Randolph Harris II International Institute

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It is Noble to See a Man’s Hands Subdued to What He Works in

A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. For me, it seems like something is missing in my life and sometimes it is hard to enjoy the moment because there are things I want to do and people I want to spend time with and I get anxious and start missing them or desiring their company or wanting to go places to have fun. There is just something so exciting about the nightclub, the light, music blaring through the speakers, and all the people having a good time. However, in order to awaken the unconditioned mind, we are required to live in a state of ongoing completion. We are required to be complete with the past and fearless about the future. When we are complete we do not need to think about what we have done, or what we will be doing. This allows us to fully encounter the next moment.

There are two ways in which we create incompletions. Either we do not do what is required to be done, or we do what does not need to be done. Often we find out why some precious seconds, minutes, hours, or days afterwards, when we sense that we have been careless or unconscious with our words or deeds. When our actions come from the conditioned mind they are not optimally responsive to the requirements of them moment. We are unable to read and respond to the uniqueness of each situation because we were operating from a model of what has worked in the past. However, it is also possible to tune into the present moment with a subtlety and depth that lets us sense the potential of our speech and behavior to condition the future. In fact, this sensitivity and care arises naturally when we connect with the unconditioned mind. 

When we grow as a person, traditions and nature of the spiritual path change from one of avoiding suffering and pursuing pleasure to one of expanding our capacity to be present to everything that human life can produce—open to the full force and richness of our conditioned existence. We develop a capacity to receive all experiences without fear or addiction. Suffering is not necessarily something wrong—as something that should not happen to us. Problems are natural. We all suffer, and will learn to handle problems better as we walk down our journey in life. We stop making a problem out of having problems! We accept the basic structure and patterns of our experience—our life circumstances, not in a defeatist way, but with dignity and grace. We welcome what is as a gateway to the unconditioned mind.

When we try to escape the burden of boring and limiting thoughts, it is difficult to be effortlessly present. Initial access to the unconditioned mind can be greatly enhanced by slowing our thinking down so that we feel peaceful and serene. If a person’s thoughts are racy or disturbed, a crucial step is to help them slow down and discover a place where they are more composed and less urgent. We do not need to eliminate thoughts completely. We are just required to arrive at the point where thoughts can float through awareness without producing disturbance. This is called serenity. A heart at ease flies into no extremes-it is ever on its center. A man who is master of himself can end a sorrow as easily as he can invent pleasure.  

The most direct and effective way to slow down our thinking is to give ourselves nothing to think about. This is logical. If we have nothing to think about we have fewer thoughts. And thinking about nothing also reveals the unconditioned mind. The two practices support each other. Thoughts are thinned out by not feeding the interpretive process, by not digging for problems, by not offering anything to think about. Stay in intimate communication and relationship without pushing your mind to be so active. You do not have to figure everything out. Just take some time to rest and relax.  

Experiences of bliss arise in the slipstream of the unconditioned mind. The supremely blissful state of natural rest—is sublime stability, spontaneously present without having to be cultivated. These experiences occur like clockwork when our thinking slows down and we move into more subtle states of consciousness. These experiences can be profoundly healing, especially for people who deprive themselves of pleasure. They are medicine for the mind and the spirit. They soothe our minds and repair the damage done to our nervous system by pain and trauma. However, like all conditioned experiences, bliss comes and goes. When you are healing, there is still further to go. There is at least this good thing of toil, that it takes the nonsense and fancy-work out of a human, and leaves nothing but what truly belongs to one.

Enmeshed in Isolation

No man’s profession can exempt him from the misfortunate incident to his nature. The idea of “World pain,” I believe, can be understood more accurately as “human pain.” Of course there is physical pain. Bodily injury and biochemical disturbance can produce excruciating suffering. Psychological pain, with its locus in our sense of self and worth; sociological pain, with its locus in our sense of affiliation and alienation; spiritual pain, with its locus in our sense of power and meaning. Human pain represents the personal and social and spiritual suffering people experience in the midst of living. On the levels of community and cosmos, that pain is, indeed, World pain.  When we are experiencing any kind of pain, we are driven to understand what is happening. It our attempt to understand, we find ourselves dealing with individual as well as Universal expression of the human pilgrimage. We look to ourselves and we look to others. Even more, we look to the Universe, what it is about, how it works, what rests at its heart. Immediate concerns inevitably mere with the official distress. What happens to others happens to us; what happens to us happens to others. Human pain intensifies human meaning with special poignancy. We have to have sense of that which seems senseless. 

Such understanding requires our person participation in pain. There is continuity between ourselves and others that specific stress cannot obscure. If we are to respond helpfully, we must ourselves know of (and not merely about) pain. In this realm we cannot be too removed from reality. The difference between reality and a semblance of reality is extreme. Those are, in truth, separate realities—one immediate, vivid, substantial; the other faint, insipid, spent. The residue of others’ experience is inadequate for one’s own sustenance. If we feed our lives on the leftovers from others’ presence, the diet could leave you alienated and alone.  We who heal also require healing. The ongoing requirement for the helper to be helped is real. Our bodies and brains function on our behalf and the crucial demands we personally face when we venture to respond to pain. These demands complete the circle of caring, for having begun with ourselves and having reached out to others, we discover we are brought back to ourselves. If we are to care for others genuinely, we are forced to face openly who we are and what we want. Dependency, aging, and dying have their own specific constellations of pain. We come into this World, we pass through it, and in many cases we depart. 

No matter what we do, we risk. We risk ideas and ideals, our lives and the lives of others, we risk concerns and security and satisfaction. In no way can we avoid risk—either in life or in responding to pain. One heart beats with other hearts in the presence of human pain. We are called from beyond our own little lives to enter into the lives of others. To respond—so simple, so meaningful, so significant, so natural, so inevitable…. Of course I want to respond, I want to help, I want to heal, I want to be all that I can be with others and for others and to others. However, what sounds so right and what seems so real, upon closer examination, turns into that which is unclear and uncertain. To respond to human pain—we can too easily jump into professional performance—or at least advanced competence without initially paying the price of person discipline.  Many people only want things that benefit them. They want to come in when the cost is less and the burden light. Most would bypass the step where the cost is greater and the burden heavier. In responding to human pain, that initial cost and that first step always mean including ourselves. To give ourselves to others in ways that matter requires that we have ourselves together as ourselves in ways that matter. If we really intend to respond to human pain, then, of necessity, we have to start with ourselves.   

Most people enter helping professions—ministry, medicine, social services, teaching, psychology—out of a personal need to be needed. Some do it because others require it of them. At its core that requirement is life and health; namely, my life takes on life to the degree it is engaged with others. There can be no life without meaningful life together. However, surrounding that core of human response, we find a layer of intent: I will be needed no matter what; I will be helpful regardless; I will respond at all times to all requests as requested. It is that willful drive to respond that becomes a terrible burden upon those to whom we seek to respond. At the beginning, we cannot avoid looking at the personal cost and individual struggles which we must undertake if we are to put ourselves at the disposal of others. That is the necessary foundation if we are to have a self to give away in ways that matter. There are, however, far more subtle loneliness traps in our society. Not every lovely person is trapped by interest in career, pursuit of independence, or a love-seeking belief system. Many lonely people are not particularly hung up about these issues. Many readily admit that they would give anything if only they could find the right person with whom they could share their lives. And yet they still find themselves enmeshed in isolation. 

Breaking a Heart on Purpose and Causing Emotional Pain for Fun!

People seek help for unexpectedly varied expressions of pain. There are hospitalized mental patients; ambulatory neurotics often with psychosomatic complaints; those with chronic disease or disability; those in special circumstances, such as criminal offenders; those with specific stress, and those with sexual difficulties. The great majority of those seeking help are people whose adaptive capacities for coping get temporarily or periodically overtaxed. There are others who suffer from World pain. They seek help in their struggles with such problems as identity and alienation. They have a spiritual unrest or feeling that they are not getting all they should out of life. Their pain reflects the confusion of moral standards and disintegration of values in today’s World, as well as the increasing proportion of the educated and affluent who have the leisure and inclination to brood about such issues.  Many people resist the idea that there is a connection between their overeating, their lack of exercise, their smoking, their drinking, or their loneliness of their healthy. They still believe that human disease is caused by germs out there and that nothing they do matters. Very similar beliefs about mental disease dominated the nineteenth century thinking. Mental illness was thought to be caused by something foreign to the human body.  

Since it was a “mental problem,” it had to involve the human soul, and so the source of these problems was attributed to an invasion of evil spirits or possession by devils. Since the mind was a reflection of the human soul, mental disturbance could only be caused by agents which disturbed the soul, namely devils. The attitude toward human emotions followed precisely the same line of thought. Emotions were viewed as quality of the human soul; they were nonmaterial, and therefore had little to do with physical disease. Like mental disorders, emotional disorders were viewed as an indication of a disturbed soul and somehow caused by evil spirits or devils. If a person was emotionally upset, then he prayed for spiritual guidance. It is possible that demons, devils, or evil spirits are inside of some people and that is why that are so wicked and mean. “Their leader’s name is Satan, and he is the deceiver of the whole World—he was thrown down to the Earth, and his outcasts were thrown down with him,” reports Revelation 12:9. They attempt to hinder God’s people. They “devote themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared,” reports 1 Timothy 4:1-3. So it is possible unholy spirits are on Earth creating physical, emotional, and mental problems for God’s people. 

For centuries these ideas remained firmly entrenched. While investigators probed deeper and deeper into the mysteries of chemistry, physics, physiology, astronomy, mathematics, and biology, most scientist continued to view human emotions, especially emotions like love, as something personal, internal, hidden, mystical, religious, and beyond scientific analysis. Such emotions could be described by mystics, poets, musicians, and artist, but clearly they were outside the scientific domain. Love and human companionship were not viewed as “things,” but rather as qualities of the human soul or the human spirit. Most eighteenth—and nineteenth—century scientist would have considered the idea of studying love scientifically absurd, perhaps humorous. However, physicians should carefully attend to human feelings; as human feelings are too often ignored or denied as an important emotion condition, and this is why many are unable to understand the roots of many crippling diseases. Digestive disorders are often misunderstood. For example, Ulcerative Colitis is an inflammatory bowel disease that causes inflammation in the digestive tract, namely the large intestine, also known as the colon. When the lining of the colon become inflamed and develop tiny open sores or ulcers, they can sometimes bleed. The combination of inflammation and ulceration can cause abdominal discomfort and frequent emptying of the colon.  Ulcerative colitis is the result of an abnormal response by your body’s immune system. Normally, the cells and proteins that make up the immune system, protect you from infection. In people with Ulcerative Colitis (UC), however, the immune system mistakes food, bacteria, and other materials in the intestine for foreign or invading substances.

When this happens, the body send white blood cells into the lining of the intestines, where they produce chronic inflammation and ulceration. People suffering from UC often experience loss of appetite and may lose weight as a result. People with UC also should not drink at all. In addition, a feeling of low energy and fatigue is also common with UC. Ulcerative Colitis does tend to come and go, with fairly long periods in between flare-ups in which patients may experience do distress. These periods of remission can span months or even years, although symptoms do eventually return. The unpredictable course of ulcerative colitis may make it difficult for physician to evaluate whether a particular course of treatment has been effect or not. No one knows what the cause of UC is. It could be an antigen in the environment, and stress can make symptoms worse, as it damages the intestine, and can spread to other tissues like the eyes. A type of eye inflammation called anterior uveitis can stem from ulcerative colitis. Anterior uveitis is an inflammation of the middle layer of the eye. This layer includes the iris and the adjacent tissue, knows as the ciliary body. If untreated, it can cause permanent damage and loss of vision from the development of glaucoma, cataract or retinal edema. People with anterior uveitis may experience red, sore and inflamed eye. Blurred vision, sensitivity to light, and small pupil. Also, ulcerative colitis can lead to cancer. However, good human contact and a reduction of stress seem to be very powerful healing method. Very few people want to be lonely or stressed out on purpose, and it is not good for our healthy.  

Modern Society–what it is Doing to Our Lives?

 

The happenstance, event, or circumstance that elevates the aspiring hero from his everyday life—or ordinary reality—into a new, totally unexpected reality that will test and develop the person, if he is successful in meeting certain challenges, into a genuine hero. One of the most crucial points is that the challenges the inspiring hero has to face and conquer cannot be entirely preplanned, manufactures, or staged. Part of the reason is that the challenges come from the aspirant’s own unconscious and represent the internal demons and terrors (archetypes) the aspirant has to conquer within himself. They can no more be completely planned or staged than what one dreams at night can be willed. This is why the best heroes are shaped as much by external circumstances not fully under their control as they are by formal training and education. A good part of the hero’s adventure consists of his leaving the everyday World—making a clean break—to encounter a World of mystery. And the mystery is not merely “out there in the World” but is, to a good degree, deep inside one as well, i.e., in the unconscious, underworld of forces (archetypes) with which the aspirant is struggling. The battle, thus, is with the person himself. However, if so, how can the hero in today’s World identify, let alone do battle with his internal mysteries if they are constantly in the media spotlight? Where can potential aspirants go in modern societies to get away sufficiently from ordinary reality in order to confront themselves? Notice that we are not talking about the phony mystification of pseudo celebrities or the deliberate withholding of public information by responsible officials. Rather, to develop, the hero needs to go off, to separate, to develop himself so as to reenter society and possibly change everyday reality.  

There is no doubt whatsoever that we have been and will continue to be highly successful in developing the technical means to produce characters and images. However, if manufacturing technology and its end product should not be confused with the social process that it takes to produce genuine heroes and leaders. Technology may be able to produce characters, but it is not able to produce character. The confusion, lack of understanding between these two is one of the prime characteristics of our culture. Why has it become increasingly difficult to secure genuine heroes and leaders in contemporary American and what does this tell us further about unreality? Two hundred years ago, when the Founding Fathers gathered in Philadelphia to write the Constitution, America had a population of only three million, yet six World class leaders contributed to the making of that extraordinary document. Today, there are nearly 323 million Americans, and we have massive debt. Clearly, if American is not to become a kind of MF Global, we must do better. Leaders come in every size, shape, and disposition, but they have in common the vision which is compelling to other people, and, by fully deploying themselves, the ability to make their vision manifest. They have, in other words, a passion for the promises of life. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison had that passion, as did Abraham Lincoln, John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. None of our current so-called leaders has it. Today, passion is out, and selfish ambition is in. 

As 18th century America was notable for its geniuses, and 19th century America for its freewheeling adventurers, entrepreneurs, inventors, and scientists, 20th century America has been chiefly notable for its bureaucrats and managers, and the 21st century and known from massive debts, drug problems, dysfunction, and celebrities. What those Philadelphia geniuses created, and their rowdy successors embellished, the organization men—in both government and business—have remade, or unmade. Unlike either our Founding Fathers or the industrial titans, the managers of America’s giant corporations and the bureaucrats, elected and appointed, who run the government have no gut stake in the enterprise and no vision.  More often than not, our leaders today, they are mere hired dictators, following the money so they can enrich themselves and appear to care about the community and the people, when they actually do not. Many of their actions are purely selfish and meant to pacify the groups who holler the loudest. Free cellphones for the poor, who cares if your kids can afford Wi-Fi to get online and do homework, as long as they look cool. A new billion-dollar sports complex for a team who is not very good, who cares if 3.5 million kids die from hunger each year. Free paint, cheap furniture for the lobby, and higher utility rates for the tenants, who cares if the people are actually safe or can afford the cost increases. News with personality and shiny bright graphics, who cares if the reporting is irresponsible.  The end result of looking cool and giving people what they want, not what they require, is that unreality has become our general substitute for our lack of vision. Where once our psychological energy was invested in people, animals, planets, nature, and dreams, we invest it now in technology and pseudo heroes. As both business and government both got bigger, they began to get in each other’s way. The bureaucrats-imposed rules and regulations on big business. Corporate managers countered by flooding Washington with lobbyists, and a new era began: America of, by and for special interest. A stalemate developed as bureaucrats and managers traded favors. Nothing much grows in a stalemate, of course, but managers and bureaucrats are less gardeners than mechanics—fonder of tinkering with the machinery than making it go. 

The Winchester Mystery House

A tour through The Winchester Mystery House cleverly presents a supernatural story that will keep you guessing. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

I See a Glimmer Coming from the Room!

We feel desperately the loss of any overall guiding framework to make sense of a World that has seemingly gone made. We experience an attack on our sensibilities because unreality and technology speeds up the breakdown and irrelevancy of coherence through the overload of sensual images that are nearly completely devoid of any intellectual or cognitive content. Americans cannot sustain for prolonged periods of time the same intensity of belief in subjective experiences because there is no hope in muting the technological forces that are at work in America, which allow people to send mean comments and anonymously terrorize others with the use of engineered images. There are fan pages online, pretending to be the celebrity they are representing and seduce fans into sending them nude pictures and even invite them out of town for the weekend. Because of technology, we may be worse off than our forefathers. We may have so atrophied our emotional lives in the intervening period that we know no other sources in which to invest our emotional experiences than in our technology or dangerous cults that promote fascist violence. We are subject to an incredible paradox. The media and internet are some of the most intense emotional experiences of the great masses of people, and they revolve around unreality, they are responsible for producing some of unreality’s strongest forms of abuse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 3

One of the things that is most interesting about various national cultures is how much similar sounding idea. Some people may act like they are all nice in person, but then use media to terrorize innocent people for many years before in is discovered that an individual is under attack by an unreality cult. Unreality is at once both its own disease. No one can fully figure out a treatment when the disease itself, social media, and the media, itself is not fully known, but it is in bad need of treatment. The media has become like a narcotic, in the sense that it is dangerous and lethal. The abuse from injections further strengthens the disease. The only truly effective cure would be to remove the conditions promoting the disease, in the case the media, in the first place.  Unreality has become so intense that some people are living lives that a dope addict lives, and in many cases do end up becoming hooked on drugs, to deal with life, until the point that it almost takes them under. Some people are truly under attacked, have been physically assaulted, stalked, had their homes broken into and vehicles vandalized and reach out for help, but no one will help them. Because of some of the rumors that are generated by unreality, people are not able to hold down jobs because they would not be able to perform them, would be too big of a distraction, or a liability. The hosts of unreality know them and try to push the victim to suicide. It gets to the point where one is a prisoner in their own homes and always alone, with no one to trust. Many people see what is going on, but do nothing.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 3

People have literally killed off, in some cases, the conditions that make it possible for heroes to emerge, to lead, to sustain, to nourish us. It seems that not only have the old gods, myths, religions, and symbols lost much, if not most of their past power in modern society, but we are sorely lacking in replacements. The old gods and myths no longer sustain us because they are no longer deeply embedded in everyday lives of people. Further, society’s present idols (celebrities) no longer, in many cases, are worthy of the role and the title of heroes, let alone gods, because the modern process of the deliberate manufacturing of pseudo heroes is complete variance with the one by which true heroes historically have risen.  Now that we have defended ourselves against the objections raised, or have at least indicated our weapons of defense, we must no longer delay entering upon the psychological investigations for which we have so long been preparing. Life is a psychic act full of import; its motive power is invariably a wish craving fulfilment; the fact that is unrecognizable as a wish, and its many peculiarities and absurdities, are due to the influence of the psychic censorship to which it has been subjected during its formation. While you will never find closure in life, stress, nightmares, and death are reminders that problems are still unsolved. I see a glimmer coming from the room in which the body is lying. Perhaps a candle has fallen over, and the child is burning!  #RandolphHarris 3 of 3

Secrets and Lies—it is a Devil of a thing to have too Nice a Conscience!

Experience, that unvarying and rational order of the World which has been the appointed instrument of man’s training since life and thought began. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. We are programmed by evolution to unreality’s special fondness for hyperactiveness. However, the brain’s receptiveness to fast moving stimuli is not sufficient in itself to account for America’s special preoccupation with unreality. More than the workings of the brain alone are required to account for the intensity with which Americans pursue unreality with a fever that approaches a national crusade. And indeed, to inveigh the phrase “national crusade” already implies that another part of the answer is to be found in American culture. Hyperactivity is not only a deeply ingrained feature of American culture by virtue of the special fortitude of those who journeyed to the new land in order to settle it—it was a dire necessity for survival—but, as a result, it has become linked with other fundamental American values and beliefs. Americans have always believed deeply in material progress. The two words “material” and “progress” are virtually inseparable. Each implies the other in the context of the American experience. The antiquated nations of the Earth creep on sluggishly; the Republic thunders past with the rush of the express. Nations like individuals can never stand still. They must always be going and changing, improving their material lot; life is a race, not a game, to be won by the swiftest and most accurate. Yet its impact has been incalculable.  

Life accounts for the relentless dynamism at the heart of capitalist development, spreading an obsessive requirement for change throughout modern culture. And for most educated and affluent Americans in the late 19th century, “change” meant “progress.” Progress means growing, it is more than “Hope” it is more than creating massive debt and claiming, “I got this,” progress means the mortgage is paid, there is money in the bank, the light bill is paid, the car runs well and has gas, the wife and kids are happy, safe, and well dressed. Progress means we have peace and like a machine, what we put in it we get back in return. Progress is the law of human existence only because there are more poor than rich, more weak than strong, more who suffer by wrong than enjoy by injustice.  Such progress we have learned was bought at a considerable price. To the uprooting and mass migration from farms and small country hamlets into cities with their teeming slums and social problems on scales not experienced before, Americans reacted against what they experienced as the “unreality of the new social order.” Removed from nature with its natural sounds, sights, and rhythms, Americans felt a great sense of uneasiness. They found the new factories with their vast management hierarchies and impersonal rules the very epitome of everything that was unnatural, unreal, stultifying, and suffocating, like a latex balloon stuck in your esophagus. Men felt they that they were in danger of becoming the very machines with which they worked and were charged with controlling.  

This sense of unreality has become part of the hidden agenda of modernization. Throughout the 21st century, recoil from the artificial, overcivilized qualities of modern existence has sparked a wide variety of quests for more intense experiences, ranging from the fascist fascinations with violence and death, to the cults of emotional spontaneity of Avant grade artists to popular therapies stressing instinctual liberation. Antimodern impulses, too, were rooted in longings to recapture an elusive “real life” in culture evaporating into unreality. There is a principle in the human mind destined to be eternally at war with improvement and science. In reaction to the growing sense of unreality brought on by the difficult adjustment to the new realities of modern life, Americans of all social classes retreated to and engaged in a frenzy-like search for authentic experience. To accomplish this, they extolled the virtues of manual labor and, much as busy, tired executive do in our time, they develop home workshops where handicraft projects were pursued with a vengeance. As these projects petered out, as they must eventually, Americans pursued other strains of Antimodernism. The most fascinating were a precursor to the cults of Eastern mysticism that were to capture the attention of the nation’s youth and disaffected during the Vietnam era.  Turned off by the excessive rationalization of the thoughts and habits that Eastern philosophy used to ruin lives, many bourgeois of society and the modern industrial factory system demanded, Americans, especially the educated and well-to-do—including many businessmen themselves—turned to earlier periods of world history where men were not suffocated and hemmed in by rational modes of thought. A special fascination for the medieval ages developed. The medieval mind was regarded as primitive and unspoiled. Americans saw in the primitization of the medieval intellect, if not indeed its total personality, the deep sense for passionate experience, the direct contact with intense human emotions that they had long ago abandoned for modern life with all its promises of security, progress, comforts, et cetera.

What a Life of Struggle Between the Head and the Heart!

A good heart will at times betray the best head in the World. We live in a society where there are a lot of conflicts and individuals who do not get along, and you often hear the cliché phrase, “Kill them with kindness.” I do not agree with this statement. I think it is best to be direct and let people know how you are feeling. We all know those people in the office, who you have done nothing to, but are kind to your face and conspiring behind your back. Often times their poison is pretending to like you, so they can get crucial information and use it to take you down. That is their way of killing you with kindness. These types of people have the conscience of an assassin, and are often secretly haunted by a vague sense of enormous wickedness. There are concepts that help explain the basis for some of the most central figures that appear repeatedly in human culture, from the Bible through contemporary soap operas, like Secrets and Lies with Ryan Phillippe Season One. The characters that compose the basic nuclear family, i.e., father, mother, son, and daughter. Every one of these characters has both a bad and a good side. The archetypes tend to split these good and bad aspects into sharply divergent characters so that the father assumes, in general, a very different archetypal nature and character structure than that of the bad father.  #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

When all of the nuclear family characteristics are polarized, or split into their good and bad opposites, the following result: The good father becomes God. The bad father becomes the Devil. The good mother, the Queen. The bad mother, the Witch. The good son, the Crown Prince. The bad son, the Black Sheep. The good daughter, the princess, and finally, the bad daughter, the Harlot. The fairness of an individual should be adequate to conquer the weakness of their heart. Custom and the fashion of the World will not always stifle the voice of conscience. There are also secondary characters that also come into play. There are known as “colleagues” of the primary characters. As before, thy are split into good and bad archetypes: The good coworker becomes the faithful ally, the bad coworker becomes the disloyal subordinate, the good therapist becomes known as the Doctor, the bad therapist becomes known as the False Prophet. Once self-supported by conscience, once embarked on a career of manifest usefulness, the true Christian never yields. Neither public nor private influences produce the slightest effect on us when we have once got our mission.  #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

There are two additional characters whose purpose is to help the character transform themselves. Again, these as well are split into good and bad archetypal characters: The good winner or hero becomes Cinderella. The bad winner or antihero takes on a form of for example the “Godfather.” The good loser abdicates and withdraws from power and the bad loser must be removed or terminated. Some have the conscience of an angel and the impulses of a devil; and reason sits between them, for an umpire, with a fool’s cap upon their head.  To be marketed successfully, individuals are required to gain control of their images, making decisions based on a thorough understanding of all aspects of how marketing operates in the celebrity industry. The person trying to execute a high visibility plan is required to understand not just the tricks of projecting the right images, but how the best images are determined and how they can be produced. We are apt to connect the voice of conscience with the stillness of midnight. However, we wrong that innocent hour. It is that terrible “next morning,” when reason is wide awake, upon which remorse fastens its fangs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Some people apparently have no feeling for whatsoever is the truly explosive forces of the human personality with which they are playing. There is no doubt that individuals can delude themselves into thinking that they can choose rationally at the conscious level “the images” they wish to project. What such people almost always fail to realize is that there is a due to be paid to the devil. The reason why one is bargaining with the devil is that although archetypes are generally split by their nature into polar opposites, the splitting is never person or complete. We presented a ledger sheet off the presumed benefits versus the cost of fame, one can never guarantee that one will reap only benefits without thereby incurring terrible costs to be paid to fame. With any archetype, there is an overlap and spillover between them that is tremendous. Thus, for example, the Good Father may be on its surface primarily beneficent. However, in order to round out its character, like that of all human beings, there is always an element of the Bad Father present in the Good Father as well, and vice versa.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

It turns out that no matter how pure or one sided we attempt to make archetypal images; we can never exclude something of its opposite from intruding if only for purposes of roundness, completion, or balance. Some gloss over too quickly because they either are unaware or choose not to become aware of the dangers in “choosing our images.” It is thus oblivious to the extreme dangers with which one is playing. The dangers come in the form of suicide, depression, drug addiction, failed marriages, and the like.  The reason is that choosing an image and living it are often two very different things particularly when the image that is chosen consciously may go deeply against the grain of the archetypes that naturally constitute the deeper against the grain of the archetypes that naturally constitute the deeper layers of the psyche of a human being one is tampering with.  The pangs of conscience, so much vaunted by some, do most certainly drive ten deeper into sin where they bring one back to virtue. Whenever a lie was necessary for their occasions, they brought it out with a careless ease and breadth although untroubled by the rebuke of conscience.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

One could cite hundreds of cases from the “true confessions” of fallen stars, for as we noted in the previous report, the “confessions” themselves are all part of the scripted story line of being a celebrity. “For me, becoming a celebrity was like being in a White Squall. Suddenly my life was bright and I was on a soap opera and in movies. Everyone was calling me the next James Dean. They wanted to take me to lunch, or lay with me. I was constantly meeting famous people and traveling the World. I had a house the size of a castle. I remember getting my first multi-million pay check. That was amazing! I put it in the bank. There seemed to be a lot of wine, women, winning. I lost my passport in Europe and being in Cruel Intentions got me through customs,” reports Ryan Phillippe. He goes on to say, “It all sounds so exciting and glamorous, and it was. I was having the best time of my life. However, I genuinely thought that people liked me for myself—for my acting abilities and work. When I came on the scene, I was naïve. I never expected to meet some many professional parasites. We shall avoid any abuse of this mode of representation if we remember that ideas, thoughts, and an object of internal perception is virtual, like the image in the telescope produced by the crossing of light-rays.”  #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

There is another consequence to being an archetypal that has been revealed. If archetypes, no matter how one-sided they appear on the surface, contain nonetheless a strong ingredient of their opposite which can burst forth unexpectedly at any time—indeed all the more when one thinks that one can reap only the beneficial aspects—then this means that at the most fundamental layers of the human personality Boundary Warping is present.  However, no matter how deep one penetrates into the human psyche, no matter what levels of depth to which one descends, one fins a fundamental lack of clarity and sharpness between the various aspects of the mortal essence and the problems and the issues with which it is struggling.  The point is that the Boundary Warping we fine in the media and with public relations representatives, both consciously and unconsciously plays on this fundamental Boundary Warping that is present at the archetypal level. The deepest sources of Boundary Warping, in other words, emanates from humans who want to be cool by association, feel they own you or your images, or just want to hustle you for anywhere from a few hundred to a few million dollars. Celebrities have a hard time surviving and are especially ripe for exploitation by the various forms and mechanisms of unreality that we have identified. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

It is More than Just a Game!

The computer, perhaps the modern archetype of impersonal, cold, calculating science and technology, has itself become the prime projective dumping ground of humanity’s inner psyche. This conclusion becomes all the more striking and powerful when one realized that one has very little reason to think that the designers of these games had any conscious appreciation of the fact they were projecting their internal archetypes onto their computerized creations. It would be a serious mistake to think that such raw images and projections are absent from the thoughts of adults.  Wizardry is a game apart from others of its genre. Its success probably rests on its unique abilities: no other game allows as much flexibility in building your own characters, designating strengths and weaknesses that have clear effects; and more important, no other game allows you to take a group of characters, up to six at a time, into [a] a dungeon, where they interact and work together to overcome monsters and obstacles. Characters can trade gold and equipment freely, cast beneficial spells on each other, and change position in the expedition to benefit all. Or they can run from all monsters; if one runs, all run.  

Wizardry is a projective game; people tend to put their personalities in the characters they invent. The World of Wizardry can be populated with characters of different races—dwarf, elf, gnome, hobbit, human—and different classes starting as [sorcerers], priests, fighters, or thieves; character can earn the right to become a samurai, bishops, and lords. The dungeon has ten levels to conquer and there are numerous personal levels through which your characters per [computer program], any six of which you can gather in the tavern to send on an expedition to the maze. Together your band fights monster, searches for treasures, or has a good old time at the inn. It is undoubtedly true that the historical context of the vast majority of archetypes that members of the human population have experiences throughout the ages is by now so far removed from our direct experience and daily lives that ancient traditional forms have little contemporary meaning for us. At best, they appear bizarre, as if from another planet. At worst, they seem to degenerate hopelessly into mysticism. And yet, this is precisely the attitude we must avoid.  

As those who have played Wizardry testify in their own words, it is more than “just a game.” The characters one creates are part of oneself. Hence, when one of the character dies, it is like having part of oneself die as well. I used to be against adults playing video games, I had stopped playing when I was twelve because I became frustrated. However, after analyzing how people spend their time, making good use of artificial technology can be a good use of time and a great outlet.  I know video games may help a person after a hard day at work. Video games and virtual technology do not look like my boss; therefore, sometimes I submerge myself in my character, I lose almost all sense of my own identity. I once played for three days straight without coming up out of the game. When my party was finally devastated, because the game was out giving everyone energy (points), I almost broke down into tears because I kept missing the energy. I would liken virtual reality to a fantasized system of personnel management. As a member of a small group of individuals…you must manipulate the members’ performance against the “competition” so that they achieve a certain goal. With AI technology, as in real life, the goal can be readvancement, or the quest for power, or over the long haul, the pot of gold. 

Perhaps the most interesting and potentially use of such games is in the field of child psychotherapy. This application also shows that we are not talking about the complete abandonment or nondevelopment of such techniques at all, but rather, only more reflective consideration given to their potentially socially productive use. An accepted psychotherapeutic technique of working with children, who cannot verbalize their inner emotional states as well as adults, is that of play therapy. What people play with and how they do offers window into their inner World. Thus, for instance, with AI technology, you get to generate your own imagine for your character, and the goal is to score points, when the boss comes, you try to get energy from them to get into the winners’ circle and earn a prize. This application reinforces the idea that people can work productively alone, among others, and compete with others to gain the bosses favor for a chance to become part of an elite circle, and whoever has the best project or output, in this case the most energy, wins a prize, and the application even allows you to shop and get discounts.

We hear some much about being part of a team, but we must not lose the idea of individuality and doing the best you can do without paying attention to your competition. Virtual technology allows one to project onto oneself characteristics in which one may be deficient. It teaches you to feel comfortable being your best and to tune others out. How ironic that a machine which has come to symbolize the epitome of humanity’s impersonal, calculating abilities carried to the highest levels of scientific and technological development should serve as a prime vehicle for teaching people how to be an independent productive member of society and rewards them for good behavior. Video games are very popular.  There are 155 million Americans who regularly play video games. 42 percent of Americans play for at least three hours per week. Four out of five American households contain a device used to play video games. The average game player is 35 years old. 26 percent of players are under 18 years old, 27 percent are over 50. Interest the mature adults and kids are almost equal in playing games. 56 percent of players are male; 44 percent are female. The most frequent female game play is on average 43 years old, and the average male game player is 35 years old. Of the most frequent game purchasers, 41 percent are female, and 59 percent are male.

Instead, Just Sandwiches and Lemonade Were Served—Reflections on War and Death

At the most elemental level, archetypes help people develop an emotionally satisfying picture of the World. The World is so terrifying both to the primitive and to the child that they require some way of coping with it and organizing it. Two dangerous patients escape Washington psychiatric hospital. Anthony Garver (age 28) and Mark Alexander Adams (age 59) were last seen around 6pm, 6 April 2016. Police said both men were at the hospital on a 180-day court commit out of Snohomish County to treat mental illness and both arrived at the hospital in February 2015. Authorities believe the men escaped through a loose window in their room. Hospital staff say they are considered dangerous to others. They blur the shapes between men and animals and represent a primitive stage in the evolution of the human mind—the stage where people are not yet able to differentiate the animal instincts that emanate from within them. 

The truth cannot always be told openly, but somehow it does come out. Since childhood and the primitive project their inner fears out onto the external World, little wonder that some of the most Universal an potent archetypal images are the strangers looking demons—half-human/half-machine creatures.   Anthony Garver, age 28, is 5-foot-8 inches, 250 pounds, with brown curly hair and a beard. He was arrested for first degree murder in 2013, but was found not competent to stand trial. In the police report, Anthony Garver was accused of gagging a woman with a ball of cloth and stabbing her 24 times in the chest before slashing her throat. Mark Alexander Adams, age 59, is 6-feet tall and weighs 210 pounds, with long blonde hair. Marl Alexander Adams was sent to the hospital to receive treatment on a domestic violence arrest from 2014, where he was also found not competent to stand trial. Authorities report that he might try to flee to California. 

The stereotyping of people, for instance, “extreme bad boy with a dark side” or the “the kindly old man” are but a tiny example of a more general phenomenon that explains at a much deeper level our requirement for unreality. You always hear women talking about how they want a bad boy, but do they every stop to think of what that mean? Anthony Garver is a stereotypical extreme bad boy with a dark side and really negative traits, such as lawbreaking, physical and verbal abuse, drug use, abandoning responsibility, and even killing people. Still, women obsess and fantasize about being with him or a man just like him because being a bad boy is considered powerful and attractive. He cuts through all the malarkey and titillates a woman with his powerful seduction techniques that she is literally at a loss for word. The Christian Grey type may not actually be good for you. Good and evil are present in this man, and he may be a satanic figure.  

Then you hear young women talking about how they want a “kind older” man to take care of them, someone who will spoil them and pay their bills. Well, sometimes these silver daddies have a dark side also. They possess traits so powerful that they turn women on to the point where they literally lose almost all control of their emotions and behavior. Traits so powerful that women will feel a deep and strong attraction for the silver fox, even if they hear friends and family do not like him and tell her that “you can do better.” Before you know it, you are a victim of his strong sexual urges and experiencing physical responses you never felt before all because you wanted a sugar daddy. After the first few black eyes, being held captive in your house, and helping to run his shady business, you are not only a victim of abuse, but also a criminal. It is this duality which poses the moral problem and requires the struggle to solve it. In psychosis, symptoms show there is a constant struggle between fancy and reality.  

This year was filled with a whole lot of sexiness, but some starlets just shine brighter than the rest. Now you can see how hot they can be in person. The glamour girl, Brenda Delgado, age 33, standing 5-feet and five-inches tall, weighing approximately 145 pounds, with black hair and brown eyes is considered armed and dangerous. She revealed her most captivating credits ever, after being charged with capital murder and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution in connection with the 2 September 2015 death of Dr. Kendra Hatcher. Authorities report that Brenda Delgado ordered Dr. Kendra Hatcher’s murder because she was jealous of the dentist’s relationship with Brenda’s former intimate partner. Clearly Brenda Delgado lacked the differentiating between animal instincts and those of the images she has seen on the screen. She became indifferent to everything around her.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 13

Lights, camera, action! The sexiest shooting star, Brenda Delgado, is only the 9th woman to make the list of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted on Wednesday, 6 April 2016.  Federal investigators are offering a $100,000 reward leading to the capture of the jilted woman, Brenda Delgado. “Brenda Delgado’s addition to the list underscores the violent and calculated nature of the crime she is accused of committing,” reports FBI Special Agent in Charge Thomas Class Dr. Brenda Delgado forgot her humanity and inexorably reality, she obtained pleasure at the expense of her victim’s hardships. Authorities has already arrested three other people in connection with the killing, including the suspected triggerman. Kristopher Love, arrested last October, has also been charged with capital murder after he allegedly shot Dr. Kendra Hatcher in the parking garage of her apartment complex. Inflicting pain was apparently Brenda Delgado’s way of forgetting. 

You have seen the glamour girls sear the screen in red-hot roles, but what is Old Mother Hubbard hiding in her cupboard?  Regina Gail Agee, age 58, is charged with two counts of first-degree financial exploitation of an antiquated person and four counts of fraudulent use of a credit card. Regina Gail Agee has been arrested on a grand jury indictment for exploiting money from an antiquated couple she was taking care of, as she was accused of taking money from the couple’s account for personal gain. Regina Gail Agee has authority to sign the woman’s name, and she is accused of writing checks on the couple’s joint checking account. Plus, she used their credit card to make purchases of items only she would be using. Contrary to what takes place in modern children’s stories, in fairy tales, evil is as omnipresent as virtue.  

Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get more than just her poor dog a bone. Reports indicate that Regina Gail Agee is also accused of taking the couple’s money to pay for vacations to the beach and the mountains as well as personal purchases. The mishandling and fraud had been going on for 18 months when a member of the couple’s family notified the Sheriff’s Department, after the couple started getting notices of purchases they had never made. Regina Gail Agee was hired to care for the couple eight hours a day so she knew exactly how to exploit them. Jerry Groce, district supervisor of the north division of the Alabama Department of Human Resources reported that exploitation crimes against the elderly and disabled are becoming more common. They are seen as easy targets because they have regular benefits and are often isolated. The figures in fairy tales are not ambivalent—not good and bad at the same time, as well as in real life. Regina Gail Agee developed the diagnostic characteristic of schizophrenia, namely, a marked apathy.

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The evil wizard Gargamel, for instance, may have been able to plague the happy, blue Smurfs for a very long time. Gragamel is a hateful individual, who lived in a castle, on a hill and was willing to commit many sinister and cruel acts to achieve his goals and he could be downright ruthless on occasion, such as enjoying tormenting the Smurfs, threatening to burn Puppy alive, and even attempting to harm the defenseless Baby Smurf. However, despite his dark and evil heart, no matter how rich and powerful you are you cannot go on mistreating people and running lives and expect to get away with it. Ambiguities must wait until a relatively firm personality has been established on the basis of positive identification. What was actually happening was that the ego was gradually constructing for itself a new World. Former Massey Energy CEO, Donald Blankenship evidently refused to be affected by impressions for the outer World as seen in when he became the first chief executive officer (CEO) in U.S. history was found guilty of a workplace-safety crime. 

After earning millions, a year, the former Massey Energy CEO, Donald Blankenship, age 66, who presided over his coalfields from a mountaintop castle, was sentenced 6 April 2016, to a year in prison and a $250,000 fine, the maximum punishment six years after the death of 29 miners who were killed in a West Virginia coal dust explosions. This conviction is due to Donald Blankenship’s conspiring to flout mine-safety rules. “How come you never come to apologize to me personally? You don’t have a heart! For six years he never apologized. He’s got a family to hug him. I’ve got tombstones.” Tommy Davis, a former Massey miner whose brother Charles Davis was killed in the explosion shouted at Donald Blankenship. Donald Blankenship has recently been cleared of securities fraud and making false statements, but looks like this backbreaking conviction is final.  The real life Garamel was finally punished. It is quite clear that the distortions manifested in the psychoses are shown by the whole behavior of the person rather than through verbal expression.

This more general phenomenon is that of archetypes. Archetypes constitute the deepest and most symbolic aspects of the mind that humans used to give order to their World. Most often observed in dreams in the form of mythological character, they are even more readily seen through an analysis of comparative World mythology, legends, fairy tales, religion, and so on. Their agreement is too strong to be produced by chance alone. It is therefore attributed to a similarity of the human psyche at the deepest layers of the unconscious. These similar appearing symbolic images are termed archetypes. A person must either be good or bad, nothing in between. These archetypes help the child develop a basis for understanding that there are great differences between people, and that therefore, one has to make a choice about who one wants to be. The distortion in this whole picture consisted of a fusion of feeling and ideas which played a part in the conflict in the mind of reality where criminals allowed abandoned all logic.  

This basic decision, on which all later personality developments will build, is facilitated by the polarization of the fairy tale.  The mechanisms of condensation, displacement, substitution, illogical thinking, absurdity, indirect expression, elisions, and representation are all present in everyday life, but such conventional inaccuracies cannot be allowed to glide by without any evident impediments. In wit, these mental disguises are especially evident because they seem to produce pleasure. They are products of the unconscious, and show that no matter how much restriction civilization imposes on the individual, he or she nevertheless finds some way to circumvent it. The most pronounced psychopathological expression which point to a deep-seated disturbance by hallucinations and delusions, which occur in adult psychotics and show a somewhat different kind of disguise. The things they say do not concur with objective facts. There is one fine thing about Teddy; he always gives you a square meal.

Secrets and Lies—Dark Side of the Celebrity Industry

The businessperson who uses celebrity, the entertainer who seeks it, and the individual who is confronted by it—show just how far celebrity has spread into every sector of the American life. So great is the value of visibility that the manufacturing and marketing of celebrities now reaches into business, sports, entertainment, religion, the arts, politics, academics, medicine, and the law. Visibility is what every aspiring host wants, what every professional seeks. It is the crucial ingredient that can make Ryan Phillippe the most sought after in town, and talk show host Paula Ferris of the View on ABC the most popular in her market, and Dr. Randy Harris in West Hollywood, California USA the most sought after and highly paid Obstetrics and Gynecologist in his city.  However, sometimes when you read celebrity gossip, it should be read, if at all with an attitude of fascination, much as one view the scene of a heinous crime with feelings that alternate between horror, curiosity, and disgust. People sometimes fail to appreciate what the celebrity industry is trying to accomplish. People should stop their complaining because of their presumed jealousy at their having failed to achieve the same degree of fame as those whom they are critical of. While our social critics attack the highly visible and denounce them as underserving of their tremendous salaries, power, privilege, and control over society’s opinions, what the critics really seem to be angry about is that they themselves do not control the process.  

Critics of celebrity culture will never be able to control image formation. The root cause of why people want—indeed, require—celebrities are so basic as to render the critics’ complaints superfluous. That the public chooses to worship Ryan Phillippe and not the editor of the Sacramento News and Review is not necessarily destructive or damaging. It is, to the contrary, often valuable and certainly worth understanding. One of Ryan Phillippe’s most vivid memories was at the age of about five years, he was standing one afternoon in the room in the first floor in his parents’ house watching a Swedish servant who was in the shower. He became very disturbed and made a great effort to look away and gave a very strong rebuke. He was very much humiliated. The servant took Ryan downstairs to the dining room in the basement and told his father and brother that he watched her undress through a keyhole, and she somehow caught him and punished him very severely for it. In his great excitement, Ryan ran away, and no one could find him. They spent hours looking for him—the police, neighbors, even the neighborhood drug dealers stop selling dope to help find the little boy. He said for year he regretted that he hid in the closet. He kept on reproducing more scenes, all of which dealt with frustration. This young man was a good Christian. On the whole, the memory represents a religious scene in order to hide an immoral scene of marked affective content. He believed that afterward, he had repeatedly come to consciousness.   

Ryan stood in the doorway demanding something and screaming; “My mother, pretty and slender, then suddenly entered the room, as if returning from the street. I formulated the scene so vividly, seen, which, however, furnished no other clue. Whether my brother wished to open or lock the door, why I cried, and what bearing the arrival of my mother had, all these questions were dim to me; I was tempted to explain to myself that it dealt with the memory of a hoax by my brother, which was interrupted by my mother. Such misunderstandings of childhood scenes retained in memory. I missed my mother and I became convinced that she was not in the closet, I began to cry, and therefore demanded my brother unlock it.” One of the techniques and strategies for celebrity development have shifted dramatically as the industry itself has matured over the course of this century; Ryan blamed his naughty brother for the absence of his mother, and he believed that him being locked in the closet is what restored her and that when she greeted him she was appeased by his worry and anxiety. Clearly, the discovery and development of people who has raw talent to begin with was important for becoming a celebrity. However, the industrialized production of celebrities reveals that there is a definite, dark, Barinas Collins side to unreality. Here, the aspirant is essentially taken as “given.” Friends or families respond initially to the immediate performances of a potential “star” and encourage him to develop his talents further. It is mainly up to the aspirant, Ryan Phillippe, with his trademark curly blonde hair, was instantly recognizable. He sought out teachers, arrange for photographs and write-ups and to distribute them to venue managers—those who control theaters or other places where the talents of potential aspirant are likely to be showcased. The potential celebrity aspirants are developed and/or promoted largely by personal cadre of teachers, friends, or parents. These “helpers” in turn seek out dancing teachers, dramatic coaches, lawyers, etc. And the celebrity aspirant’s personal helpers seek and arrange by themselves the appropriate lessons for the aspirant. Under this plan of proceeding, the aspirant depends largely on developing whatever talents he has and hopes, through hard work and luck, to be “discovered.” However, the success rate of this method are too low to justify the expenditures of time, energy, and money it requires.  

Ironically, after physically being locked in a closet, one of Ryan Phillippe’s first roles on TV was on One Life to Live, as Billy Douglas, a young man who was convinced that he was homosexual and trying to come out of the closet, but was rejected by his father, and called a pervert. Under this model, we begin to see the utilization of more specialists to help refine the aspirant’s talents and to being him to the attention to the outside World. This represents the industrializing stage. Specialists hired here are agents, publicists, and lawyers who in turn will refer the aspirant to further professional help from coaches, teachers, accountants, and so on. The specialists may even work with the communications media to spread the potential celebrity’s image, and this how Ryan Phillippe got the role of Shane 54, in the cult classic 54. Billy Douglas represented a real breakthrough for Ryan.   Sometimes when creating a celebrity, every brand of expertise necessary to spot, develop, market and sell new celebrities is brought under one centralized roof. New names and story lines for potential aspirants will be designed in-house. Clinical psychologist might be employed to transform the individual’s personality to be completely consistent and consonant with the story line. An entire strategy for the transformation of the aspirant and his careful development in controlled settings are painstakingly developed. If need be, every facet of the aspirant’s life from his finances to where he lives, how he dresses, what he eats, with whom he is seen is carefully developed and coordinated.  Under the guidance of his manager, Ryan Phillippe undertook physical regimen involving diet, four and one-half hours of daily exercise, dictation and drama lessons improvements for his posture, appearance, and behavior. The guy can run five miles without even stopping for air.  

With this process of celebrity manufacturing, market researchers are employed to find out what the public wants from celebrities. These in turn are translated into specs to see if there is a potential celebrity in-house who already meets the criteria or whether a potential aspirant is malleable enough to be manufactured to fit the specifications as to what the public wants. Story lines are also carefully crafted to establish an identity for the potential aspirant. Celebrities are not only given new names to fit their new identities, but new identities are fashioned for them. Depending on how deep the internalization process is, in effect a whole new packaged identity is created. There is the pure selling approach, product improvement approach, and market fulfillment approach.  Ryan Phillippe wanted to be the best!  People do not realize how lucky they are; celebrities are a relatively new phenomenon. Back in the Victorian era, most people had little, if virtually no, direct contact with those who occupied high places. Vast numbers of people would not even be so fortunate as to secure a once-in-a-lifetime, fleeting glimpse of someone famous. It was really only in the 21st century that social media, and TV, and photography, and rapid means of travel, and communication have made celebrities so accessible to the public. Ordinary people are now able to see people that they have only dreamt of previously. Nowadays, people take celebrities for granted and forget that a close up shot is not a natural way to view a star. It is an artifact, an invention, that was made possible by the medium of motion pictures.   

The camera is focused in on the eyes, the lips, the hair, the legs, and the chest of our heroes in ways that we never saw one another before. Seeing such things on a week-in week-out basis one cannot help developing an intense curiosity about what these people are like in other settings, how they live, what and whom they like, what they wear, eat, dream. One cannot help, but form an intense bond with such people without indulging in deep fantasies about them. It is precisely the human ability to fantasize that is in the heart of nearly all the forces which move the human psyche. Hollywood has quickly learned to apply its onscreen story writing talents off-screen to the lives of its starts.  A new genre was mastered—pseudo stories, which in turn gave rise to pseudo-events, staged events that has as their only purpose the creation of artificial newsworthy happenings so that the star could be vastly observed by the adoring public. The stars were deliberately created so that the masses could live out their fantasies. The process of intense identification was made infinitely easier if the stars were different, but not too different from their adorning fans, who could fantasize that each star was a more glamorous version of themselves. Besides, fame itself is hard enough to handle on its own. More than once, envy has been motiving enough to site the less some to assassination or murder. Celebrities are now so complicated that it requires the intense cooperation of other industries for it to operate.   

A deep sense of mystery has always been an important ingredient of real art. A true piece of art is never fully explainable. This is one of the reasons why we are continually drawn to it again and again. Public relations accounts for the more than 70 percent of all the information that is disseminated under the label as news in our society. That the decentralization of the celebrity/Public Relations industry has contributed to the deliberate production and distribution of partial or slanted truths at best and outright untruths at worst is disturbing, if not dangerous to the celebrities. Often times ignorance or deliberate falsification creates a negative side to fame, which most are incapable of seeing.  Hundreds of personal stories could be used to illustrate the “dark side” of celebrityhood. More often than not, it represents the final act of a genuine tragedy. There was a celebrity male who was not qualified for network-level journalism; however, he was hired by a TV station to boost the rating because he had a following and was very attractive. He was making over $1.2 million a year, but had hit rock bottom and was relegated to one-minute news updates, all the while withdrawing into the pathology of stardom. His ever-shrinking professional World was dominated by a core of doting personal attendants—groomers, wardrobe helpers and secretaries—who formed a “warm, unthreatening, loyal wall between him and the increasingly hostile World outside.” 

He got so weirded out on cocaine, his addiction was in full [swing] and he was snorting from morning till night. He was so paranoid by the time it was time to go to work, he would not go. However, he was labeled as someone who had more than a drug problem. People said that he was depressed, and his hands would shake.  He would get paid $394,964.01 for a TV episode, $59,244.06 for a cameo, up to $5,000.00 for a picture and handwritten letter (even if it was image engineered), $236.98 for a five-minute phone call, and his underwear would sale for $59.05 a pair (the cleaning lady was really cleaning up)!  Only the future can tell which young actors will be ready to bleed for their art and which will continue to work with ice cold Perrier in their veins. It would be wrong to conclude that, as a result of the industrialization of celebrities that is so rampant in our society, all mystery has vanished from the scene. Some sense of mystery is always necessary to the successful creation of celebrities and their appeal to the masses. All arts and artists constantly flirt on the borderline between heightening mystery and reducing it. Everything which humans create is a testimony to their nature. We should expect, therefore, that the kinds of reality, celebrities, like Ryan Phillippe experiences is a reflection of the general culture of the particular society in which his is situated. The dark side of the celebrity industry is our dark side as well.