to the hope in it. And even if only a few people share such hopes, a power is created which nothing can hold down—it inevitably spears to others. The second essential of plowing is silence. We must learn that all of our talking and planning is powerless. Modest, quiet work in the kingdom of God is the order of the day. The third need when plowing is to work in the solitude. We expect all kinds of salvation from meetings, congresses, and organized cooperation. However, we deceive ourselves. The most blessed labours can only be accomplished alone, and that is just what we must learn—to work independently. Even if several plowmen plow one field, each follows one’s own plow. They do not talk to one another; each sees one’s neighbour and senses the nearness to one’s fellow worker, all bound together in a common, wordless task. Whether out in this World of happenings or deep within the mind in a Heaven of beauty and peace, the observer is the same; but in the first case one is the little limited ego and in the second case one is THAT from which the ego draws its sustenance—the Overself. If there is not to be an endless series of observers, which would be unthinkable, there must be an ultimate one, itself unobserved and self-illuminated. Somewhere at the hidden core of human’s being there is light, goodness, power, and tranquility. The infinite divine life dwells within all embodied creatures, therefore in all humankind. It is the final source of one’s feelings and one’s consciousness, however limited they are here in the body itself. “If you honour the LORD with your possessions and with the first fruits of all your increase; then you will have plenty and have overflow,” reports Proverbs 3.9-10. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
There is nothing else like it; nothing with which the Overself could be compared. It has no form to be pictured and weighed, measures and numbered; it makes no movement to be timed and no sound to be registered on the ear drum. It could be said that the innermost essence of humans, be it one’s heart or one’s mind, is the Overself. No person can hope to discover what God is like since human beings do not possess the proper faculties for such an undertaking. The best one can do is to create for oneself an idea or interpretation of God that will suit one’s understanding and help one. Some people call it by different names; in fact, I have referred to it as the Soul, the Overself, the Higher Self, the True Self, and so on—all of which are quite correct. The word Overmind should never have been introduced but not that it is here it must be explained. There is only one Reality. The nearest notion we can form of it is that it is something mental. If we think of it as being the sum total of all individual minds, then it is Overmind; if we can rise higher and know that it cannot be totalized, it is Overself. The first explanation was originally introduced to explain why abnormal phenomena can happen but not as a final explanation of what Mind and Reality are. People have confused the two aim. Actually there is only One thing, whatever you call it, but it can be studied from different standpoints and thus we get different results. That thing is Mind—unindividuated, infinite. The planetary overmine is the active aspect of the Overself but still only an aspect. “If you first seek the LORD and His righteousness, then all things you need and desire will be added unto you,” reports Matthew 6.33. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
The overmind works with space and time although the latter assumes dimensions far beyond that with which waking human capacity can cope. The Overself in its passive purity is timeless and spaceless. The Overself has not expressed itself in matter simply because there is no matter! It has not improved itself by evolution, but finite, individual minds have done so. The universal gods are the Overminds, the sum totals of each system—that is, concepts of the human mind which are dropped by the adept when they have served their purpose in brining him to That which is unlimited. Seek the kingdom first, and all these occult powers will be added unto you. The point in the heart is a focus for prayer and also an experience during prayer. When, however, one rises to the ultimate path one disregards the heart because the Overself has nothing to do with localities or geography of any kind; it cannot be measured. It is often asked why we have so little contact with the Overself, why it is so hard to find the clues which shall lead us to it. There is more within one of the good than a human suspects, even though experience may make one believe otherwise. However, it lies in deeper layer, hence it needs a longer time to bring it up. It is not the Reality found by speculation or thinking alone, for intellect can err. It is the Reality found by the mystic intuition of mystic experience, by Reason (as opposed to intellect) of Philosophy, and verified by a realization more immediate and intimate then the ego of ordinary life, with its passions, emotions, and thoughts, and deeper than anything every before experienced. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
There is no single term satisfactory on all points for use when referring to THAT. The name “Overself” is no exception to this situation. However, to those who object to this coinage of the new word, the answer is best given by the editor of the latest edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage, Sir Ernest Gowers: “I am all in favour of new words. How else would a language live and flourish?” It is the observer which is itself unobserved. It is as difficult to trace the spiritual source of a human’s life as it is to trace the mathematical source of pi, of 3.14159…We may try o make this idea as clearly definable as we can, but nothing put into words can in the end be more than a hint, a clue, or merely suggestive. Just as the pearl is well hidden within the oyster and not apparent until searched for, so the Overself is well hidden in humans. The Christ-self who was Jesus is in us too. It is like nothing that we know from experience or can picture from imagination. Space does not hold it. Time does not condition it. There are some truths which are durable ones. Change cannot change them. This is one of them. If most humans fail to recognize the Overself, if they deny its presence in Nature or in themselves, can they be blamed? What else is so elusive? It was, I believe, Matthew Arnold who first used this term “higher self,” and it is certainly expressive enough for our present purpose. Here is one thing which does not have to move with the times, although the communication of it and instruction in it, do. Here is the concentrated ultimate essence of one’s being. In this spiritual self we may find the origin of life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
That which is within us as the Overself, being Godlike, is out of time and enteral. There is something within one which is without personal existence, without a name, and without scrutable face. It is the Overself. Here is the beginning, the middle, and the end of all wisdom. All power and all intelligence reside within. It is “the sacred spirit dwelling within us, observer and guardian of all our evil and our good” of Seneca. The Overself is shrouded in seemingly inaccessible and impenetrable mystery. In the gravest depths of a human’s being one will find, not fouling slime an evil, but cleansing divinity and goodness. This is the irreducible essence of a human, where God is. It is inaccessible to the intellect, unknowable by ordinary egoistic humans. Yet there are some into whose consciousness It has entered. It is a felt presence. That from which the intellect’s power recoils and the ego’s pride suffers—that is the Overself! It embodies several true principles regarding communication from the Lord to His children here on Earth. I believe that you can leave the most precious, personal direction of the Spirit unheard because you do not respond to, record, and apply the first promptings that come to you. Impressions of the Spirit can come in response to urgent prayer or unsolicited when needed. Sometimes the Lord reveals truth to you when you are not actively seeking it, such as when you are in danger and do not know it. However, the Lord will not force you to learn. You must exercise your agency to authorize the Spirit to teach you. As you make this a practice in your life, you will be more perceptive to the feelings that come with spiritual guidance. Then, when that guidance comes, sometimes when you least expect it, you will recognize it more easily. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
One is not separate from one’s own experience, not an observer watching it. For there is only the inner silence, with which one is identified if one turns to examine the I, only the pure consciousness. It is the presence of the Overself within us which makes more consciousness possible, whether it be the consciousness of the dream or the consciousness of waking. There are two biblical quotations, one from the Song of Solomon and one from Saint Paul, that accurately refer to the Overself. This indeed is the real soul of humans, whose findings here and now, during our life on Earth is the task silently set us by life itself. That which finds itself and lives within one, works through one and is the God within: a holy Presence. The inspiring influence of the Holy Spirit can be overcome or masked by strong emotions, such as anger, hate, passion, fear, or pride. When such influences are present, it is like trying to savour the delicate flavour of D’Artagnan Foie Gras while eating a Frrrozen Haute Chocolate ice cream sundae. Both flavours are present, but one completely overpowers the other. In like manner, strong emotions overcome delicate promptings of the Holy Spirit. Through our efforts, the chains of bondage will fall from around us, and the darkness surrounding our community will clear away, that light may shine upon all of society and we shall hear the spirit World of the work that has been done for us by our people here, and we will rejoice in our collective performance of these duties. May we be filled with the Spirit of the Lord as we listen and learn. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
It was meant to be that life would be a challenge. To suffer some anxiety, some depression, some disappointment, even some failure is normal. If you have a good, miserable day once in a while, or several in a row, stand steady and face them. Things will straighten out. There is great purpose in our struggle in life. Happiness is written in such a way that is we continue to trust in God and follow His commandments through the challenging times, even those times will bring us close to the happiness we are seeking. The Saviour said, “In the World ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the World,” reports John 16.33. The Saviour, Jesus Christ, showed us the way to happiness and told us everything we need to do to be happy. As we study the teachings of the Saviour and thereby understand the purpose of our existence, we feel and express our happiness. In the Doctrine and Covenants, the Lord said that we should worship Him “with a glad heart and cheerful countenance,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 59.15. We can experience a speedier and more sure course to our “ever-after happiness” by developing certain habits and attitudes that encourage happiness. I am an optimist. My plea is that we stop seeking out storms and enjoy more fully the sunlight. I am suggesting that as we go through life, we “accentuate the good.” Father, I come to Thou in the name of Jesus Christ. I ask Thou to forgive me for all my sins and the sins of my forefathers. Let all transgression and iniquities be cleansed by the blood of Jesus Christ. Right now, I break every spirit of poverty on my life in the name of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
No devourer will destroy the fruit of my labour. I break every curse of failure and lack in the name of our Saviour, Jesus Christ. I repent for any breaking of covenant with Thou tithe and offerings, LORD. I asked and receive forgiveness for disobedience and touching anything that is holy to Thou in the name of Jesus Christ. Let the rod of iron fall on any strange money that has passed through me in the name of Jesus Christ. I decree and declare, I am blessed of God! I break myself loose from the bondage of stagnancy and lack in the mighty name of Jesus! I am created to be fruitful and to multiply, to fill the Earth and subdue it. I have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the Heavens and over every living thing that moves on the Earth. Every curse of poverty, barrenness, unproductiveness, and ineffectiveness is broken off me in the name of Jesus! I am fruitful! The blessing of the LORD overtake me! Amen. “If you respect the LORD, you will lack nothing,” reports Psalm 34.9. I do invocate and conjure Thee, O Spirit, GUSION; and being with power armed from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command Thee, by BERALANENSIS, BALADACHIRNSIS, PAUMACHIA, and APOLOGIAE SEDES; by the most Power Princes, Genii, Liachidae, and Ministers of the Taratrean Abode; and by the Chief Prince of the Seat of Apologia in the Ninth Legion, I do invoke Thee, and by invoking conjure Thee. And being armed with power from the SUPREME MAJESTY, I do strongly command Thee, by Him Who spake and it was done, and unto whom all creatures be obedient. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
Also, I being made after the image of GOD, endued with power from GOD and created according unto His will, do exorcise Thee that most mighty and powerful name of God, EL, strong and wonderful; O Thou Spirit, ZAGAN. And I command Thee and Him who spake the Word and HIS FIAT was accomplished, and by all the names of God. Also by the names ADONAI, EL, ELOHIM, ELOHI, EHYEH, ASHER EHYEH, ZABAOTH, ELION, IAH, TETRAGRAMMATON, SHADDAI, LORD GOD MOST HIGH, I do exorcise Thee and do powerfully command Thee, O Thou Spirit, VOLAC, that Thou dost forthwith appear unto me here before this Circle in a fair human shape, without any deformity or tortuosity. And by this ineffable name, TETRAGRAMMATON IEHOVAH, do I command Thee, at the which being heard the elements are overthrown, the air is shaken, the sea runneth back, the fire is quenched, the Earth trembelth, and all the hosts of the celestials, terrestrials, and infernals do tremble together, and are troubled and confounded. Wherefore come Thou, O Spirit CIMEJES, forthwith, and without delay, from any or all parts of the World wherever Thou mayest be, and make rational answers unto all things that I shall demand of Thee. Come Thou peaceably, visibly, and affably, now, and without delay, manifesting that which I shall desire. For Thou art conjured by the name of the LIVING and TRUE GOD, HELIOREN, wherefore fulfill Thou my commands, and persist Thou therein unto the end, and according unto mine interest, visibly and affably speaking unto me with a voice clear and intelligible without any ambiguity. “Jesus Christ has redeemed you and opened the door so that the blessing of Abraham can come to you. By faith, you receive the promise,” reports Galatians 3.14. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Winchester Mystery House
What do you think motivated Sarah Winchester to keep building?
▪️ Built over 38 years
▪️ 24,000 square feet
▪️ 10,000 windows
▪️ 2,000 doors
▪️ 160 rooms
▪️ 52 skylights
▪️ 47 stairways and fireplaces
▪️ 17 chimneys
▪️ 13 bathrooms
▪️ 6 kitchens
In all my life I have met only one person who claims to have seen a ghost. And the interesting thing about the story is that that person disbelieved in the immortal soul before she saw the ghost and still disbelieves after seeing it. She says that what she saw must have been an illusion or a trick of the nerves. And obviously she may be right. Seeing is not believing. It was certainly not surprising that she had been researching the Devil’s Bible. We scholars like to call it the Codex Gigas—literally, “giant book,” it is an ancient text. It was the biggest book of the Middle Ages and compiled the most important historical and religious documents of its time. It was once considered an eighth wonder of the World. Giant, indeed. Monumental, even. Much like the Winchester mansion, it is unique, one of a kind, there is simply no other book like it in the World—not then, not now. And yet we know so little about it. Where was it scripted? What happened to the legendary missing pages? Who took them? And why? We have not even answered the most basic mystery of all: Who wrote it? A distorted, horned beast, clothed only in an ermine loincloth, split-tongue flickering and clawed hands? Was it the Devil, as legend claims? Did poor Herman the monk, walled up in his cell, eventually admit the impossibility of his penitent task—to write a single book containing all the World’s knowledge—and call on Satan to rescue him? Of course, it was not some demonic conspiracy any more than it was ancient angels. However, we have let the myth work their magic on us all the same. It is shrouded in mystery. No one even knows who wrote it or even where it was written. It is as mysterious as the blueprints to the Winchester mansion, where are they?
Did you know Adam and Eve had two sons? Cain, which means a possession, and Abel, which signifies sorrow. Michelanglo’s vision told a dark tale of the Fall of Man and a judgmental God. Michelangelo’s tormented souls had the hope of redemption. God willed, and Heaven and Earth, water, air, fire, the angels, and darkness came into being from nothing. Darkness is a self-existent nature. Other say that it is the shadow of bodies. When the soul goes froth from the body, the angles go with it: then the hosts of darkness come forth to meet it, seeking to seize and examine it, to see if there be anything of theirs in it. The angels do not fight with the host of darkness, but those deeds which the soul has wrought protect it and guard it. If its deeds be victorious, then the angels sing praises before it until it meets God with joy. Redemption comes when we choose it, and not once, but over and over again. Long is the way, and hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light. Reach into the depths of your soul. Tell yourself that you are immortal. Tell yourself that death has no power over you. A glorious thing has befallen you here in the darkness. Do you know that the ancient Persians, they thought that during the last millennia before the final Resurrection humans would gradually turn away from the eating of meat and milk, and even plants, and that they would be sustained only on water? Pure water. And then would come the Resurrection. There are those who believe our Earthly bodies are only one biological stage, that spirits constitute another, that it is all a matter of atoms of particles.
The Winchester mansion is shrouded in mystery. There are many old stories about Sarah Winchester having unusual powers—an ability to call spirits, and ability to read minds, to know the future. When Mrs. Winchester was alive, few people outside the family ever got to see the interior of that mysterious Winchester Mansion. The Winchesters are a haunted family. Before when there was a nine-story tower, no one would go near that mansion. For years, it was a dreadful ghost. He did a lot more than push people off the tower. Besides this illustrious ghost, surrounding the Winchesters was talk of genetic mutations. They were half-ghost, a “halfa.” There genetic structure was fused with ectoplasm. People say the Winchesters had the ability to change between human and ghost forms at will, and possessed the same supernatural powers that ghost have. Legend has it that the family was exposed to an intense amount of ectoplasmic energy in New Haven, Connecticut. Oliver Fisher Winchester was the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The Winchester Rifle is hailed, “The Gun that Won the West.” It was used during the civil war in which approximately 750,000 soldiers were left dead, along with an undetermined number of civilians. It was those most deadliest military conflict in American history, and accounted for more American military deaths than all other wars combined until the Vietnam War.
At a time when black magic was relatively common, there was a curse cast on Oliver Winchester as the result of Alse Young’s husband, John Young, being killed by a Winchester rifle during the civil war. Alse Young had entered into a compact with the devil before she was chained to a tree and burned. The witch placed a curse on the Winchester family tree that they would have a hereditary blood disease. When Willian Wirt Winchester was born, he appeared frail, and required strict attention, as he bruised quickly from even the slightest bump. The nanny nicked named him “The Bleeding Prince” because he would bleed a lot and it was hard to stop. He would often bleed for years and the doctors had no idea what to do. Because he was an heir of the Winchester rifle and had a bleeding problem, legend has it that this opened a demon portal, and it started spawning demons—angry souls that were willed by the Winchester rifle. The curse rearranged William Winchester’s molecules and genetic structure. People knew who Mr. Winchester was because he would hemorrhage easily, often times coughing up blood as thick as jelly, he was very thin, had pain in his chest, and fatigue. He was so faint and pale that at times he appeared almost invisible. Town’s people said before he died he was often change into a ghost, then back into human form before their eyes. When Annie Winchester, Willam and Sarah’s daughter was born in 1866, she would often vanish, and it was unexplainable. Six weeks after she was born, little Annie vanished from her crib and was never seen again. No one had any idea what happened to her so they declared her dead.
It was also reported the Annie suffered from Marasmus, which is a severe malnutrition characterized by energy deficiency. The baby simply refused to eat and could not digest her food. A medium said this was because of the genetic curse and that the baby was born as ghost. Almost exactly 15 years to the date after the death of their daughter, the curse overcame William Winchester, and he was said to have died from Tuberculosis, but others think he was hemophiliac, and that his lungs filled with plasma and drowned in his own blood. Sarah Winchester was in a deep grief about what happened to her husband and daughter and wanted to find out how she could escape this curse. A witch told Mrs. Winchester because she was a Winchester by marriage, she was not cursed, but to keep the cruse from spreading to other generations, she would need to move West, and build a mansion to house all the spirits and never stop building or she would inherit the curse, too. The Winchester Legacy involves billions. It is like the capital of a small country. And Mrs. Winchester inherited an unimaginable fortune. Construction on the Winchester Mansion went on nonstop for 38-years, until her death 5 September 1922. Mrs. Winchester was one of the wealthiest women in the World. When she was not happy with a room, she would tear it down, or have it boarded up. Some suspect it was to keep something in. Evidence that Mrs. Winchester’s restless spirit was haunting the mansion began immediately after her death and continues even today. Some witnesses and paranormal investigators are also convinced that legions of other ghosts haunt the mansion as well. You ought to take the advantage of the privilege to visit one of the most unique places in the World.
Winchester Mystery House
A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com
115 years ago today, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake rocked the Winchester Mystery House at 5.13am. Trapped in the Daisy Bedroom, Sarah Winchester and her mansion would never be the same.
Read More Here:
👉 http://ow.ly/Bann50z95WM
We Laugh at Honour and are Shocked to Find Traitors in our Midst!
People are the same most everywhere you go, they just make their living in different ways. A thing’s being a good X for K is treated as equivalent to its having the properties which it is rational for K to want in an X in view of one’s interests and aims. Yet we often assess the rationality of a person’s desires, and the definition must be extended to over this fundamental case if it is to serve the purposes of the theory of justice. Now the basic idea at the third stage is to apply the definition of good to plans of life. The rational plan for a person determines one’s good. A person may be regarded as a human life lived according to a plan. An individual says who one is by describing one’s purposes and causes, what one intends to do in one’s life. This plan is characterized by the coherent, systematic purpose of the individual and it makes one a conscious, unified moral person. If this plan is a rational one, then I say that the person’s conception of one’s good is likewise rational. In one’s case the real and the apparent good coincide. Similarly one interests and aims are rational, an it is appropriate to take them as stopping points in making judgments that correspond to the first two stages of the definition. These suggestions are quite straightforward but unfortunately setting out the details is somewhat tedious. Both the inward and outward lives of every human are controlled by a concealed entity—the Overself. Could one but see aright, one would see that everything witnesses to its presence and activity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A person’s plan for life is rational if, and only if, it is one of the plans that is consistent with the principles of rational choice when these are applied to all the relevant features of one’s situation, and it is that plan among those meeting this condition which would be chosen by one with full deliberative rationality, that is, with full awareness of the relevant fact and after a careful consideration of the consequences. For simplicity I assume that there is one and only one plan that would be chosen, and not several (or many) between which the agent would be indifferent, or whatever. Thus I speak throughout of the plan that would be adopted with deliberative rationality. Secondly, a person’s interests and aims are rational if, and only if, they are to be encouraged and provided for by the plan that is rational for one. Note that in the first of these definitions I have implied that a rational plan is presumably but one of many possible reason for this complication is that these principles do not single out one plan as the best. We have instead a maximal class of plans: each member of this class is superior to all plans not included in it, but given any two plans in the class, neither is superior or inferior to the other. Thus to identify person’s rational plan, I suppose that it is that plan belonging to the maximal class which one would choose with full deliberative rationality. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We criticize someone’s plan, then, by showing either that it violates the principles of rational choice, or that it is not the plan that one would pursue were one to assess one’s prospects with care in the light of a full knowledge of one’s situation. A rational plan is fundamental for the definition of good, since a rational plan of life establishes the basic point of view from which all judgments of value relating to a particular person are to be made and final rendered consistent. Indeed, with certain qualification, we can think of a person as being happy when one in in the ways of a successful execution (more or less) of a rational plan of life drawn up under (more or less) favourable conditions, and one is reasonably confident that one’s plan can be carried through. Someone is happy when one’s plans are going well, one’s more important aspirations being fulfilled, and one feels sure that one’s good fortune will endure. Since plans which it is rational to adopt vary from person to person depending upon their endowments and circumstances, and the like, different individuals find their happiness in doing different things. The gloss concerning favourable circumstances is necessary because even a rational arrangement of one’s activities can be a matter of accepting the lesser evil if natural conditions are hard and the demands of humans oppressive. The achievement of happiness in the larger sense of a happy life, or of a happy period of one’s life, always presumes a degree of good fortune. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Several other points are important. The first relates to their time structure. A plan, will, to be sure, makes some provision for even the most distant future and for our death, but it becomes relatively less specific for later periods. Certain broad contingencies are insured against and general means provided for, but the details are filled in gradually as more information becomes available and our wants and needs are known with greater accuracy. Indeed, one principle of rational choice is that of postponement: if in the future we may want to do one of several things but are unsure which, then, other things equal, we are to plan now so that these alternatives are both kept open. We must not imagine that a rational plan is a detailed blueprint for action stretching over the whole course of life. It consists of hierarchy of plans, the more specific subplans being filled in at the appropriate time. The second point is connected with the first. The structure of a plan not only reflects the lack of specific information but it also mirrors a hierarchy of desires proceeding in similar fashion from the more to the less general. The main features of a plan encourage and secure the fulfillment of the more permanent and general aims. A rational plan must, for example, allow for the primary goods, since otherwise no plan can succeed; but the particular form that the corresponding desires will take is usually unknown in advance and can wait for the occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Thus while we know that over any extended period of time we shall always have desires for food and drink, it is not until the moment comes that we decide to have a meal consisting of this or that course. These decisions depend on the choices available, on the menu that the situation allows. Thus planning is in part scheduling. We try to organize our activities into a temporal sequence in which each is carred on for a certain length of time. In this way a family of interrelated desires can be satisfied in an effective and harmonious manner. The basic resources of time and energy are allotted to activities in accordance with the intensity of the wants that they answer to and the contributions that they are likely to make to the fulfillment of other ends. The aim of deliberation is to find that plan which best organizes our activities and influences the formation of our subsequent wants so that our aims and interests can be fruitfully combined into one scheme of conduct. Desires that tend to interfere with other ends, or which undermine the capacity for other activities, are weeded out; whereas those that are enjoyable in themselves and support other aims as well are encouraged. A plan, then, is made up of subplans suitably arranged in a hierarchy, the broad features of the plan allowing for the more permanent aims and interests that complement one another. Since only the outlines of these aims and interest can be foreseen, the operative parts of the subplans that provide for them are finally decided upon independently as we go along. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Revisions and changes at the lower levels do not usually reverberate through the entire structure. If this conception of plans is sound, we should expect that the good things in life are, roughly speaking, those activities and relationships which have a major place in rational plans. And primary goods should turn out to be those things which are generally necessary for carrying out such plans successfully whatever the particular nature of the plan and of its final ends. If future shock were a matter of physical illness alone, it might be easier to prevent and to treat. However, future shock attacks the psyche as well. Just as the body cracks under the strain of environmental overstimulation, the “mind” and its decision processes behave erratically when overloaded. By indiscriminately racing the engines of change, we may be undermining not merely the health of those least able to adapt, but their very ability to act rationally on their own behalf. The striking signs of confusional breakdown we see around us—the spreading use of drugs, the rise of mysticism, the recurrent outbreaks of vandalism and undirected violence, the politics of nihilism and nostalgia, the sick apathy of millions—can all be understood better by recognizing their relationship to future shock. These forms of social irrationality may well reflect the deterioration of individual decision-making under conditions of environmental overstimulation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Psychophysiologists studying the impact of change on various organisms have shown that successful adaptation can occur only when the level of stimulation—the amount of change and novelty in the environment—is neither too low nor too high. “The central nervous system of a higher animal,” says Professors D. E. Berlyne of the university of Toronto, “is designed to cope with environments that produce a certain rate of simulation. It will naturally not perform at its best in an environment that overstresses or overloads it.” He makes the same point about environments that understimulate it. Indeed, experiments with deer, dogs, mice and men all point unequivocally to the existence of what might be called an “adaptive range” below which and above which the individual’s ability to cope simply falls apart. Future shock is the response to overstimulation. It occurs when the individual is forced to operate above one’s adaptive range. Considerable research has been devoted to studying the impact of inadequate change and novelty on human performance. Studies of humans in isolated Antarctic outposts, experiments in sensory deprivation, investigations into on-the-job performance in factories, all show a falling off of mental and physical abilities in response to understimulation, but such evidence as does exist is dramatic and unsettling. Soldiers in battle find themselves trapped in environments that are rapidly changing, unfamiliar, and unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The soldier is torn this way and that. Shells burst on every side. Bullets whiz past erratically. Flares light the sky. Shouts, groans and explosions fill one’s ears. Circumstances change from instant to instant. To survive in such overstimulating environments, the solider is driven to operate in the upper reaches of one’s adaptive range. Sometimes, one is pushed beyond one’s limits. During World War II a bearded Chindit soldier, fighting with General Wingate’s forces behind the Japanese lines in Burma, actually fell asleep while a storm of machine gun bullets splattered around him. Subsequent investigation revealed that this solider was not merely reacting to physical fatigue or lack of sleep, but surrendering to a sense of overpowering apathy. Death-inviting lassitude was so common, in fact, among guerrilla troops who had penetrated behind enemy lines that British military physicians gave it a name. They termed in Long Range Penetration Strain. A soldier who suffered from it became, in their words, “incapable of doing the simplest thing for himself and seemed to have the mind of a child.” This deadly lethargy, moreover, was not confined to guerrilla troops. One year after the Chindit incident, similar symptoms cropped up en masse among the allied troops who invaded Normandy, and British researchers, after studying 5,000 American and English combat casualties, concluded that this strange apathy was merely the final stage in a complex process of psychological collapse. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Mental deterioration often began with fatigue. This was followed by confusion and nervous irritability. The human become hypersensitive to the slightest stimuli around one. One would “hit the dirt” at the least provocation. One showed signs of bewilderment. One seemed unable to distinguish the sound of enemy fire from other, less threatening sounds. One became tense, anxious, and heatedly irascible. One’s comrades never knew when one would flail out in anger, even violence, in response to minor inconvenience. Then the final stage of emotional exhaustion set in. The soldier seemed to lose the very will to live. One gave up the struggle to save oneself, to guide oneself rationally through the battle. One became, in the words of R. L. Swank, who headed the British investigation, “dull and listless…mentally and physically retarded, preoccupied.” Even one’s face became dull and apathetic. The fight to adapt had ended in defeat. The stage of total withdrawal was reached. That humans behave irrationally, acting against their own clear interest, when thrown into conditions of high change and novelty is also borne out by studies of human behaviour in times of fire, flood, earthquake, and other crises. Even the most stable and “normal” people, unhurt physically, can be hurled into anti-adaptive states. Often reduced to total confusion and mindlessness, they seem incapable of the most elementary rational decision-making. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Thus in a study of responses to tornadoes in Texas, H. E. Moore writers that “the first reaction may be one of dazed bewilderment, sometimes one of disbelief, or at least of refusal to accept the fact. This, it seems to us, is the essential explanation of the behaviour of persons and groups in Waco when it was devastated in 1953. On the personal level, it explains why a girl climbed into a music store through a broke display window, camply purcansed a record, and walked out again, even though the plate glass front of the building had blown out and articles were flying through the air inside the building.” A study of a tornado in Udall, Kansas, quotes a housewife saying: “After it was over, my husband and I just got up and jumped out of the window and ran. I do not know where we were running to but…I just did not care. I just wanted to run.” The classic disaster photograph shows a mother holding a dead or wounded baby in her arms, her face blank and numb as though she could no longer comprehend the reality around her. Sometimes she sits rocking gently on her porch with a doll, instead of a baby, in her arms. In disaster, therefore, exactly as in certain combat situations, individuals can be psychologically overwhelmed. Once again the source may be traced to a high level of environmental stimulation. The disaster victim finds oneself suddenly caught in a situation in which familiar objects and relationships are transformed. Where once one’s house stood, there maybe nothing more than smoke and rubble. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
One may encounter a cabin floating on the flood tide or a rowboat sailing through the air. The environment is filled with change and novelty. And once again the response is marked by confusion, anxiety, irritability, and withdrawal into apathy. Usually at times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress, that is when the mind turns towards the future, and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at the beginning of the Christian era, or of the spiritual changes in the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium. Today, as we are nearly a quarter of the way through the second millennium, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our civilization, and of humans themselves, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe? We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the New World there are subversive marginalized groups who, sheltered by out humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limits at about forty percent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of human’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconsistent, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness. Culture shock, the profound disorientation suffered by the traveler who has plunged without adequate preparation into an alien culture, provides a third example of adaptive breakdown. Here we find none of the obvious elements of war or disaster. The scene may be totally peaceful and riskless. Yet the situation demands repeated adaptation to novel conditions. Culture shock, according to psychologist Seven Lundstedt, is a “form of personality maladjustment which is a reaction to a temporarily unsuccessful attempt to adjust to new surroundings and people.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The culture shocked person, like the soldier and disaster victim, is forced to grapple with unfamiliar and unpredictable events, relationships and objects. One’s habitual ways of accomplishing things—even simple tasks like placing a telephone call—are no longer appropriate. The strange society may itself be changing only very slowly, yet for one it is all new. Signs, sounds, and other psychological cues rush past one before one can grasp their meaning. The entire experience takes on a surrealistic air. Every word, every action is shot through with uncertainty. In this setting, fatigue arrives more quickly than usual. Along with it, the cross-cultural traveler often experiences what Dr. Lundstedt describes as “a subjective feeling of loss, and a sense of isolation and loneliness.” The unpredictability arising from novelty undermines one’s sense of reality. Thus one longs, as Professor Lundstedt put it, “For an environment in which the gratification of important psychological and physical needs is predictable and less uncertain.” One becomes “anxious, confused, and other appears apathetic.” In fact, Dr. Lundstedt concludes, “culture shock can be viewed as a response to stress by emotional and intellectual withdraw.” It is hard to read these (and many other) accounts of behaviour breakdown under a variety of stresses without becoming acutely aware of their similarities. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
While there are differences, to be sure, between a soldier in combat, a disaster victim, and a culturally dislocated traveler, all three face rapid change, high novelty, or both. All three are required to adapt rapidly and repeatedly to unpredictable stimuli. And there are striking parallels in the way all three respond to this overstimulation. First, we find the same evidences of confusion, disorientation, or distortion of reality. Second, there are the same signs of fatigue, anxiety, tenseness, or extreme irritability. Third, in all cases there appears to be a point of no return—a point at which apathy and emotional withdraw set in. The available evidence strongly suggests that overstimulation may lead to bizarre and anti-adaptive behaviour. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic epidemic. Under these conditions all those elements whose existence is merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
For every manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out openly but whose views and behaviour, for all their appearance of normality, are influenced unconsciously by pathological and perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on the frequency of latent psychoses—for understandable reasons. However, even if their number should amount to less than ten times that of the manifest psychoses and manifest criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population figures they represent is more than compensated for by the peculiar dangerousness of these people. Their mental state is that of a collectively exited group ruled by affective judgments and wish-fantasies. In a milieu of this kind they are the adapted ones, and consequently they feel quite at home in it. They know from their own experience the language of these conditions, and they know how to handle them. Their chimerical idea, sustained by fanatical resentment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful soil there; they expressed all these motives and resentments which lurk in more normal people under the clock of reason and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The greatest question of our time is not communism versus individualism, not Europe verses America, not even the Old World versus the New World; it is whether humans can live without God. What is wrong? Hypocrisy, betrayal, and greed unsettle the nation’s soul. At a time of moral disarray, America seeks to rebuild a structure of values. Yet even in the midst of this long-overdue national soul-searching, who is to decide what are the “right” values? Does ultimate moral authority lie with institutions such as church and state to codify and impose? Or, in a free society, are these matters of private conscience, with final choice belonging to the individual? We live in a society in which all transcendent values have been removed and thus there is no moral standard by which anyone can say right is right and wrong is wrong. What we live in is a naked public square. On the surface, a value-free society sounds liberal, progressive, and enlightened. It certainly sounded that way to the generations of sixties and seventies—probably many of the same people now wringing their hands on the pages of Time. However, when the public square is naked, truth and values drift with the winds of public favour and there is nothing objective to govern how we are to live together. Why should we be shocked, then, by the inevitable consequences; why should we be surprised to discover that society yield what is planted? #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
When parents fail to set stnadards of right behaviour in the home, when school teachers will not offer a moral opinion in the classroom, either out of fear of litigation or because they cannot “come from a position of what is right and what is wrong,” one New Jersey teacher out it, why are we surprised that crime soars steadily among juveniles? When pleasures of the flesh are treated as casualy as going out for a Frosty at Wendy’s—why are we horrified at the growing consequences of sexual promiscuity—including a life-threatening epidemic? When they have been preaching a get-rich-quick gospel all along, way are we shocked at disclosures of religious leader bilking their ministries of millions? Why the wonderment over the fact that for enough dollars or sexual favours, government employees and military personnel sell out their nation’s secrets? We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. Why is it so surprising that Wall Street yuppies make fast millions on insider information or tax fraud? Without objective values, the community or one’s neighbour has no superior claim over one’s own desires. Whether we like to hear it or not, we are reaping the consequences of the decades since World War II when we have, in Solzhenitsyn’s words, “forgotten God.” What we have left is the reign of relativism. However, humanity cannot survive without some law. The truly naked public square is at best a transitional phenomenon. It is a vacuum begging to be filled. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Exercise belief in God and you are left with only two principle: the individual and the state. In this situation, however, there is no mediating structure to generate moral values and, therefore, no counterbalance to the inevitable ambition of the state-as-church, toward totalitarianism. As we have seen, this has already occurred in Marxist nation where the death of God has created a new form of messiah—the all-power state whose political ideology acquires the force of religion. The same is true, though not as extreme, in the West where traditional religious influences have been excluded from public debated either by law or Chesterton’s taboo of tact of convention. As a result, government is free to makes its own ultimate judgments. Hence government ideology acquires the force of religion. The removal of the transcendent sucks the meaning from the law. Without an absolute standard of moral judgment backing government “morality,” where is the protection for the marginalized groups and the powerless? When in our public life no legal prohibition can be articulated with a force of transcendent authority, then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless, and the marginal, as indeed there are now no rules protecting the unborn, and only fragile inhibitions surrounding the ages and defective. With no ultimate reference point supporting it—no just cause for obedience—law can only be enforced by the bayonet. So the state seeks more and more coercive power. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Since the time of Adam, people have turned away from the gospel. They have turned away no matter how long and hard the prophets tried to teach the love of Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ and of Their desire for us to live with Them and enjoy all that They have for eternity. Each period of time when there has been at least one prophet on the Earth is called a “dispensation.” The prophets of each dispensation have had the power and authority of God, known as the priesthood, to help them testify of Jesus Christ and His gospel and perform the ordinances necessary for people to return to Him and Heavenly Father. “The prayers of the faithful shall be heard,” reports 2 Nephi 26.15. Know that the Lord loves you. You are a choice child of God. Pray always. Look to Him for guidance. He will not desert you in your hour of need. One will feel that this nobler self actually overshadows one at times. This is literally true. Hence we have named it the Overself. When humans shall discover the hidden power within oneself enabled one to be conscious and to think, one will discover the holy spirit, the ray of Infinite Mind lighting one’s little finite mind. If we could penetrate to the deeper regions of personality, the deeper layer of consciousness, we would find at the core a state that is utterly paradoxical. For it combines, at one and the same time, the highest degree of dynamic being and extreme degree of static being. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
This is the abiding essence of a human, one’s true self against one’s ephemeral person. Whoever enters into its consciousness enters into timelessness, a wonderful experience where the flux of pleasures and pains comes to an end in utter serenity, where regrets from the past, impatience at the present, and fears of the future are unknown. Nothing could be nearer to a human than the Overself for it is the source of one’s life, mind, and feeling. Nothing could be farther from one, nevertheless, for it eludes all one’s familiar instruments of experience awareness. Without the Overself no human creature could be what it is—conscious, living, and intelligent. The Lord who hath been mindful of us, may He bless us; may He bless the house of America; may He bless the house of Aaron. May He bless them that revere the Lord, small and great alike. May the Lord increase you, you and your children. Blessed may you be by the Lord, the Maker of Heaven and Earth. The Heavens are the Heavens of the Lord, but the Earth hath He given to the children of men. The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go down into silence; but we will bless the Lord. From this time forth and forever. Hallelujah. I delight when the Lord hears the voice of my supplications. For He inclines His ear unto me on the day I call upon Him. The cords of death had encircled me, and the straights of the netherworld had overtaken me; I was in anguish and sorrow. But I called upon the name of the Lord: “O Lord, do Thou save me.” The Lord guarded the simple; when I was brought low, He saved me. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The More Individualized People are, the More Difficult it is to Attain Identification
Those who take the long view of human’s experience will find that from time to time there were other societies no less honest and courageous than ours in facing all the ugliness, cruelty, and indifference the mirror reveals, but with the greater honesty still to hold the brighter, nobler view of humans and with greater courage to pursue the vision. Despite romantic rhetoric, freedom cannot be absolute. To argue for total choice (a meaningless concept) or total individuality is to argue against any form of community or society altogether. If each person, busily doing one’s thing, were to be wholly different from every other, no two humans would have any basis for communication. It is ironic that the people who complain the most loudly that people cannot “relate” to one another, or cannot “communicate” with one another, are often the very same people who urge greater individuality. The sociologist Karl Mannheim recognized this contradiction when he wrote: “The more individualized people are, the more difficult it is to attain identification.” Unless we are literally prepared to plunge backward into pre-technological primitivism, and accept all the consequences—a shorter, more brutal life, ore disease, pain, starvation, fear, superstition, xenophobia, bigotry, and so on—we shall move forward to the more and more differentiated societies. This raises severe problems of social integration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
What bonds of education, politics, culture must we fashion to tie the super-age of information order together into a functioning whole? Can this be accomplished? “This integration,” writes Bertram M. Gross of Wayne State University, “must be based upon certain commonly accepted values or some degree of perceived interdependence, if not mutually acceptable objectives.” A society fast fragmenting at the level of values and life styles challenges all the old integrative mechanism and cries out for a totally new basis for reconstitution. We have by no means yet found this basis. Ye if we shall face disturbing problems of social integration, we shall confront even more agonizing problems of individual integration. For the multiplication of life styles challenges our ability to hold the very self together. Which of many potential selves shall we choose to be? What sequences of serial selves will describe us? How, in short, must we deal with overchoice at this, the most intensely personal and emotion-laden level of all? In our headlong rush for variety, choice and freedom, we have not yet begun to examine the awesome implications of diversity. When diversity, however, converges with transience and novelty, we rocket the society toward an historical crisis of adaptation. We create an environment so ephemeral, unfamiliar and complex so to threaten millions with adaptive breakdown. This breakdown is future shock. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
The problem of synchronicity has puzzled me for a long time, ever since the middle twenties, when I was investigating the phenomena of the collective unconscious and kept on coming across connections which I simply could not explain as chance groupings or “run.” What I found were “coincidences” which were connected so meaningfully that their “chance” concurrence would represent a degree of improbability that would have to be expressed by an astronomical figure. By way of example, I shall mention an incident from my own observation. A young woman I was treating had, at a critical moment, a dream in which she was given a golden scarab. While she was telling me this dream I sat with my back to the closed window. Suddenly I heard a noise behind me, like a gentle tapping. I turned round and saw a flying insect knocking against the window-pane from outside. I opened the window and caught the creature in the air as it flew in. It was the nearest analogy to a golden scarab that one finds in our latitudes, a scarabaeid beetle, the common rose-chafer (Cetonia aurata), which contrary to its usual habits had evidently felt an urge to get into a dark room at this particular moment. I must admit that nothing like it ever happened to me before or since, and that the dream of the patient has remained unique in my experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
I should like to mention another case that is typical of a certain category of events. The wife of one of my patients, a man in his fifties, once told me in conversation that, at the deaths of her mother and her grandmother, a number of birds gathered outside the windows of the death-chamber. I had heard similar stories from other people. When her husband’s treatment was nearing its end, his neurosis having been cleared up, he developed some apparently quite innocuous symptoms which seemed to me, however, to be those of heart-disease. I sent him along to a specialist, who after examining him told me in writing that he could find no cause for anxiety. One the way back from this conclusion (with the medical report in his pocket) my patient collapsed in the street. As he was brought home dying, his wife was already in a great state of anxiety because, soon after her husband had gone to the doctor, a whole flock of birds alighted on their house. She naturally remembered the similar incidents that had happened at the death of her own relatives, and feared the worst. Although I was personally acquainted with the people concerned and know very well that the facts here reported are true, I do not imagine for a moment that this will induce anybody who is determined to regard such things as pure “chance” to change one’s mind. My sole object in relating these two incidents is simply to give some indication of how meaningful coincidences usually present themselves in practical life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The meaningful connection is obvious enough in the first case in view of the approximate identity of the chief objects (the scarab and the beetle); but in the second case death and the flock of birds seem to be incommensurable with one another. If one considers, however, that in the Babylonian Hades the souls wore a “feather dress,” and that in ancient Egypt the ba, or soul, was thought of as a bird (in Homer the souls of the dead “twitter”) it is not too far-fetched to suppose that there may be some archetypal symbolism at work. Has such an incident occurred in a dream, that interpretation would be justified by the comparative psychological material. There also seems to be an archetypal foundation to the first. It was an extraordinarily difficult case to treat, and up to the time of the dream little or no progress had been made. I should explain that the main reason for this was my patient’s animus, which was steeped in Cartesian philosophy and clung so rigidly to its own idea of reality that the efforts of three doctors—I was the third—had no been able to weaken it. Evidently something quite irrational was needed which was beyond my power to produce. The dream alone was enough to disturb ever so slightly the rationalistic attitude of my patient. However, when the “scarab” came flying in through the armour of her animus possession and the process of transformation could at last begin to move. Any essential change of attitude signifies a psychic renewal which is usually accompanied by symbols of rebirth in the patient’s dreams and fantasies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The scarab is a classic example of a rebirth symbol. The ancient Egyptian Book of What Is in the Netherworld describes how the dead sun-god changes himself at the tenth station into Khepri, the scarab, and then, at the twelfth station, mounts the barge which carries the rejuvenated sun-god into the morning sky. The only difficulty here is that with educated people cryptomenesia often cannot be ruled out with certainty (although my patient did not happen to know this symbol). However, this does not alter the fact that psychologist is continually coming up against cases where the emergence of symbolic parallels cannot be explained without the hypothesis of the collective unconscious. The other part of the answer is that the Overself is always here as human’s innermost truest self. It is beginningless and endless in time. Its consciousness does not have to be developed as something new. However, the person’s awareness of it begins in time and has to be developed as a new attainment. The ever-presence of Overself means that anyone may attain it here and now. There is no inner necessity to travel anywhere or to anyone in space or to wait years in time for this to happen. Anyone, for instance, who attends carefully and earnestly to the present exposition may perhaps suddenly and easily get the first stage of insight, the lightning-flash which affords a glimpse of reality, at any moment. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
By that glimpse one will have been lifted to a new dimension of being. The difficulty will consist in retaining the new perception. For ancient habits of erroneous thinking will quickly reassert themselves and overwhelm one enough to push it into the background. This is why repeated introspection, reflective study and mystical meditation are needed to weaken those habits and generate the inner strength which can firmly hold the higher outlook against these aggressive intruders from one’s own past. Those who are unable to grasp this explanation the first time may do so at a later attempt, while those who will not grasp it and refuse to consider it further thereby indicate that they are not subtle enough to receive its truth. They will continue to seek reality among the cozening deceivers of superficial experience, but it will ever elude them there. Although It is at the very heart of human beings, the Overself is very far from their present level of consciousness. Nothing could be close yet this is the supreme paradox of our existence and the strangest enigma confronting our thought. The Overself is implicit in all humanity but explicit only in a few solitary figures. Its golden note of harmony falls dead upon our muted ears. The Overself is not a goal to be attained but a realization of what already is. It is the inalienable possession of all conscious beings and not of a mere few. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
No effort is needed to get hold of the Overself, but every effort is needed to get rid of the many impediments to its recognition. We cannot take hold of it; it takes hold of us. Therefore the last stage of this quest is an effortless one. We are led, as children by the hand, into the resplendent presence. Our weary strivings come to an abrupt end. Our lips are made shut and wordless. No situation in human life lasts totally unchanged forever, just as no condition on the very planet which harbours that life lasts forever. It is folly to demand changelessness. And ye we do. Why? Because beneath this conscious desire for fresh experiences there is the unconscious longing for That which is the permanent core of selfhood. The stilled, one-pointed, and reverent mind may know it, the self may dissolve in it. We carry the divine presence with us everywhere we travel. We do not directly profit by it simply because we are not directly conscious of it. The effort to arouse such awareness is a worthwhile one, brining rich reward in its train. The soul is always with us but our sense of its presence is not. There is a spiritual element in every human. It is one’s essence. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Although we are divided in awareness from the higher power, we are not divided in fact from it. The divine being is immanent in each one of us. This is why there is always some good in the worst of us. Goethe: “You give me space to belong to myself yet without separating me from your own life.” The Overself is always present but human’s attention seldom is. Because the soul is present deep down in each human heart, none is so depraved that one will not one day find the inward experience of it. There is a zone of utter clam within a human. It is not only there but always there. Those who suffer, fret, or are confused may doubt or deny this—understandably and pardonably. It is always possible for a human to gain enlightenment anytime anywhere even though I may not be probable, for one has within oneself the Light itself as an ever-present Reality. What does happen and what is probable is that some moment during the course of a lifetime a glimpse may happen, and the glimpse itself is nothing less than a testimony to that ever-presence, a witness telling one that it is true and real. Just then, as thoughts themselves stop coming into one’s mind, one stops living in time and begins living in the eternal. One knows and feels one’s timelessness. And since all one’s sufferings belong to the World of passing time, of personal ego, one leaves them far behind as though they had never been. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
One finds oneself in the Heaven of a serene, infinite bliss. One learns that one could always have entered it; only one’s insistence on holding to the little egoistic values, one’s lack of thought-control, and one’s disobedience to the age-old advice of the Great Teachers prevented one from doing so. If that divine element into which they exalted us did not already exist within us, these rear moments of spontaneous spiritual exaltation, which cast all other moments in the shade and which are remembered ever after, could not have been born. Its very presence in our hearts makes always possible and sometimes actual the precious feeling of a non-material sublimely happy order of being. It is not really a goal to be reached, nor a state to be attained, nor something new to be added to what one now has or is. However, if one insists on thinking that it is any of these things, there is no other course open than to take the appropriate action, make the necessary effort, for such achievement. One’s labours are really self-imposed, a consequence of incorrect thought about oneself. Is this benign state a past from which we have lapsed or a future to which we are coming? The true answer is that it is neither. This state as always been existent within us, is so now, and always will be. It is forever with us simply because it is wat we really are. It is not as if one has to find something foreign, making communication too distant and too difficult, for this is one’s very native being, giving one meaning and awareness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
If the real Self must have been present and been witness to our peaceful enjoyment of deep slumber—otherwise we would not have known that we had such enjoyment—so must it likewise have been present and been witness to our rambling imaginations in dream-filled sleep and to our physical activities in waking. This leads to a tremendous but inescapable conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real Self, the Overself, at conclusion. We are as near to, or as much in, the real self, the Overself, at every moment of every day as we shall ever be. All we need is awareness of it. A thing that is infinite and eternal hath n qualities, since it hath all qualities. This nothingness or fullness we name the PLEROMA. Therein both thinking and being cease, since the eternal and infinite possess no qualities. In it no being is, for one then would be distinct from the pleroma, and would possess qualities which would distinguish one as something distinct from the pleroma. In the pleroma there is nothing and everything. It is quite fruitless to think about the pleroma, for this would mean self-dissolution. The opposites are contained in the pleroma, but because they are equally balanced, they void. Although the opposites are manifested in individuals, they are not balanced and void. The individual’s task is to pursue one’s own distinctiveness, and this involves one in distinguishing oneself from the opposites. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
We labour to attain the good and beautiful, yet at the same time we also lay hold of the evil and ugly, since in the pleroma these are one with the good and the beautiful. When, however, we remain true to our own nature, which is distinctiveness, we distinguish ourselves from the good and the beautiful, and, therefore, at the same time, from the evil and the ugly. And thus we fall not into the pleroma, namely into nothingness and dissolution. In the pleromatic or (as the Tibetans call it) Bardo state, there is a perfect interplay of cosmic forces, but with the Creation—that is, with the division of the World into distinct processes in space and time—events begin to rub and jostle one another. Although the birth of Christ is an event that occurred but once in history, it has always existed in eternity. For the layperson in these matters, the identity of a nontemporal, eternal event with a unique historical occurrence is something that is extremely difficult to conceive. One must, however, accustom oneself to the idea that “time” is a relative concept and needs to be complemented by that of the “simultaneous” existence, in the Bard or pleroma, of all historical processes. What exists in the pleroma as an eternal process appears in time as an aperiodic sequence, that is to say, it is repeated many times in an irregular patten. To take but one example: Yahweh had one good son and one who was a failure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, correspond to this prototype, and so, in all ages and in all parts of the World, does the motif of the hostile brothers, which in innumerable modern variants still causes dissension in families and keeps the psychotherapist busy. Just as many examples, no less instructive, could be found for the two women prefigured in eternity. When these things occur as modern variants, therefore, they should not be regarded merely as person episodes, modes, or chance idiosyncrasies in people, but as fragments of the pleromatic process itself, which, broken up into individual events occurring in time, is an essential component or aspect of the divine drama. Wen Yahweh created the World from his prima materia, the “Void,” he could not help breathing his own mystery into Creation which is himself in every part, as every reasonable theology has long been convinced. From this comes the belief that it is possible to know God from His Creation. When I say that He could not help doing this, I do not imply any limitation of is omnipotence; on the contrary, it is an acknowledgment that all possibilities are contained in Him, and that there are in consequence no other possibilities than those which express Him. All the World is God’s, and God is in all the World from the very beginning. Why, then, the tour de force of the Incarnation? One asks oneself, astonished. God is in everything already, and yet there must be something missing is a sort of second entrance into Creation has now to be staged with so much care and circumspection. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Since Creation is universal, reaching to the remotest stellar galaxies, and since it has also made organic life infinitely variable and capable of endless differentiation, we can hardly see where the defect lies. The fact that Satan as everywhere intruded his corrupting influence is no doubt regrettable for many reasons, but it makes no difference in principle. It is not easy to give an answer to this question. One would like to say that Christ had to appear in order to deliver humankind from evil. However, when one considers that evil was originally slipped into the scheme of things by Satan, and still is, then it would seem much simpler if Yahweh would, for once, call this “practical joker” severely to account, get rid of his pernicious influence, and thus eliminate the root of all evil. He would then no need the elaborate arrangement of a special Incarnation with all the unforeseeable consequences which this entails. Wen God becomes man, one should make clear to oneself what it means. It means nothing less than a World-shaking transformation of God. It means more of less what Creation meant in the beginning, namely an objectivation of God. At the time of the Creation, He revealed Himself in Nature; now he wants to be more specific and become man. It must be admitted, however, that there was a tendency in this direction right from the start. For, when those other human beings, who had evidently been created before Adam, appeared on the scene along with the higher mammals, Yahweh created on the following day, by a special act of creation, a man who was the image of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
This was the first prefiguration of His becoming man. God took Adam’s descendants, especially the people of Israel, into His personal possession, and from time to time He filled this people’s prophets with His spirit. All these things were preparatory events and symptoms of a tendency within God to become man. However, in the omniscience there had existed from all eternity a knowledge of the human nature of God or of the divine nature of man. That is why, long before Genesis was written, we find corresponding testimonies in the ancient Egyptian records. These intimations and prefigurations of the Incarnation must strike one as either completely incomprehensible or superfluous, since all creation ex nihilo is God’s and consists of nothing but God, with the result that humans, like the rest of creation, are simply God become concrete. Prefigurations, however, are not in themselves creative events, but are only stages in the process of becoming conscious. It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize) that God is Reality itself and therefore—last but not least—man. This realization is a millennial process. The conception of “the millennial process” refers to a profound belief that change is about to take place in human’s conception of oneself and the Universe. Traditionally, the reign of Christ ended with the first millennium, to be succeeded by the reign of Antichrist. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The reign of the Antichrist is now nearing its end, coinciding with the entry of the vernal equinox into Aquarius, and the end of the aeon of Pisces. A human’s refusal to allow spiritually intuitive feelings to awaken in one cannot obliterate the presence of the source of those feelings. One bears that presence ever within one and one day must reconcile oneself willingly, knowingly, even yearningly, with it. The Overself is always within call, for its hiding place is no farther than a human’s heart. However, if the call does not go forth, or goes forth without faith, or is not sustained with patience, the response will not come. God is ever present with us but we are ever turning away from Him. No one is forsaken except those who look only to, and into, the ego, and even then only for a time. In one sense that World of the Overself remains always inaccessible and inexpressible, but in another sense it is as close as breathing and as palpable in highest art forms or in the illuminated human’s presence as a fragrant perfume. By one’s ignoring of the Overself’s presence, humans commit their greatest sin and shows one’s worst stupidity. If God did not exist, then we humans would not exist. A divine ray, atom, soul, call it what you wish, is present in each of us. Some are aware of this, others must one day come to this knowledge. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
The Overself is always present in human’s heart. If one does not receive awareness of this face in one’s mind, that is because one makes no proper and sustained effort to do so. You may be an insignificant creature in the vastness of the cosmos, but the divine life—of which that cosmos is but a channel—is in you, too. Have enough faith in your divine heritage, take it into your common everyday life and thought, and in some way, to some people, you will become very significant and important. If unconscious, we life all the time in unfailing union with the Overself. Perhaps the most wonderful thing which the illuminate discovers is that one’s independence from the infinite life power never really existed and was only illusory, that one’s separation from the Overself was only an idea of the imagination and not a fact of being. Even the desire to unite with the Overself was only a dream, and consequently all lesser desire of the ego were merely dreams within a dream. Speaking of dreams, the Winchester mansion is something reminiscent of a dream, it is so surreal. Surrealism is a style of art in which the reality of the dream, or the subconscious mind, is seen as more “real” than the surface of everyday life. Its reality is a higher reality. It is usually reflected in works of art. When using surrealism, people are directly presenting the reality of their own feelings and emotions on the canvas. Nothing can be more concrete to a human than one’s own felt thought, one own thought feeling. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
There are many surreal elements in the Winchester mansion such as a spiral stairway that has 42 steps, each two inches high. Other stairways melt into blank walls. A second story door opens into the great outdoors, and a 20-foot step. A linen closet has the area of a three-room apartment; a nearby cupboard is less than one-inch deep. A skylight is placed in the middle of a room, in the floor! Another floor is apparently a series of trap-doors. Exterior faucets project unexpectedly from under second-story windows. The visitor must stoop through one door to enter, the next gives clearance for an eight-foot giant. Many stairway turnposts are set upside down. Entire walls are built entirely of half-inch, “half-round” strips. Everywhere prevails that uncanny deference to the number 13; 13 stairsteps, 13 hangers in a closet, 13 wall panels, 13 lights in the chandeliers, 13 windows to a room and if necessary to make that number, some placed in an inside wall. No wonder the one-time visitors Houdini and Ripley stood in awe; imagine Houdini in the dead center of this 160-room catacomb, perhaps wondering if blindfolded he could make a timely midnight escape from such a maze, or imagine a spellbound Ripley, reaching for his Believe-It-Or-Not sketch pad to immortalize this architectural dream. In searching out potential hunts, human investigators may be drawn to the Winchester mansion with its long, dark corridors, widow’s walk, and dramatic staircases. However, the ghost themselves show a profound indifference to such things. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The ghost, it seems, is concerned with what happened to one, not where it happened. In most accounts of hauntings, the spirit comes back to erase, re-enact, avenge or simply brood about some awful event or unfulfilled longing. The Winchester mansion with its mysterious history and unresolved hauntings would inspire a legion of restless spirits and that is not surprising. In December of 1897, several curious people flocked to the Winchester mansion—in a window in the house—a bodiless head appeared at a second story window. The floating visage manifested itself at random day or night. Many people thought it resembled William Wirt Winchester, but Mrs. Winchester disagreed. Eventually the whole window concealed inside of the mansion by new construction. It is reported to be the one next to the most expensive window in the house. Judging from the number of individuals reporting spectral contact, one does not have to be a professional medium to see a ghost. They attract believer and nonbeliever indiscriminately. One man reports in the 1960s medical students would sleep in the Winchester mansion because of their professional interests. One of the students who had a skeleton in his bedroom told an analyst after some time and with great embarrassment that he often took the skeleton into his bed, embraced it, and sometimes kissed it. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Another student reported that one night he slept in the attic in the witch’s cap, and was suddenly wrenched up out of the bed and dragged across the floor! He was fully awake in an instant. Into the bathroom he was forced by powerful hands that hurt his arms. His head was smacked against the wall. He was lifted off his feet and held that way, and by the thin light from the door through which he had just been dragged he saw that it was a tall man who held him. His hair was clearly brushed from his high rounded temples, and his large dark eyes were fastened on him. His hands came up around the student’s neck and then he vanished. However, if nothing paranormal occurs while you are visiting the house, that can be expected. Ghost tend to be shy and more active overnight. Nonetheless, you will have lost nothing. As an adventure in historical research, the Winchester mansion has no equal. A spirit has literally conquered death and come back to prove it. It is both a clue and an invitation to a World beyond our own limited reality, an offer to broaden our awareness to encompass everything and anything that just might be possible. The truth is that this feeling or its presence has been shut up so long, that we have come back to look upon it as non-existent and to regard the rumours of its actual experience as hallucination. This is why religion, mysticism, and philosophy have so hard a battle to fight in these ties, a battle against human’s inevitable incredulity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Even more scary than the Land of Spirits are the deities of destruction and death. Since mysticism seeks to include all life, it must include its bad parts as well as its good. That is not to say that we have to like the bad things. It is certainly understandable to ask that they pass us by. However, some of its is unavoidable, so we ask for the strength to deal with it. Sometimes we ask benevolent deities to protect us, and sometimes we ask the not-so-benevolent ones to deal lightly with us, or to show us in what way our sufferings are necessary and even valuable. I do not want to wax poetic about how curses can be blessings in disguise, after all Mrs. Winchester was said to be cursed and look at the beautiful work of art that was produced as a result. However, I also do not want to insult those who suffer by implying that their suffering is a good thing. I do want to say, however, that sometimes suffering can indeed bring blessings. It shows us that the World is not all bunnies, kittens, and rainbows, which means we come face to face with reality, a great blessing. It both tests us and strengthens us. We learn how much we can stand and how to stand worse, if it should come. We learn that sometimes good things are born from bad things. Think of the pain that comes with childbirth. All in all, may God protect the person who grows up without experiencing suffering; the first strong wind they encountered as an adult will blow them away. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
Beyond all this, destruction can be beneficial. Sometimes the weeds need to be whacked back to let the good stuff grow. Part of us must die so the best of us can live. Deities of destruction can do this for us. This is not easy, nor is it safe. The fire that burns away brush can get out of control and destroy the forest. It has become fashionable in neo-Paganism to worship “dark” deities—Kali, Loki, Hecate, et cetera. They are seen as misunderstood. They are in fact misunderstood, but by those who see them as “fun.” They are not fun. They are scary, dangerous, and difficult to deal with. I hesitate to share ghost stories and episodes of real demonic possession to readers. No sense in calling up trouble for people. However, we need to acknowledge the darker side of things in order to fill out our relationship with the Universe, as Mrs. Winchester did. Loki is a demon who, when the gods grew too comfortable in their unending like, stole the apples that kept them young and made them face age. When they sought to cheat the giant of the wages for his work, they turned to him to save themselves. When Thor grew too sure of his strength to end Chaos, Loki showed him that craftiness is as necessary as raw power. Loki is a god of unpleasant truths, and he can open your eyes to your own limits. It is only by seeing them that we can overcome them. May all your weaknesses be burned away, making you fit for God. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
Winchester Mystery House
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If You Do His Work, You Must Prepare for His Wages!
I must be getting absent-minded. Whenever I complain that things are not what they used to be, I always forget to include myself. The theory of civil disobedience is designed only for a special case of a nearly just society, one that is well-ordered for the most part but in which some serious violations of justice nevertheless do occur. A state of near justice requires a democratic regime, and the theory concerns the role and the appropriateness of civil disobedience to legitimately established democratic authority. It does not apply to the other forms of government nor, except incidentally, to other kinds of dissent or resistance. It is not necessary to discuss this mode of protect, along with militant action and resistance, as a tactic for transforming or even overturning an unjust and corrupt system. There is no difficulty about such action in this case. If any means to this end are justified, then surely nonviolent opposition is justified. The problem of civil disobedience, arises only within a more or less just democratic state for those citizens who recognize and accept the legitimacy of the constitution. The difficulty is one of a conflict of duties. At what point does the duty to comply with laws enacted by a legislative majority (or with executive acts supported by such a majority) cease to be binding in view of the right to defend one’s liberties and the duty to oppose injustice? This question involves the nature and limits of majority rule. For this reason the problem of civil disobedience is a crucial test case for any theory of the moral basis of democracy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
A constitutional theory of civil disobedience has three parts. First, it defines this kind of dissent and separated it from other forms of opposition to democratic authority. These rand from legal demonstrations and infractions of law designed to raise test cases before the courts to militant action and organized resistance. A theory specifies the place of civil disobedience in this spectrum of possibilities. Next, it set out the grounds of civil disobedience and the conditions under which such action is justified in a (more or less) just democratic regime. And finally, a theory should explain the role of civil disobedience within a constitutional system and account for the appropriateness of this mode of protest within a free society. As a word of caution, we should not expect too much of a theory of civil disobedience, even one framed for special circumstances. Precise principles that straightway decide actual cases are clearly out of the question. Instead, a useful theory defines a perspective within which the problem of civil disobedience can be approached; it identifies the relevant considerations and helps us to assign them their correct weights in the more important instances. If a theory about these matters appears to us, on reflection, to have cleared our vision and to have made our considered judgments more coherent, then it has been worthwhile. The theory has done what, for the present, ne may reasonably expect it to do: namely, to narrow the disparity between the conscientious convictions of those who accept the basic principles of a democratic society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
Civil disobedience as a public, nonviolent, conscientious yet political act contrary to law is usually done with the aims of being about change in the law or policies of the government. Civil disobedience can also be considered a deliberate, discriminate violations of the law for a vital social purpose. By acting in this way one addresses the sense of justice of the majority of the community and declares that in one’s considered opinion the principles of social cooperation among free and equal humans are not being respected. A preliminary gloss on this definition is that it does not require that the civilly disobedient act breach the same law that is being protested. It allows for what some have called indirect as well as direct civil disobedience. And this definition should do, as there are sometimes strong reasons for not infringing on the law or policy held to be unjust. Instead, one may disobey traffic ordinances or laws of trespass as a way of presenting one’s case. Thus, if the government enacts a vague and harsh statue against treason, it would not be appropriate to commit treason as a way of objecting to it, and in any event, the penalty might be far more than one should reasonably be ready to accept. In other cases there is no way to violate the government’s policy directly, as when it concerns foreign affairs, or affects another part of the country. A second gloss is that the civilly disobedient act is indeed thought to be contrary to law, at least in the sense that those engaged in it are not simply presenting a test case for a constitutional decision; they are prepared to oppose the statue if it should be upheld. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
To be sure in a constitutional regime, the courts may finally side with the dissenters and declare the law or policy objected to unconditional. It often happens, then, that there is some uncertainty as to whether the dissenters’ action will be held illegal or not. However, this is merely a complicating element. Those who use civil disobedience to protest unjust laws are not prepared to desist should the courts eventually disagree with them, however pleased they might have been with the opposite decision. It should also be noted that civil disobedience is a political act noted that civil disobedience is a political act not only in the sense that it is addressed to the majority that holds political power, but also because it is an act guided and justified by political principles, that is, by the principles of justice which regulate the constitution and social institutions generally. In justifying civil disobedience one does not appeal to principles of personal morality or to religious doctrines, though these may coincide with and support one’s claims; and it goes without saying that civil disobedience cannot be ground solely on group or self-interest. Instead one invokes the commonly shared conception of justice that underlies the political order. It is assumed that in a reasonably just democratic regime there is a public conception of justice by reference to which citizens regulate their political affairs and interpret the constitution. The persistent and deliberate violation of the basic principles of this conception over any extended period of time, especially the infringement of the fundamental equal liberties, invites either submission or resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
By engaging in civil disobedience a minority forces the majority to consider whether it wishes to have its actions construed in this ways, or whether, in view of the common sense of justice, it wishes to acknowledge the legitimate claims of the minority. A further point is that civil disobedience is a public act. Not only is it addressed to public principles, it is done in public. It is engaged in openly with fair notice; it is not covert or secretive. One may compare it to public speech, and being a form of address, an expression of profound and conscientious political conviction, it takes place in the public forum. For this reason, among others, civil disobedience is nonviolent. It tries to avoid the use of violence, especially against persons, not from the abhorrence of the use of force in principle, but because it is a final expression of one’s case. To engage in violent acts likely to injure and to hurt is incompatible with civil disobedience as a mode of address. Indeed, any interference with the civil liberties of others tends to obscure the civilly disobedient quality of one’s act. Sometimes if the appeal fails in its purpose, forceful resistance may later be entertained. Yet civil disobedience is giving voice to conscientious and deeply held convictions; while it may warn and admonish, it is not itself a threat. Civil disobedience is nonviolent for another reason. It expresses disobedience to law within the limits of fidelity to law, although it is at the outer edge of theory. The law is broken, but fidelity to law is expressed by the public and nonviolent nature of the act, by the willingness to accept the legal consequences of one’s conduct. One should be willing to undergo the legal consequences for the sake of fidelity to law. The charge may be contested in court, should this prove appropriate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
This fidelity to law helps to establish to the majority that the act is indeed politically conscientious and sincere, and that it is intended to address the public’s sense of justice. To be completely open and nonviolent is to give bond of one’s sincerity, for it is not easy to convince another that one’s acts are conscientious, or even to be sure of this before oneself. No doubt it is possible to imagine a legal system in which conscientious belief that the law is unjust is accepted as a defense for noncompliance. Humans of great honesty with full confidence in one another might make such a system work. However, as things are, such a scheme would presumably be unstable even in a state of near justice. We must pay a certain prince to convince others that our actions have, in our carefully considered view, a sufficient moral basis in the political convictions of the community. Civil disobedience has been defined so that it falls between legal protest and the raising of test cases on the one side, and conscientious refusal and the various forms of resistance on the other. In this range of possibilities it stands for that form of dissent at the boundary of fidelity to law. Civil disobedience, so understood, is clearly distinct from militant actions and obstruction; it is far removed from organized forcible resistance. The militant, for example, is much more deeply opposed to the existing political system. One does not accept it as one which is nearly just or reasonable so; one believes either that it departs widely from its professed principles or that it pursues a mistake conception altogether. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
While one’s action is conscientious in its own terms, one does not appeal to the sense of justice of the majority (or those having effective political power), since one thinks that their sense of justice is erroneous, or else without effect. Instead, one seeks by well-framed militant acts of disruption and resistance, and the like, to attack the prevalent view of justice or to force a movement in the desired direction. Thus the militant may try to evade the penalty, since one is not prepare to accept the legal consequences of one’s violation of the law; this would not only be to play into the hands of forces that one believes cannot be trusted, but also to express a recognition of the legitimacy of the constitution to which one is opposed. In this sense militant action is not within the bounds of fidelity to law, but represents a more profound opposition to the legal order. The basic structure is thought to be so unjust or else to depart so widely from its own professed ideals that one must try to prepare the way for radical or even revolution change. And this is to be done by trying to arouse the public to an awareness of the fundamental reforms that need to be made. Now in certain circumstances militant action and other kinds of resistance are surely justified. The year 2100 A.D. is closer to us in time than the great depression, yet the World’s economists, traumatized by it, 9/11, the recession of 2008, and the COVID-19 crisis, remain frozen in their attitudes of the past. Economist, even those who talk the language of revolution, are peculiarly conservative creatures. If it were possible to pry from their brains their collective image of the economy of, say, the year 2125, it would look very much like that of 2010—only more so. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Conditioned to think in straight lines, economists have great difficulty imagining alternatives to communism and capitalism. They see in the growth of large-scale organizations nothing more than a linear expansion of old-fashion bureaucracy. They see technological advance as a simple, non-revolutionary extension of the known. Born of scarcity, trained to think in terms of limited resources, they can hardly conceive of a society in which human’s basic material wants have been satisfied. One reason for their lack of imagination is that when they think about technological advance, they concentrate solely on the means of economic activity. Yet the super-age of information revolution challenges the ends as well. It threatens to alter not merely the “how” of production but they “why.” It will, in short, transform the very purposes of economic activity. Before such an upheaval, even the most sophisticated tools of today’s economists are helpless. Input-output tables, econometric models—the whole paraphernalia of analysis that economists employ simply do not come to grips with the external forces—political, social and ethical—that will transform economic life in the decades before us. What does “productivity” or “efficiency” mean in a society that places a high value on psychic fulfillment? What happens to an economy, when, as is likely, the entire concept of property is reduced to meaninglessness? #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
How economies likely to be affected by the rise of supra-national planning, taxing, and regulatory agencies or by a kind of dialectical return to “cottage industry” based on the most advanced cybernetic technologies? Most important, what happens when “no growth” replaces “growth” as an economic objective, When Gross National Product (GNP) ceases to be the holy grail? Only by stepping outside the framework of orthodox economic thought and examining these possibilities can we begin to prepare for tomorrow. And among these, none is more central than the shift in values that is likely to accompany the super-industrial revolution. Under conditions of scarcity, humans struggle to meet their immediate material needs. Today under more affluent conditions, we are reorganizing the economy to deal with a new level of human needs. From a system designed to provide material satisfaction, we are rapidly creating an economy geared to the provision of psychic gratification. This process of “psychologization,” one of the central themes of the super-age of information revolution, has been all but overlooked by the economists. Yet it will result in a novel, surprise-filled economy unlike any human has ever experienced. The issues raised by it will reduce the great conflict of the twenty-first century, the conflict between capitalism and communism, to comparative insignificance. For these issues sweep far beyond economic or political dogma. They involve, as we shall see, nothing less than sanity, the human organism’s ability to distinguish illusion from reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Much excitement has accompanied the discovery that once a techno-society reaches a certain stage of informational development, it begins to shift energies into automation and autonomy. Many experts see in the services the wave of the future. They suggest the many retail, jobs, food service jobs and manual labor jobs, even news broadcasting, teaching, many aspects of medical care, and law enforcement will be handled by androids and other machines—a prophecy already on its way toward fulfillment. Actors and musicians are expected to be replaced by holograms. What the economists, however, have not done, is ask the obvious question. Where does the economy go next? After the services, what? The high technology nations must, in coming years, direct vast resources to rehabilitating their physical environment and improving what has come to be called “the quality of life.” The fight against air and noise pollution, aesthetic blight, crowding, noise and dirt will clearly absorb tremendous energies. However, in addition to the provision of these public goods, we can also anticipate a subtle change in the character of production for private use. They very excitement aroused by the mushrooming growth of the service sector has diverted professional attention from another shift that will deeply affect both goods and services in the future. It is this shift that will lead to the net forward movement of the economy, the growth of a strange new sector based on what can only be called the “experience industries.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
For the key to post-service economies lies in the psychologization of all production, beginning with manufacture. One of the curious facts about the production in all the techno-societies today, and especially the United States of America, is that goods are increasingly designed to yield psychological “extras” for the consumer. Technology becomes a Veblen good. As the demand of technology increases, which is a luxury good and also a necessity with new products, the price also increases. The future will be packed with positional good, which are goods valued only by how they are distributed among the population, not by how many of them there are available in total (as would be the case with other consumer goods). The source of greater worth of positional goods is their desirability as a status symbol, which usually results in them greatly exceeding the value of comparable good. Various goods have been described as positional in a given capitalist society, such as gold, real estate, diamonds, and luxury goods. More formally in economics, positional goods are a subset of economic goods whose consumption (and subsequent utility), also conditioned by Veblen-like pricing, depends negatively on consumption of those same goods by others. In particular, for these goods the value is at least in part (if not exclusively) a function of its ranking in desirability by others, in comparison to substitutes. Therefore, new is not always better. It depends on the status and ranking of an item you possess. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The term-Veblen good is sometimes extended to include services and non-material possession that may alter one’s social status and that are deemed highly desirable when enjoyed by a relatively few in a community, such as college degrees, Cresleigh Homes, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, big trucks, college degrees, achievements, awards, memberships to exclusive clubs, et cetera. The manufacturer adds a “psychic load” to one’s basic product, and the consumer gladly pays for this intangible benefit. A classic example is the case of the appliance or auto manufacturer who adds buttons, knobs, touch screens, dials to the control panel or dashboard, to replace basic tools that are slightly out of fashion. Or home builders who add luxury features to their new homes like butler’s panties, California rooms, coded entry doors, surveillance systems and other luxury features like stained glass, floor to ceiling windows, and so forth. The manufacturer has learned that increasing the number of gadgets and features, up to a point, gives the operator of the machine or home the sense of controlling a more complex device, and hence a feeling of increased mastery. This psychological payoff is designed into the product. Conversely, pains are taken not to deprive the consumer of an existing psychological benefit. Thus a large American food company proudly launched a labour-saving, add-water-only cake mix. The company was amazed when women rejected the product in favour of mixes that require extra labour—the addition of an egg along with the water. By inserting powered egg in the factory, the company had oversimplified the task of the housewife, depriving her of the sense of creatively participating in the cake-baking process. The powered egg was hastily eliminated, and women went happily back to cracking their own eggs. Once again a product was modified to provide a psychic benefit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Examples like these can be multiplied endlessly in almost any major industry, from soap and clothing stores to dishwashers and diet colas. According to Dr. Emanuel Demby, president of Motivational Programmers, Incorporated, a research firm employed in the United States of America and Europe by such blue-chip corporations as General Electric, Caltex, and IBM, “The engineering of psychological factors into manufactured goods will be a hallmark of production in the future—not only in consumer goods, but in industrial hardware. “Even the big cranes and derricks built today embody this principle. Their cabs are streamlined, slick like something out of the twenty-first century. Cater-pillar, International Harvester, Ferguson—all of them. Why? These mechanical monsters do not dig better or hoist better because the cab is aesthetically improved. However, the contractor who buys them likes it better. The men who work on them like it better. The contractor’s customers like it better. So even the manufacturers of earthmoving equipment begin to pay attention to non-utilitarian—id est, psychological—factors.” Beyond this, Dr. Demby asserts, manufacturers are devoting more attention to reducing tensions that accompany the use of certain products. Manufacturers of sanitary napkins, for example, know that women have a fear of stopping up the toilet when disposing of them. “A new product ha been developed,” he says, “that instantly dissolves on contact with water. It does not perform its basic function any better. However, it relieves some of the anxiety that went with it. This is psychological engineering if ever there was any!” #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Affluent consumers are willing and able to pay for such niceties. As disposable income rises, they become progressively less concerned with price, progressively more insistent on what they call “quality.” For many products quality can still be measured in the traditional terms of workmanship, durability and materials. However, for a fast-growing class of products, such differences are virtually undetectable. Blindfolded, the consumer cannot distinguish Brand A from Brand B. Nevertheless, she often argues fiercely that one is superior to another. This paradox vanishes once the psychic component of production is taken int account. For even when they are otherwise identical, there are likely to be marked psychological differences between one product and another. Advertisers strive to stamp each product with its own distinct image. These images are functional: they fill a need on the part of the consumer. The need is psychological, however, rather than utilitarian in ordinary sense. Thus we find that the term “quality” increasingly refers to the ambience, the status associations—in effect, the psychological connotations of the product. As more and more of the basic material needs of the consumer are met, it is strongly predictable that even more economic energy will be directed at meeting the consumer’s subtle, varied and quite personal needs for beauty, prestige, individuation, and sensory delight. The manufacturing sector will channel ever greater resources into the conscious design of psychological distinctions and gratifications. They psychic component of goods production will assume increasing importance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
A merciful human aims at one’s neighbour’s good and so does “God’s will,” consciously co-operating with “the simple good.” A cruel human oppresses one’s neighbour, and so does simple evil. However, in doing such evil, one is used by God, without one’s own knowledge or consent, to produce the complex good—so that the first human serves God as a son (or child), and the second as a tool. For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. The whole system is, so to speak, calculated for the clash between good humans and bad humans, and the good fruits of fortitude, patience, pity and forgiveness for which the cruel human is permitted to be cruel, presuppose that the good human ordinarily continues to seek simple good. I say “ordinarily” because a human is sometimes entitled to hurt (or even, in my opinion, to kill) one’s fellow, but only where the necessity is urgent and the good to be attained obvious, and usually (though not always) when one who inflicts the pain has a definite authority to do so—a parent’s authority derived from nature, a magistrate’s or soldier’s derived from civil society, or a surgeon’s derived, most often, from the patient. To turn this into a general charter for afflicting humanity because the affliction is good for them is not indeed to break the Divine scheme but to volunteer for the post of Satan within that scheme. If you do his work, you must prepare for his wages. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The problem about avoiding our own pain admis a similar solution. Some ascetics have used self-torture. As a layman, I offer no opinion on the prudence of such a regimen; but I insist that, whatever its merits, self-torture is quite a different thing from tribulation sent by God. Everyone knows that fasting is a different experience from missing your dinner by accident or through poverty. Fasting asserts the will against the appetite—the reward being self-mastery and the danger pride: involuntary hunger subjects appetite and will together to the Divine will, furnishing an occasion for submission and exposing us to the danger or rebellion. However, the redemptive effect of suffering lies chiefly in its tendency to reduce the rebel will. Ascetic practices, which in themselves strengthen the will, are only useful in so far as they enable the will to put its own house (the passions) in order, as a preparation for offering the whole human to God. They are necessary as a means; as an end, they would be abominable, for in substituting will for appetite and there stopping, they would merely exchange the animal self for the diabolical self. It was, therefore, truly said that only God can mortify. Tribulation does its work in a World where human beings are ordinarily seeking, by lawful means, to avoid their own natural evil and to attain their natural god, and presuppose such a World. In order to submit the will to God, we must have a will and that will must have objects. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Christian renunciation does not mean stoic “Apathy,” but a readiness to prefer God to inferior ends which are in themselves lawful. Hence the Perfect Man brought to Gethsemane a will, and a strong will, to escape suffering and death is such escape were compatible with the Father’s will, combined with a perfect readiness for obedience if it were not. Some of the saints recommend a total renunciation at the very threshold of our discipleship; but I think this can mean only a total readiness for every particular renunciation that may be demanded, for it would not be possible to live from moment to moment willing nothing but submission to God as such. What would be the material for the submission? It would seem self-contradictory to say “What I will is to subject what I will to God’s will,” for the second what has no content. Doubtless we all spend too much care in the avoidance of our own pain: but a duly subordinated intention to avoid it, using lawful means, is in accordance with nature—that is, with the whole working system of creaturely life for which the redemptive work of tribulation is calculated. It would be quite false, therefore, to suppose that the Christian view of suffering is incompatible with the strongest emphasis on our duty to leave the World, even in a temporal sense, better than we found it. In the fullest parabolic picture which He gave to the Judgment, Our Lord seems to reduce all virtue to active beneficence: and though it would be misleading to take that one picture in isolation from the Gospel as a whole, it is sufficient to place beyond doubt the basic principles of the social ethics of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Before Abraham was God. God is a higher mentalism. “I am” points to the eternal One where no individual entity ever was, is, or shall be. Philosophy raises the questions of Reality and pursues it until an answer can be found. That answer assets there is something unique which alone can be the Real, which ever was, is, and shall be. Philosophy’s fundamental postulate is that there is but one ultimate Power, one sublime Reality, one transcendent Being. It is invisible to all, since it is the power that makes the World visible. It is without form, since it is the Substance out of which all forms are made. The Real is unique—the only undivided, unsplit being beyond which there is nothing else. There is nothing else either beyond it or besides it. It is the unique not only because of what IT is but also because two statements concerning IT can be quite contradictory, yet each can still be correct! Ne transcends all categories. Since the Real is unique, the One without a second and not the One which is related to the Many that spring out of it, it cannot correctly be set up in opposition to the Unreal, the Illusory, the Appearance. They are not on the same level. That which both Greek Plato and Indian Vedantin called “the One” did not refer to the beginning figure of a series, but to “One-without-a-Second.” It is unique. There is nothing to which it can be justly likened, or with which it can be compared. This must be so since it goes beyond and transcends all things without any exception. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Whatever is said of it will only succeed in describing an idea in the mind of the sayer, and this goes beyond and transcends all ideas, again without any exception. You can compare one being or one thing with another but not This, not This! There is a Mind which is self-existent, unique, unlike anything else, unbegotten. The Universal Mind is also unique in that, while comprehending all things, it is itself incomprehensible. It stands alone, unique, unseen and untouchable. Yet from it emerge all the gods of all the planets which they govern, all the ethical injunctions which humans need and must in the end. Please stand about me, your protective spirits, on all six sides, please establish your guards. From all dangers, no matter from what quarter, whether from above or below, please keep me safe. My Lord at my right hand, and my Lord at my left: please be with me throughout my life, watching over me by night and by day. Thy dwelling there forever. Mayest Thou be exalted and sanctified in Jerusalem, Thy city, throughout all generations and to all eternity. O please let our eyes behold the establishment of Thy kingdom, according to the word that was spoken in the inspired Psalms of David, Thy righteous anointed: The Lord shall reign forever. Thy God, O American, shall be Sovereign unto all generations. Hallelujah! Unto all generations we will declare Thy greatness and to all eternity we will proclaim Thy holiness. Our mouth shall ever speak Thy praise, O our God, for Thou art a great and holy God and King. Your arms are strong, Father; they can hug a child or restrain one from harm. Please Wrap them about me: I trust You to know which is needed. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, the holy King. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
CRESLEIGH RANCH: BRIGHTON STATION– Rancho Cordova, CA
3-5 Beds 3-3.5 Bath 2,054-3,634 Square Feet
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together!
Yesterday and All Our Yesterdays—Stuck Fast in Yesterday!
Tomorrow is the most important thing in life. Comes into us at midnight very clean. It is perfect when it arrives and it puts itself in our hands. It hopes we have learned something from yesterday. There is quite clearly no difficulty in explaining why we are to comply with just laws enacted under a just constitution. In this case the principles of natural duty and the principle of fairness establish the requisite duties and obligations. Citizens generally are bound by the duty of justice, and those who have assumed favoured offices and positions, or who have taken advantage of certain opportunities to further their interests, are in addition obligated to do their part by the principle of fairness. The real question is under which circumstances and to what extent we are bound to comply with unjust arrangements. Not it is sometimes said that we are never required to comply in these cases. However, that is a mistake. The injustice of a law is not, in general, a sufficient reason for not adhering to it any more than the legal validity of legislation (as defined by the existing constitution) is a sufficient reason for going along with it. When the basic structure of society is reasonably just, as estimated by what the current state of thins allows, we are to recognize unjust laws as binding provided that they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In trying to discern these limits we approach the deeper problem of political duty and obligation. The difficulty here lies in part in the fact that there is a conflict of principles in these cases. Some principles counsel compliance while other direct us the other ways. Thus the claims of political duty and obligation must be balanced by a conception of the appropriate priorities. There is, however, further problem. As we have seen, the principles of justice (in lexical order) belong to ideal theory. The persons in the original position assume that the principles they acknowledge, whatever they are, will be strictly complied with and followed by everyone. Thus the principles of justice that result are those defining a perfectly just society, given favourable conditions. With the presumption of strict compliance, we arrive at a certain ideal conception. When we as whether and under what circumstances unjust arrangements are to be tolerated, we are faced with a different sort of question. If needed it applies at all, we must ascertain how the ideal conception of justice applies, to cases where rather than having to make adjustments to natural limitations, we are confronted with injustice. The discussion of these problems belongs to the partial compliance part of nonideal theory. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
It included, among other things, the theory of punishment and compensatory justice, just war and conscientious objection, civil disobedience and militant resistance. These are among the central issues of political life, yet so far the conception of justice as fairness does not directly apply to them. Now I shall not attempt to discuss these matters in full generality. In fact, I shall take up but one fragment of partial compliance theory: namely, the problems of civil disobedience and conscientious refusal. And even here I shall assume that the context is one of a state of near justice, that is, one in which the basic structure of society is nearly just, making due allowance for what it is reasonable to expect in the circumstances. An understanding of this admittedly special case may help to clarify the more difficult problems. However, in order to consider civil disobedience and conscientious refusal, we must first discuss several points concerning political duty and obligation. For one thing, it is evident that our duty or obligation to accept existing arrangements may sometimes be overridden. These requirements depend upon the principles of right, which may justify noncompliance in certain situations, all things considered. Whether noncompliance is justified depend on the extent to which laws and institutions are unjust. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Unjust laws do not all stand on a par, and the same is true of policies and institutions. Now there are two way in which injustice can arise: current arrangements may depart in varying degrees from publicly accepted standards that are more of less just; or these arrangements may conform to a society’s conception of justice, or to the view of the dominant class, but his conception itself may be unreasonable, and in many cases clearly unjust. As we have seen, some conceptions of justice are more reasonable than others. While the two principles of justice and the related principles of natural duty and obligation define the most reasonable view among those on the list, other principles are not unreasonable. Indeed, some mixed conceptions are certainly adequate enough for many purposes. As rough rule a conception of justice is reasonable in proportion to the strength of the arguments that can be given for adopting it in the original position. This criterion is, of course, perfectly natural if the original position incorporates the various conditions which are to be imposed on the choice of principles and which lead to a match with our considered judgments. Although it is easy enough to distinguish these two ways in which existing institutions can be unjust, a workable theory of how they affect our political duty and obligations is another matter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
When laws and policies deviate from publicly recognized standards, an appeal to the society’s sense of justice is presumably possible to some extent. This condition is presupposed in undertaking civil disobedience. If, however, the prevailing conception of justice is not violated, than the situation is very different. The course of action to be follow depends largely on how reasonable the accepted doctrine is and what means are available to change it. Doubtless one can manage to live with a variety of mixed and intuitionistic conceptions, and with utilitarian view when they are not too rigorously interpreted. In other cases, though, as when a society is regulated by principles favouring narrow class interests, one may have no recourse but to oppose the prevailing conception and the institution it justifies in such ways as promise some success. Secondly, we must consider the question why, in a situation of near justice, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust, and not simply with just, laws. While some writers have questioned this contention, I believe that most would accept it; only a few think that any deviation from justice, however small, nullifies the duty to comply with existing rules. How, then, is this fact to be accounted for? Since they duty of justice and the principle of fairness presuppose that institutions are just, some further explanation is required. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Now one can answer this question if we postulate a nearly just society in which there exists a viable constitutional regime more or less satisfying in the principles of justice. Thus I suppose that for the most part the social system is well-ordered, although not of course perfectly ordered, for in this event the question of whether to comply with unjust laws and policies would not arise. Under these assumptions, the earlier account of a just constitution as an instance of imperfect procedural justice provides an answer. It will be recalled that in the constitutional convention the aim of the parties is to find among the just constitutions (those satisfying the principle of equal liberty) the one most likely to lead to just and effective legislation in view of the general facts about the society in question. The constitution is regarded as a just but imperfect procedure framed as far as the circumstances permit to insure a just outcome. It is imperfect because there is no feasible political process which guarantees that the laws enacted in accordance with it will be just. In political affairs perfect procedural justice cannot be achieved. Moreover, the constitutional process must rely, to a large degree, on some form of voting. I assume for simplicity that a variant of majority rule suitably circumscribed is a practical necessity. Yet majorities (or coalitions of minorities) are bound to make mistakes, if not from a lack of knowledge and judgment, than as a result of partial and self-interested views. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Nevertheless, our natural duty to uphold just institutions binds us to comply with unjust laws and policies, or at least not to oppose them by illegal means as long as they do not exceed certain limits of injustice. Being required to support a just constitution, we must go along with one of its essential principles, that of majority rule. In a state of near justice, then, we normally have a duty to comply with unjust laws in virtue of our duty to support a just constitution. Given humans as they are, there are many occasions when this duty will come into play. The contract doctrine naturally leads us to wonder how we could ever consent to a constitutional rule that would require us to comply with laws that we think are unjust. One might ask: how is it possible that when we are free and still without chains, we can rationally accept a procedure that may decide against our opinion and give effect to that of others? Once we take up the point of view of the constitutional convention, the answer is clear enough. First, among the very limited number of feasible procedures that have any chance of being accepted at all, there are none that would always decide in our favour. And second, consenting to one of these procedures is surely preferable to no agreement at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The situation is analogous to that of the original position where the parties give up any hope of free-rider egoism: this alternative is each person’s best (or second best) candidate (leaving aside the constraint of generality), but it is obviously not acceptable to anyone else. Similarly, although at the stage of the constitutional convention the parties are now committed to the principles of justice, they must make some concession to one another to operate a constitutional regime. Even with the best of intentions, their opinions of justice are bound to clash. In choosing a constitution, then, and in adopting some form of majority rule, the parties accept the risks of suffering the defects of one another’s knowledge and sense of justice in order to gain the advantages of an effective legislative procedure. There is no other way to manage a democratic regime. Nevertheless, when they adopt the majority principle the parties agree to put up with unjust laws only on certain conditions. Roughly speaking, in the long run the burden of injustice should be more or less evenly distributed over different groups in society, and the hardship of unjust policies should not weigh too heavily in any particular case. Therefore the duty to comply is problematic for permanent minorities that have suffered from injustice for many years. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
And certainly we are not required to acquiesce in the denial of our own and others’ basic liberties, since this requirement could not have been within the meaning of the duty of justice in the origin position, nor consistent with the understanding of the rights of the majority in the constitutional convention. Instead, we submit our conduct to democratic authority only to the extent necessary to share equitably in the inevitable imperfections of a connotational system. Accepting these hardships is simply recognizing and being willing to work within the limits imposed by the circumstances of human life. In view of this, we have a natural duty of civility not to invoke the faults of social arrangements as a too ready excuse for not complying with them, nor to exploit in evitable loopholes in the rules to advance our interests. The duty of civility imposes a due acceptance of the defects of institutions and a certain restraint in taking advantage of them. Without some recognition of this duty mutual trust and confidence are liable to break down. Thus in a state of near justice at least, there is normally a duty (and for some also the obligation) to comply with unjust laws provided that they do not exceed certain bounds of injustice. This conclusion is not much stronger than that asserting our duty to comply with just laws. It does, however, take us a step further, since it covers a wider range of situations; but more important, it gives some idea of the questions that are to be asked in ascertaining our political duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Like the geography of the planet, the human body has until now represented a fixed point in human experience, a “given.” Today we are fast approaching the day when the body can no longer be regarded as fixed. Humans will be able, within a reasonably short period, to redesign not merely individual bodies, but the entire human race. In in 1962 Drs. J. D, Watson and F. H. Crick received the Novel prize for describing the DNA molecule, advanced in genetic have come tripping over one another at a rapid pace. Molecular biology is now exploding from the laboratories. New genetic knowledge has permitted us to tinker with human heredity and manipulate the genes to create altogether new versions of humans. One of the more fantastic possibilities is that humans will be able to make biological carbon copies of themselves. Through a process known as “cloning” it will be possible to grow from the nucleus of an adult cell a new organism that has the same genetic characteristics of the person contributing the cell nucleus. The resultant human “copy” would start life with a genetic endowment identical to that of the donor, although cultural differences might thereafter alter the personality or physical development of the clone. Cloning would make it possible for people to see themselves born anew, to fill the World with twins of themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Cloning would, among other things, provide us with solid empirical evidence to help us resolve, once and for all, the ancient controversy over “nature vs. nurture” or “heredity vs. environment.” The solution of this problem, through the determination of the role played by each, would be one of the great milestones of human intellectual development. Whole libraries of philosophical speculation could, by a single stroke, be rendered irrelevant. An answer to this question would open the way for speedy, qualitative advances in psychology, moral philosophy and a dozen other fields. However, cloning could also create undreamed of complications for the race. There is a certain charm to the idea of Albert Einstein bequeathing copies of himself to posterity. We could bring Mrs. Winchester back and learn the secrets of her mansion, and find out if she wanted to complete or expand it. However, what of horrible figures enshrined in history? Should there be laws to regulate cloning. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a scientist who takes his social responsibility very seriously, believes it conceivable that those who are most narcissistic, and that the clones they produce will also be narcissists. Even if narcissism, however, is culturally rather than biologically transmitted, there are other eerie difficulties. Thus Dr. Lederberg rises a question as to whether human, if permitted, might not “go critical.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“I use that phrase,” Dr. Lederberg told me, “in almost exactly the same sense that is involved in nuclear energy. It will go critical if there is a sufficient positive advantage to doing so. This has to do with whether the efficiency of communication, particularly along educational lines, is increased as between identical genotypes or not. The similarity of neurological hardware might make it easier for identical copies to transmit technical and other insights from one generation to the next.” How close is cloning? We have technically been able to clone humans for almost a decade, but as far as we know, no one has actually cloned a whole person. Technically, it is not difficult to produce a clone embryo. However, to even research human cloning, scientists would need to ethically collect a large amount of donated eggs and find enough surrogates to carry them. But even if they made it through that logistical nightmare. Across the board, scientists have found that some embryos expire before they are implanted. And those that make it to term often die soon after birth or end up wit severe abnormalities. Simply, these are risks that are easier to take when it comes to experimenting with non-human beings. However, scientists have learned how the various organs of the body develop, and they have begun to experiment with various means of modifying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Eventually, things like the size of the brain and certain sensory qualities of the brain are going to be brought under direct developmental control. I think this is very near. However, this ethical, moral, and political questions raised by the new biology simply boggle the mind. Who shall live and who shall die? What are humans? Who shall control research into these fields? How shall new findings be applied? Might we not unleash horrors for which humans are totally unprepared? In the opinion of many of the World’s leading scientist human cloning is a disaster waiting to happen. However, gene editing has some benefits. Imagine the implications of the biological breakthroughs in what might be termed “birth technology.” Within a mere ten to fifteen years a woman will be able to buy a tiny frozen embryo that has been perfected, take it to her doctor, have it implanted in her uterus, carry it for nine months, and then give birth to it as thought it had been conceived in her own body. The embryo would, in effect, be sold with a guarantee that the resultant baby would be free of genetic defect. The purchaser would also be told in advance the colour of the baby’s eyes, and hair, its gender, its probable size at maturity and its probable Intelligence Quotient (IQ). #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Indeed, it will be possible at some point to do away with the female uterus altogether. Babies will be conceived, nurtured and raised to maturity outside the human body. It is clearly only a matter of years before the work begun by Dr. Daniele Petrucci in Bologna and other scientists in the United States of America and the Soviet Union, makes it possible for women to have babies without the discomfort of pregnancy. Fertilized human eggs might be useful in the colonization of the planets. Instead of shipping adults to Mars, we could ship a shoebox full of such cells and grow them into an entire city-size population of humans. When you consider how much it costs in fuel to lift every pound off the launch pad, why send full-grown men and women aboard space ships? Instead, why not ship tiny embryos, in the care of a competent biologist…We miniaturize other spacecraft components. Why not the passengers? Long before such developments occur in outer space, however, the impact of the new birth technology will strike home on Earth, splintering our traditional notions of sexuality, motherhood, love, child-rearing, and education. Discussions about the future of the family that deal only with The Pill overlook the biological witches’ brew now seething in the laboratories. The moral and emotional choices that will confront us in the coming decades are mind-staggering. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Many believe that we are playing God and should not, but we have been made in the image of God and should we sit back and watch as the environment and the human race and animal and plant life have been destroyed, or try to fix errors and make a primary race of humans that is healthy, control the weather and make Earth a paradise and produce enough food to feed humanity, make other planets inhabitable to sustain the human life that is produced by a healthy society, and product animal and plant life from going extinct? We really could produce an animal planet, have a forest planet, so forth and so on. It has sometimes been asked whether God commands certain things because they are right, or whether certain things are right because God commands them. I emphatically embrace the first alternative. The second might lead to the abominable conclusion that charity is good only because God arbitrarily commanded it—that He might equally well have commanded us to hate Him and one another and that hatred would then have been right. I believe, on the contrary, that they err who think that of the will of God to do this or that there is no reason besides His will. God’s will is determined by His wisdom which always perceives, and His goodness which always embraces, the intrinsically good. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
However, when we have said that God commands things only because they are good, we must add that one of the things intrinsically good is that rational creatures should freely surrender themselves to their Creator in obedience. The content of our obedience—the thing we are commanded to do—will always be something intrinsically good, something we ought to do even if (by an impossible supposition) God had not commanded it. However, in addition to the content, the mere obeying is also intrinsically good, for, in obeying, a rational creature consciously enacts its creaturely role, reverses the act by which we fell, treads Adam’s dance backward, and returns. We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a human is the more one will like it; but we agree with Dr. Kant so far as to say that there is one right act—that of self-surrender—which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant. And we must add that this one right act includes all other righteousness, and that the supreme cancelling of Adam’s fall, the movement full speed astern by which we retrace our long journey from Paradise, the untying of the old, hard know, must be when the creature, with no desire to assist it, stripped naked to the bare willing of obedience, embraces what is contrary to its nature, and does that for which only one motive is possible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Such an act may be described as a test of the creature’s return to God: hence our fathers said that troubles were sent to us. A familiar example is Abraham’s trial when he was ordered to sacrifice Isaac. With the historicity or the morality of that story I am not now concerned, but with the obvious question, “If God is omniscient He must have known what Abraham would do, without any experiment; why, then, this needless torture? However, as St. Augustine points out, whatever God knew, Abraham at any rate did not know his obedience could endure such a command until the even taught him; and the obedience which he did not know that he would choose, he cannot be said to have chosen. The reality of Abraham’s obedience was the act itself; and what God knew in knowing that Abraham would obey was Abraham’s actual obedience on that mountain top at that moment. To say that God need not have tried the experiment is to say that because God knows, the thing known by God need not exist. However, God uses these legends in the Bible and gives us free will to cultivate us and not allow nature nor nurture to control us, in hopes that we learn to yield to the righteous will of God through guidance and not force. If pain sometimes shatters the creature’s false self-sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice it teaches one the self-sufficiency which really ought to be one’s—the strength, which if Heaven gave it, may be called one’s own: for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports, one acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon one through one’s subject will. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which one that loses one’s soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self—through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone—that is, from God in ourselves—we are collaborators in, or live instruments of, creation: and that is why such an act undoes with backward mutters of dissevering power the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. Hence as suicide is the typical expression of the stoic spirit, and battle of the warrior spirit, martyrdom always remains the supreme enacting and perfection of Christianity. This great action has been initiated for us, done on our behalf, exemplified for our imitation, and inconceivably communicated to all believers, by Christ on Calvary. There the degree of accepted Death reaches the utmost bounds of the imaginable and perhaps goes beyond them; not only all natural supports, but the presence of the very Father to whom the sacrifice is made deserts the victim, and surrender to God does not falter though God forsakes it. The doctrine of death which I describe is not peculiar to Christianity. Nature herself has written it large across the World in the repeated drama of the buried seed and the re-arising corn. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
From nature, perhaps, the oldest agricultural communities learned it and with animal, or human, sacrifices showed forth for centuries the truth that without shedding of blood is no remission; and though at first such conceptions may have concerned only the crops and offspring of the tribe, they came later, in the Mysteries, to concern the spiritual death and resurrection of the individual. The Indian ascetic, mortifying one’s body on a bed of spikes, preaches the same lesson; the Greek philosopher tells us that the life of wisdom is a practice of death. The sensitive and noble heathen of modern times makes one’s imagined gods die into life. Mr. Huxley expounds non-attachment. We cannot escape the doctrine by ceasing to be Christians. It is an eternal gospel revealed to humans wherever humans have sought, or endured, the truth: it is the very never of redemption, which anatomizing wisdom at all times and in all places lays bare; the unescapable knowledge which the Light and that lighteneth every human presses down upon the minds of all who seriously question what the Universe is about. The peculiarity of the Christian faith is not to teach this doctrine but to render it, in various ways, more tolerable. Christianity teaches us that the terrible task has already in some sense been accomplished for us—that a master’s hand is holding ours as we attempt to trace the difficult letters and that our script need only be a copy, not an original. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Again, where other systems expose our total nature to death (as in Buddhist renunciation) Christianity demands only that we set right a misdirection of our nature, and has no quarrel, like Plato, with the body as such, nor with the psychical elements in our make-up. And sacrifice in its supreme realization is not exacted of all. Confessors as well as martyrs are saved, and some old people whose state of grace we can hardly doubt seem to have gotten through their, on average, seventy to ninety years surprisingly easily. The sacrifice of Christ is repeated, or re-echoed, among His followers in varying degrees, from the curellest martyrdom down to a self-submission of intention whose outward signs have nothing to distinguish them from the ordinary fruits of temperance and sweet reasonableness. The causes of tis distribution I do not know; but from our present point of view it ought to be clear that the real problem is not why some humble, pious, believing people suffer, but why some do not. Our Lord Himself, it will be remembered, explained the salvation of those wo are fortunate in the World only by referring to the unsearchable omnipotence of God. Guide to travelers, for your help I pray, that you might be with me as I go on my way. I give greetings to the God of this place, I, a traveler, offer up prayers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
From my land to this one, I have come, meaning no harm to any who dwell here. Land of Spirits, I pray to you; though I do not yet know you, I honour you. Lord of Trees, I pray to you as I enter this forest. Please watch over my steps while I am under your care. Throughout all generations God endureth and His name endureth; His throne is established, and His kingdom and His faithfulness are eternal. His words have living and abiding power. They are forever trustworthy and for all time precious both for our fathers and for us, for our children, and for all future generations of His servants, the seed of America. As for our ancestors so for our descendants, Thy teaching is good and endures forever and ever; it is a truth, a faith, a law which shall not pass away. It is true that Thou art the Lord our God and the God of our fathers, our King and our fathers’ King, our Redeemer and the Redeemer of our Fathers. From everlasting Thou has been our Creator, the Rock of our salvation; our Deliverer and Redeemer forever; there is no God besides Thee. Thou has been the help of our father from of old, a Shield and a Deliverer to their children in every generation. In the height of the Universe is Thy habitation, and Thy laws of righteousness please reach unto the ends of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
At night, passers-by heard ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion. The bell in the belfry high in the gables tolled regularly at midnight to summon incoming flights of spirits. Later it tolled again to warn these visitors to return to their sepulchres. About once a week these departed ones relaxed and danced in the Great Ball Room.
Yes, there was a six-foot cypress hedge enclosing the estate. The writer’s father in 1888, helped with much of the ground’s landscaping, pruned this hedge and planted many of the still-standing ornamental trees. He mentioned no barbed wire–nor did the man who removed this hedge decades later.
Entrance was not really barred but we were reluctant to trespass. Adults stretched their necks when they drove by and small boys settled for a peek through the cypress hedge. So much for answers to a few of those endless rumors surrounding our mysterious lady.
Ghosts have always been a part of the human psyche and experience. Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there. The Victorian Gardens are open today! winchestermysteryhouse.com
Nobody Can Meddle with Fire or Poison without Being Affected in Some Vulnerable Spot!
Eggheads of the World unite; you have nothing to lose but your yolks. As my life entered it second half, I was already embarked on the confrontation with the contents of the unconscious. My work on this was an extremely long-drawn-out affair, and it was only after some twenty years of it that I reached some degree of understanding of my fantasies. First I had to find evidence for the historical prefiguration of my inner experiences. That is to say, I had to ask myself, “Where have my particular premises already occurred in history?” If I had not succeeded in finding such evidence, I would never have been able to substantiate my ideas. Therefore, my encounter with alchemy was decisive for me, as it provided me with the historical basis which I had hitherto lacked. Alchemy is the medieval forerunner of chemistry, based on the supposed transformation of matter. It was concerned particularly with attempts to convert base metal into gold or to fund a universal elixir. Necromancy is the practice of magic involving communication with the dead—either by summoning their spirits as apparitions, visions or raising them bodily—for the purpose of divination, imparting the means to foretell future events, discover hidden knowledge, to bring someone back from the dead, or to use the dead as a weapon. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Sometimes referred to as “Death Magic,” necromancy may also sometimes be used in a more general sense to refer to black magic or witchcraft. Necromancy and alchemy are semantically related in some cases. Some believe alchemy is a form of necromancy where energy is harvested to manipulate the souls of the dead and bring them back to life. Necromancers prefer to summon the recently departed based on the premise that their revelations were spoken more clearly. This timeframe was usually limited to the twelve months following the death of the physical body; once this period elapsed, necromancers would evoke the deceased’s ghostly spirit instead. The apparent value of their counsel may not have only been their physical form or ability in life, but information and knowledge the subjected learned while they were dead. The Book of Deuteronomy explicitly warns the Israelites against engaging in the Canaanite practice of divination from the dead. “When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do according to the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one who maketh one’s son or one’s daughter to pass through the fire, or who useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
“For all who do these things are an abomination unto the LORD, and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out before thee,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-12. Though Mosaic Law prescribed the death penalty to practitioners of necromancy, this warning was not always heeded. “A man or a woman who is a medium or spiritist among you must be put to death. You are to stone them; their blood will be on their own heads,” reports Leviticus 20.27. One of the foremost explains is when King Saul had the Witch of Endor invoke the spirit of Samuel, a judge and prophet, from Sheol using a ritual conjuring pit (1 Samuel 28.3-25). However, the witch was shocked at the presence of the real spirit of Samuel for in I Samuel 28.12 it was reported, “When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out at the top of her voice and said to Saul, ‘Why have you deceived me? You are Saul!’ The king said t her, ‘Don’t be afraid. What do you see?’ The woman said, ‘I see a spirit coming from the ground,’” reports 1 Samuel 28.12-13. Saul did not receive a death penalty (his being the highest authority in the land) but he did receive it from God Himself as prophesied by Samuel during that conjuration—within a day he died in battle along with his son Jonathan. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Some Christians writers reject the idea that humans can bring back the spirits of the dead and believed that these are demons in disguise, thus conflating necromancy with demon summoning. It is also believed that even the working shells of these people provide benefit. Supposedly demons only act with divine permission and are permitted by God to test Christian people. Yet, some Christians believe that necromancy is real (along with other facets of occult magic) but that God has not allowed Christians to deal with those spirits. “The nations you will dispossess listen to those who practice sorcery or divination. However, as for you, the LORD your God has not permitted you to do so. The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him,” reports Deuteronomy 18.14-15. Still some believe the phantom of Samuel to be a trick. However, many people in the 18th and 19th centuries used to hold seances to assist them in the intellectual and spiritual affairs. One of these spiritualists was Sarah Winchester. Mrs. Winchester would go to the blue séance room in her mansion and consult with spirits. She used to planchette board to transmit messages from the dead and that is where she supposed receive the architectural blue prints for her mansion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Medieval practitioners believed they could accomplish things with the use of necromancy, and perhaps Mrs. Winchester was getting plans about her beautiful mansion from her late husband William Writ Winchester. It is believed that necromancers can manipulate the mind and will of another person, animal, or spirit. That they can summon demons to cause various afflictions on others, to drive them mad, inflame love or hatred, gain favour, or constrain one from a deed. The magic often involves reanimation of the dead, conjuring food, entertainment, or a mode of transportation. Also, knowledge is supposedly discovered when demons provide information about various things. This might involve identifying criminals, finding missing items, or revealing future events. Sacrifice was the payment for summoning; though it may involve the flesh of a human being or an animal, it could sometimes be as simple as offering a certain object. This is probably why God does not like humans to use witchcraft. Innocent lives were sometimes lost of personal gain. “When you enter the land of your LORD your God is giving you, do not learn to imitate the detestable ways of nations there. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
“Let no one be found among you who sacrifices one’s son or daughter in the fire, who practices divination or sorcery, interprets omens, engages in witchcraft, or cast spells, or who is a medium or spiritist or who consults the dead,” reports Deuteronomy 18.9-11. Analytical psychology is fundamentally a natural science, but it is subject far more than any other science to the personal bias of the observer. The psychologist must depend therefore in the highest degree upon historical and literacy parallels if one wishes to exclude at least the crudest errors in judgment. Between 1918 and 1926 I had seriously studied the Gnostic writers, for they had too been confronted with the primal World of the unconscious and had dealt with its contents, with images that were obviously contaminated with the World of instinct. Just how they understood these images remains difficult to say, in view of the paucity of the accounts—which, moreover, mostly stem from their opponents, the Church Fathers. It seems to me highly unlikely that they had a psychological conception of them. However, the Gnostics were too remote for me to establish any link with them in regard to the questions that were confronting me. As far as I could see, the tradition that might have connected Gnosis with the present seemed to have been severed, and for a long time it proved impossible to find any bridge that led from Gnosticism—or Neo-Platonism—to the contemporary World. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
However, when I begun to understand alchemy I realized that it represented the historical link with Gnosticism, and that a continuity there existed between past and present. Grounded in the natural philosophy of the Middle Ages, alchemy formed the bridge on the one hand into the past, to Gnosticism, and on the other into the future, to the modern psychology of the unconscious. Light on the nature of alchemy began to come to me only after I had read the text of the Golden Flower, that specimen of Chinese alchemy which Richard Wilhelm sent me in 1928. I was stirred by the desire to become more closely acquainted with the alchemical text. I commissioned a Munich bookseller to notify me of any alchemical books that might fall into his hands. Soon afterwards I received the first of them, the Artis Auriferae Volumina Duo (1593), a comprehensive collection of Latin treatises among which are a number of the “classics” of alchemy. I let this book lie almost untouched for nearly two years. Occasionally I would look at the pictures, and each time I would think, “Good Lord, what nonsense! This stuff is impossible to understand.” However, it persistently intrigued me, and I made up my mind to go into it more thoroughly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
The next winter I began, and soon found it provocative and exciting. To be sure, the texts still seemed to be blatant nonsense, but here and there would be passages that seemed significant to me, and occasionally I even found a few sentences which I thought I could understand. Finally I realized that the alchemist were talking in symbols—those old acquaintances of mine. “Why, this is fantastic,” I thought. “I simply must learn to decipher all this.” By now I was completely fascinated, and buried myself in the texts as often as I had the time. One night, while I was studying them, I suddenly recalled the dream that I was caught in the seventeenth century. At last I grasped its meaning. “So that is it! Now I am condemned to study alchemy from the very beginning.” It was a long while before I found my way about in the labyrinth of alchemical thought processes, for no Ariadne had put a thread into my hand. Reading the sixteenth-century text, “Rosarium Philosophorum,” I noticed that certain strange expressions and turns of phrase were frequently repeated. For example, “solve et coagula,” “unum vas,” “lapis,” “prima materia,” “Mercurius,” et cetera. I saw that these expressions were used again and again in a particular sense, but I could not make out what the sense was. I therefore decided to start a lexicon of key phrases with cross references. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
In the course of time I assembled several thousand such key phrases and words, and had volumes filled with excerpts. I worked along philological lines, as if I were trying to solve the riddle of an unknown language. In this way the alchemical mode of expression gradually yielded up its meaning. It was a task that kept me absorbed for more than a decade. I had very soon seen that analytical psychology coincided in a most curious way with alchemy. The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their World was my World. This was, of course, a momentous discovery: I had stumbled upon the historical counterpart of my psychology of the unconscious. The possibility of a comparison with alchemy, and the interrupted intellectual chain back to Gnosticism, gave substance to my psychology. When I pored over these old texts everything fell into place: the fantasy-images, the empirical material I had gathered in my practice, and the conclusions I had drawn from it. I now began to understand what these psychic contents meant when seen in historical perspective. My understanding of their typical character, which had already begun with my investigation of myths, was deepened. The primordial images and the nature of the archetype took a central place in my researches, and it became clear to me that without history there can be no psychology, and certainly no psychology of the unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
A psychology of consciousness can, to be sure, content itself with material drawn from personal life, but as soon as we wish to explain a neurosis we require an anamnesis which reaches deeper than the knowledge of consciousness. And when in the course of treatment unusual decisions are called for, dreams occur that need more than personal memories for their interpretation. I regard my work on alchemy as a sign of my inner relationship to Prince Lestat. Lestat’s secret was that he was in the grip of that process of archetypal transformation which has gone on through the centuries. He was an opus magnum or divinum. This is his main business, and his whole life was enacted within the framework of this drama. Thus, what was alive and active within him was a living substance, a suprapersonal process the great dream of the mundus archetypus (archetypal World). I myself am haunted by the same dream, and from my eleventh year I have been launched upon a single enterprise which is my main business. My life has been permeated into the secret of personality. Everything can be explained from this central point, and all my works relate to this one theme. It is a remarkable fact, which we come across again and again, that absolutely everybody, even the most unqualified novice, thinks one knows all about psychology as though the psyche were something that enjoyed the most universal understanding. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
However, anyone who really knows that human psyche will agree with me when I say that it is one of the darkest and most mysterious regions of our experience. There is no end to what can be learned in this field. Hardly a day passes in my practice but I come across something new and unexpected. True enough, my experiences are not commonplaces lying on the surface of life. They are, however, within easy reach of every psychotherapist working in this particular field. It is therefore rather absurd, to say the least, that ignorance of the experiences I have to offer should be twisted into an accusation against me. I do not hold myself responsible for the shorting comings in the lay public’s knowledge of psychology. The treatment of neurosis opens up a problem which goes far beyond purely medical considerations and to which medical knowledge alone cannot hope to do justice. People are still very fond of describing a lengthy analysis as “running away from life,” “unresolved transference,” “auto-eroticism”—and by other equally unpleasant epithets. However, since there are two sides to everything, it is legitimate to condemn this so-called “hanging on” as negative to life only if it can be shown that it really does contain nothing positive. The very understandable impatience felt by the doctor does not prove anything in itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Only through infinitely patient research has the new science succeeded in building up a profounder knowledge of the nature of the psyche, and if there have been certain unexpected therapeutic results, these are due to the self-sacrificing perseverance of the doctor. Unjustifiably negative judgments are easily to come by and at times harmful; moreover they arouse the suspicion of being a mere cloak for ignorance if not an attempt to evade the responsibility of a thorough-going analysis. For since the analytical work must inevitably lead sooner or late to a fundamental discussion between “I” and “You” and “You” and “I” on a plane stripped of all human pretences, it is very likely, indeed it is almost certain, that no only the patient but the doctor as well will find the situation “getting under his skin.” Nobody can meddle with fire or poison without being affected in some vulnerable spot; for the true physician does not stand outside one’s work but is always in the thick of it. Christ can indeed be imitated even to the point of stigmatization without the imitator coming anywhere near the ideal of its meaning. For it is not a question of an imitation that leaves a person unchanged and makes ne int a mere artifact, but of realizing the ideal on one’s own account—Deo concedente—in one’s own individual life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
We must not forget, however, that even a mistake imitation may sometimes involve a tremendous moral effort which has all the merits of a total surrender to some supreme value, even though the real goal may never be reached and the value is represented externally. It is conceivable that by virtue of this total effort a human may even catch a fleeting glimpse of one’s wholeness, accompanied by the feeling of grace that always characterizes this experience. I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken. The Kingdom of God—Christians are taught that it is within you. However, Christ the ideal took upon himself the sins of the World. Therefore, if the ideal is wholly outside, then the sins of the individual are also outside, and consequently one is more fragmented than ever, since superficial misunderstanding conveniently enables one, quite literally, to “cast one’s sins upon Christ” and thus to evade one’s deepest responsibilities—which are contrary to the spirit of Christianity. Such formalism and laxity were not only one of the prime causes of the Reformation, they are also present within the body of Protestantism. If the supreme value (Christ) and the supreme negation (sin) are outside, then the soul is void: its highest and lowest are missing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
People in the New World, whose soul is evidently of little worth, speak and think. If much were in one’s soul, one would speak of it with reverence. However, since one does not do so we can only conclude that there is nothing of value in it. Not that this is necessarily so always and everywhere, but only with people who put noting into their souls and have all God outside. An exclusive religious projection may rob the soul of its values so that through sheer inanition it becomes incapable of further development and gets stuck in an unconscious state. At the same time it falls victim to the delusion that the cause of all misfortune lies outside, and people no longer stop to ask themselves how far it is their own doing. So insignificant does the soul seem that it is regarded as hardly capable of evil, much less of good. However, if the soul no longer has any part to play, religious life congeals into externals and formalities. However we may picture the relationship between God and the soul, one thing is certain: that the souls cannot be nothing but. (Nothing but something else of a quite inferior sort.) On the contrary it has the dignity of an entity endowed with consciousness of a relationship to Deity. One’s first step is to detect the presence of the higher Power consciously in oneself through vigilantly noting and cultivating the intuitions it gives one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
One must educate oneself to recognize the first faint beginners of the intuitive mood and train oneself to drop everything else when its onset is noticed. Intuitive feelings are so easily and hence so often drowned in the outer activity of the body, the passions, the emotions, or the intellect, that only a deliberate cultivation can safeguard and strengthen them. We may ardently want to do what is wholly right and yet not know just what this is. This is particularly possible and likely when confronted with two rads and when upon the choice between them the gravest consequences will follow. It is then that the mind easily becomes hesitant and indecisive. The search for the wisest choice may not end that day or that month. Indeed, it may not end until the last hour of the last day. This is how the aspirants are tested to see if they can humble the ego with the realization that they are no longer capable of making their own decision but must turn it over to the higher self and wait in quiet patience for the result. However, when finally the intuitive guidance does emerge after such deep, sincere, and obedient quest of God’s will, it will do so in a formulation so clear and self-evidence as to be beyond all doubt. One has to bring one’s problems and lay them at the feet of the higher self and wait in patience until an intuitive response does come. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
However, this is not to say that one has to lay them before one’s timid fears or eager wishes. The first step is to take them out of the hold of the anxious fretting intellect or the blind egoistic emotional self. Even if it were only the relationship of a drop of water to the sea, that sea would not exist but for the multitude of drops. The immortality of the soul insisted upon by strict and rigid doctrines exalts it above the transitoriness of mortal humans and cases it to partake of some supernatural quality. It thus infinitely surpasses the perishable, conscious individual in significance, so that logically the Christian is forbidden to regard the soul as “nothing but.” The strict and rigid doctrine that humans are formed in the likeness of God weigh heavily in the scales in any assessment of humans—not to mention the Incarnation. As the eye to the sun, so the soul corresponds to God. Since our conscious mind does not comprehend the soul it is ridiculous to speak of the things of the soul in a patronizing depreciatory manner. Even the believing Christian does not know God’s hidden ways and must leave one to decide whether one will work on humans from outside or from within, through the soul. So the believer should not boggle at the fact that there are somnia a Deo missa (dreams sent by God) and illuminations of the soul which cannot be traced back to any external causes. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
It would be blasphemy to asset that God can manifest oneself everywhere save only in the human soul. Indeed the very intimacy of the relationship between God and the soul precludes from the start any devaluation of the latter. The fact that the devil too can take possession of the soul does not diminish its significance in the least. It would be going perhaps too far to speak of an affinity; but at all events the soul must contain in itself the faculty of relationship to God, id est, a correspondence, otherwise a connection could never come about. It is therefore psychologically quite unthinkable for God to be simply the “wholly other,” for a “wholly other” could never be one of the soul’s deepest and closet intimacies—which is precisely what God is. The only statements that have psychological validity concerning the God-image are either paradoxes or antinomies. This correspondence is, in psychological terms, the archetype of the God-image. It may easily happen, therefore, that a Christian who believes in all the sacred figures is still undeveloped and unchanged in one’s inmost soul because one has all God outside and does not experience God in the soul. The great events of our World as planned and executed by humans do not breathe the spirit of Christianity but rather of unadorned paganism. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
These Worldly events originate in a psychic condition that has remained archaic and has not been even remotely touched by Christianity. The human soul is out of key with one’s beliefs; in one’s soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. One of the first steps is to watch out for those infrequent moments when deeply intuitive guidance, thoughts, or reflections make their unexpected appearance. As soon as hey are detected, all other mental activities should be thrown aside, all physical ones should be temporarily stilled, and one should sink oneself in them with the utmost concentration. Even if one falls into a kind of daze as a result, it will be a happy and fortunate event, possibly a glimpse. The secret is to stop, on the instant, whatever one is going just then, or even whatever one is saying, and reorient all one’s attention to the incoming intuition. The incompleted act, the broken sentence, should be deserted, for this is an exercise in evaluation. The whole of this quest is really a struggled toward a conception of life reflecting the surpreme values. Hence throughout its course the aspirant will feel vague intuitions which one cannot formulate. Only a master can do that. It is better to wait, if intuition is not at once apparent, till all favourable facts are found and till full knowledge is gained of the unfavourable ones before deciding an issue. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
The intuition grows by use of it and obedience to it. The intuitive faculty can be deliberately cultivated and consciously trained. Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls. Christ only meets them from without, never rom within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a pasanism which, not in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the World of the so-called Christian civilization. Thinking carefully, attempting clarity, I ask God for inspiration. If our lips were adorned was the spacious firmament, were our eyes radiant as the sun and the moon, our hands spread forth to Heaven like the wings of the eagles, and our feet swift as hinds, we would still be unable to thank and bless Thy name sufficiently, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, for even one measures of the thousands upon thousands of kindnesses which Thou hast bestowed upon our fathers and upon us. Thy tender mercies have helped us, Thy loving kindnesses have not failed us, and Thou wilt not ever forsake us, O Lord our God. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Therefore, the limbs which Thou hast fashioned for us, and the soul which Thou hast breathed into us, and the tongue which Thou has set in our mouth, lo, they shall thank, bless, exalt and revere Thee. They shall proclaim Thy sovereignty, O our King. The Godhead is a great Void and has no direct connection with the cosmos. When the hour ripens for the latter to appear, there first emanates from the Godhead a mediator which is the active creative agent. This is the World-Mind. From the Void emerges the Central Point. The Point spreads the All. So the World-Mind and the Grans Universe appear in existence together. No thing is exactly like any other nor is any individual history the same as any other. No entity or circumstance is perpetuated: each passes away and the entity reappears later in another form. If the divine activity ceases in one Universe it continues at the same time in another. If our World-Mind returns to its source in the end, there are other World-Minds and other Worlds which continue. Creation is a thing without beginning and without end, but there are interludes and periods of rest just as there are in the individual’s own life in and outside the body. Logos in Greek means not only the word through which mind communicates or expresses itself but also the thought behind the word. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
So the Biblical phrase “In the beginning was the Logos” means that first of all there was the MIND, here divine mind. Humans need and speak numerous words to express themselves, but God needed and uttered only the one creative silent Word to bring this infinitely varied cosmos into being. However far we trace back the line of cause and effects it must come to an end in the lone cause, the great mystery which is the unseen power. The sign for infinite is a circle. The sign for unity is a vertical dash. Hence 9, the figure nine, combines both and the figure six also, but reversed. Unity is the creative beginning of all things and infinite is that wherein they dissolve. The World-Mind is the conscious Power sustaining all life, the intelligent energy sustaining all atoms, the divine being behind and within the Universe. Just as the echo can have no reality, no existence even, without the sound which originally produced it, so this entire Universe can have none without the Infinite Power from which originate and on which it is still dependent. Call it God or Allah, the Creator or Tao, it is the First, the Source, the Origin from which all energies and things come into being. The World-Mind is the creative principle of the Universe. The World-Mind eternally thinks this Universe into being in a pulsating rhythm of thought and rest. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
The process is as eternal as the World-Mind itself. The energies which accompany this thinking are electrical. The scientists note and tap the energies, and ignore the Idea and the Mind they are expressing. There is a double alternating movement within Mind: the first spreading out from itself towards multiplicity, the second withdrawing inwards to its own primal unity. Hidden behind the so-called material Universe is the Power which emanated it, which it present in all atoms. Hidden behind the Power is the eternal Mind. There is no power in the material Universe itself. All its forces and energies drive from a single source—the World-Mind—whose thinking is expressed by that Universe. Intuitive guidance comes not necessarily when we seek it, but when the occasion calls for it. It does not usually come until it is actually needed. The intellect, as part of the ego, will often seek it in advance of the occasion because it may be driven by anxiety, fear, desire, or anticipation. Such premature seeking is fruitless. “Then the angel I has seen standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to Heaven. And he swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created the Heavens and all that is in them, the Earth and all this is in it, and the sea and all that is in it, and said, ‘There will be no more delay! But in the days when the seventh angel is about to sound his trumpet, the mystery of God will be accomplished, just as he announced to his servants the prophets,’” reports Revelation 10.5-7. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
It may seem that our intents have been to weave a clock of vindication and protection covering our Lady’s eccentricities, so many to this day still unexplainable. In truth, volumes could be written extolling her many virtues and justifying construction of this usually beautiful and mysterious estate. Still the question remains—Why? Why? The enigma of the Winchester Estate that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable. The present generation must weigh and drawn its own conclusions about this Valley’s most interest, most controversial, most unappreciated and surely our most mysterious Frist Lady! Prior to all the gossip and rumors, Mrs. Winchester was social and happy. Living today are descents of people who still tell of parties in those incomparable gardens lush with acres of blooming flowerbed, boarded with rare dwarf boxwood and shaded by imported ornamental trees and shrubs. At one time, the Winchester Mansion was the center of high society.
The Winchester Estate is Open Today! We are happy to offer an opportunity to enjoy the Victorian Gardens on this beautiful day with a zero-contact, self guided tour complimented by informative visuals and educational sound clips. The strongest precautions are being taken to ensure the safety and health of our guests and employees, in accordance with city, county and state guidelines and protocols. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International Institute 