Randolph Harris II International Institute

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We Are Not a Homebuilder—What We Sell is a Lifestyle!

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

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Mr. Simon was forced out by Gulf Corporation, which, in turn, sold out Mobil. Reston is now an economically successful town of over 61,150 with a substantial number of corporate offices and other “clean” industries. Where initially most residents had to carpool or take a long bus ride to Washington, today 40 percent of the residents work in the community. Residentially, Reston has a mix of free-standing homes, town houses, and condominiums facing Reston’s four artificial lakes. Reston has had a distinct upper-middle-class-but-involved character. Housing ranges from $800,000-plus homes to government-subsidized apartments. The average home buyer is between thirty and forty years old, has two children, and has an income considerably higher than the national average. (The median household income is $120,396.) Reston has several hundred units of federally subsidized housing, but attempts to place lower-income and high-income housing side by side were abandoned as not being economically sound. Mixed-income housing was a desirable social goal, but Reston is a profit-making enterprise. Columbia, Maryland, some twenty miles north of Washington, was developed by James Rouse, one of the nation’s most respected developers. Mr. Rouse managed quietly to buy or option some twenty-two square miles of land from 169 separate owners before plans for Columbia were revealed in 1963. Architecturally, Columbia looks more like a suburb than Reston, since builders of Columbia’s various sections were given a free hand to build their most popular home models. The community has some 104,726 persons living in eight villages, and Columbia is close to meeting is goal of housing some 110,000 people on its 15,600 acres. The investment in the community totals over $3 billion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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Like most new towns, Columbia is organized into neighbourhoods of some 900 houses having their own elementary school, swimming pool, recreational center, and convenience store. Four neighbourhoods are combined to create a “village” of 3,500, which has an intermediate school and a small plaza including a number of shops and a supermarket. Wooded areas and pathways run throughout the village. Columbia is racially integrated, with over one-quarter of the residents being African America. Economically, although there are subsidized units, the community is middle-to upper-middle class. Irvine, California began in the 1960s with a dedication to create a new town of 100,000 on garden city principles around a new University of California campus. It was designed without a downtown, but rather, it was to have shopping centers and business parks intermixed within what is primarily a residential community of single-family homes. Irvine from the firs was o be a geographically dispersed community. The Irvine family owned some 64,000 acres of ranch land and orange groves, which meant Irvine would cover nine times the land space of Reston, or four times that of Columbia. All the land was owned by the Irvine family and is successor, the Irvine Company. The company had a strong commitment to architectural design, a high level of amenities, and controls over the use of the landscape. Irvine was incorporated as a city in 1971. However, Irvine, unlike its east coast siblings, had little interest in racial or income diversity. Simon and Rouse each had a strong personal and corporate commitment to creating communities with population diversity. Irvine executives and planners had no interest in proving subsidized or lower-income housing. From the first, Irvine was designed to be an expensive and elitist community. Low-income or even middle-income housing and residents have been rigorously excluded. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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

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Neotraditional planners design in both higher densities and mixed land usage in order to both reduce the need for auto travel and increase the sense of community. The developers consciously are trying to design in the advantages and mood of earlier eras. Their model for an ideal livable community is the nineteenth-century small town, with is dense intermixture of small shops and homes. Thus, some of the most commented upon, and debated, new community developments at the start of the twenty-first century are being built to approximate the character and amenities of the small town or village of over a century ago. Master plan codes that call for separate shopping and housing pods are discarded in favour of designing on a more intimate scale a community that is both comfortable and interesting to the local residents. Certainly there is something both inviting and comforting about towns like this. Seaside, Florida, Masshipee, on Cape Cod, and, less successfully, Princeton Forrestal Village, in Plainsboro, New Jersey, are examples of such attempts to repeat the nineteenth-century model of providing an inviting, livable, and walkable public environment, Forrestal Village is currently trying to recast itself as a factory outlet mall. The fastest growing type of new community now being built is the retirement community. This is not surprising since anyone who reads a newspaper or pays Social Security knows that elderly are the fastest growing segment of the population. Every day in the United States of America, some 10,000 people turn 65, and the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades and represent over 20 percent of the population by 2050. The elderly currently constitutes 15.2 percent of the population. The population age 65 and over numbers more than 50 million in 2021. More than 50 percent of the elderly live in the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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More older Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities or rural areas. Some of the retirement communities are explicitly designed and advertised as such, while others are simply developments in recreational areas with lots of golf courses or a good fishing lake. Growth is taking place even in locations that are not true retirement areas. For example, Peachtree City, in fast-growing Fayette, Georgia grew from 2,000 residents to 22,000 in 1990 and now has a population of 114,421. The postwar assumption that suburbs were for young couples and their children is another out-of-date myth. The assumption long has been that as those who moved to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s aged, they would sell their homes and move back into city apartments or condominiums. By and large, this has not occurred. The elderly are choosing to remain in the suburban homes they have occupied for decades. People are remaining in their suburban homes after the children leave, and even after their spouses die. This has resulted in suburbs being better integrated by age than anytime in the past fifty years. It also means that since most of the suburban elderly are not segregated in specific areas, it is more difficult to provide for their needs such as access to social services and public transportation. If an elderly widow or widower has restricted mobility and is no longer able to drive, one can become isolated. Retirement communites have a minimum age limit of fifty-five for buyers. Younger people are excluded. What retirement communities sell is far more than housing; it is a life of golf, bowling, and crafts that is literally walled off from outside problems. Resident status in retirement communities commonly is limited to couple where one spouse is at least fifty-five years of age. Young people are kept at a minimum by community regulations that ban other then short-term stays by adult children or other guests under the mandatory age. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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

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

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Whatever one thinks about the suburbs is no longer sub. Outer cities may sprawl over the landscape, but they contain all the functions of the older downtowns. Although it twists the language a bit, they have become outlying “central places” in their own right. Whether the outer cities are called edge cities, polynucleated cities, or technoblurbs, these outlying “urbs” now house more shopping malls, manufacturing plans, and business offices than do the traditional central downtowns. The downtown retail outlets essentially suburbanized to the malls during the 1970s, leaving only skeletal remains in the once-dominant cores. The 1980s saw the dramatic proliferation of suburban office and manufacturing complexes—such that today, outer cities surpass most central cities in total business activity. Transportation, and especially communication technologies, no longer favour centralization over dispersion. FAX machines, the Internet, Email, Video calls, and text messages work equally well from suburban and urban locations. The reality is that the major action is in the suburbs. Suburbs will continually for the foreseeable future increase their dominance. In spite of the hopes of some, research has established that nationwide urban gentrification will be of the limited scope and, moreover, the much-discussed back-to-the-city movement is actually not occurring. The myth of a substantial back-to-the-city movement, and that of incipient massive central-city gentrification, were largely creations of the popular media. Census or other data do not support the thesis that either cities or rural areas are making a strong comeback. Both continue to lose both population and economic strength to suburban areas. Central cities and rural places have become the edges which are losing to the suburban middle ground. Suburbia has become the American Way of Life. It is already the life most of us live. And in spite of our laments for the central city, we do not want to give up the personal advantages of suburban living. The twenty-first century is the age of the suburb, and departing the city. North American is increasingly dominated by a pax suburbia. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

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Children, meanwhile, will also be likely to grow up differently in the electronic cottage, if for no one reason than that they will actually see work taking place. First Wave children, from their first blink of consciousness, saw their parents at work. Second Wave children, by contrast—at least in recent generations—were segregated in schools and divorced from real work life. Most today have only the foggiest notion of what their parents do or how they live while a work. One possibly apocryphal story makes the point: An executive decides to bring his son to his office one day and to take him out to lunch. They boy sees the plushy carpeted office, the indirect lighting, the elegant reception room. He sees the fancy expense-account restaurant with its obsequious waiters and exorbitant prices. Finally, picturing their home and unable to restrain himself, the boy blurts out: “Daddy, how come you are so rich and we are so poor?” The fact is that children today—especially affluent children—are totally divorced from one of the most important dimensions of their parents’ lives. In an electronic cottage kids not only observe work, they may, after a certain age, engage in it themselves. Second Wave restrictions on child labour—originally well-intentioned and necessary, but now largely an anachronistic device to keep young people out of the crowded job market-become more difficult to enforce in the home setting. Certain forms of work, indeed, might be specially designed for youngsters and even integrated with their education. (Anyone who underestimates the capacity of even very young people to understand and cope with sophisticated work has not run into the fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys who serve, probably illegally, as “salesmen” in California computer stores. I have had kids with braces still on their teeth explain the intricacies of home computing to me.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

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The alienation of youth today flows in large measure from being forced to accept a nonproductive role in society during an endlessly prolonged adolescence. The electronic cottage would counteract this situation. In fact, integrating young people into work in the electronic cottage may offer the only real solution to the problems of high youth unemployment. This problem will grow increasingly explosive in many countries in the years ahead, with all the attendant evils of juvenile crime, violence, and psychological immiseration, and cannot be solved within the framework of a Second Wave economy except by totalitarian means—drafting young people, for example, for war or forced service. The electronic cottage opens an alternative way to bring youth back into socially and economically productive roles, and we may see, before long, political campaigns for, rather than against, child labour, along with struggles over the necessary measures to protect them against gross economic exploitation. To be sure, Dr. Freud was not the first to discover the phenomenon that we habour thoughts and strivings which we are not aware of—that is to say, which are unconscious—and live in a hidden life in our psyche. However, Dr. Freud was the first to have made this discovery the center of his psychological system and he investigated unconscious phenomena in the greatest detail, with astonishing results. Basically Dr. Freud dealt with a discrepancy between thinking and being. We think one thing, for instance that our behaviour is motivated by love, devotion, sense of duty, et cetera, and we are not aware that instead it is motivated by the wish for power, masochism, dependency. Dr. Freud’s discovery was that what we think is not necessarily identical with what we are; that what a person thinks of oneself may be, and usually is, quite different or even completely in contradiction to what one really is, that most of us live in a World of self-deception in which we take our thoughts as representing reality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

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

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There is no kind of cruelty and viciousness which has not been rationalized individually or in history as being motivated by good intentions. Since Dr. Freud, the sentence I meant well has lost its function as an excuse. Meaning well is one of the best rationalizations for acting badly, and nothing is easier than to persuade oneself of the validity of this rationalization. There is a third result of Dr. Freud’s discovery. In a culture like ours in which words play a tremendous role, the weight given to them often serves to neglect, if not to distort, experience. If somebody says, “I love you” or “I love God” or “I love my country,” one utters words which, in spite of the fact that one fully believe in their truth, may be utterly untrue and nothing but a rationalization of the person’s wish for power, success, fame, money or an expression of one’s own dependence on one’s group. There might not be—and usually there is not—any element of love involved. Dr. Freud’s discovery is not yet so generally accepted that people are instinctively critical of statements of good intentions or stories of exemplary behaviour, nevertheless the fact is that Dr. Freud’s theory is a critical theory, as Marx’s was. Dr. Freud did not accept statements at face value; he looked at them skeptically even when he did not doubt the conscious sincerity of the person speaking. However, conscious sincerity means relatively little within the whole of somebody’s personality structure. Dr. Freud’s great discovery, with its fundamental philosophical and cultural consequences, was that of the conflict between thinking and being. However, he restricted the importance of his discovery by assuming that essential what is repressed is awareness of immature desires and strivings and that the conflict between thinking and being is essentially that between thinking and immature desires of pleasures of the flesh. This restriction is not surprising. However, impulses for pleasures of the flesh very often do not owe their presence or intensity to the physiological substratum of sexuality, on the contrary, they are very often the product of entirely different impulses which in themselves are not sexual. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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Thus a source of desires of pleasures of the flesh can be one’s narcissism, one’s sadism, one’s tendency to submit, plain boredom; and it is well know that power and wealth are important elements in arousing desires for pleasures of the flesh. In recent times, it has become obvious hat in the culture of the cities, sexuality is not the main object of repression. Since mass humans are dedicated to becoming a Homo consumnes, pleasures of the flesh have become one of the main articles of consumption (and in fact one of the cheapest) creating the illusion of happiness and satisfaction. The conflict o be observed in humans, between conscious and unconscious strivings, are diverse. “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth,” reports Colossians 3.2. Programming your mind for success involves choosing to expect good things to happen to you. When starting off your day, set your mind in a righteous direction. “Open my heart to Your law, O Lord God,” reports 2 Maccabi 1.4. Start your day with faith and determination to walk in God’s commandments. Appreciate the outrageousness that God wants to show you with blessings, and let your memory prompt you with the reminder to give God thanks. God wants you to get your hopes up. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for,” reports Hebrews 11.1. One definition of that sort of hope is confident expectancy. We can confidently expect the favour of God. Have the full knowledge and wherewithal to thank God for His gifts. The number of gifts God has blessed us with his overwhelming. Start anticipating doors of opportunity to open for you, and be ready to rise above life’s challenges. Everything we have in our souls and bodies and whatever we possess, exteriorly or interiorly, naturally or supernaturally, these are God’s gifts, and they reveal God as a generous, even an extravagant, giver. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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However, why should one be surprised?  God usually meets our expectancy. Just about everything we have comes from God. One person may receive rather more and another rather less, but all the gifts are God’s. Without God not even the smallest gift can be given or gotten. Your expectations will set the boundaries for your life and that is why so many people try to belittle others. They want them to expect less from life and have less. Bullies exhibit a defensive, self-aggrandizing form of self-esteem. Those with genuine self-esteem—who feel secure self-worth without seeking to be the center of attention or being angered by criticism—are more often found defending the victims of bullying. When feeling securely good about ourselves, we are less defensive. We therefore nurture others’ growing by being genuine (open and honest regarding our own feelings), by being empathic (listening with a reflective understanding of others feelings), and by being accepting—by offering unconditional beneficial regard. What better definition of grace than the unconditional beneificial regard—knowing someone as one truly is and the person nonetheless. As persons are accepted and prized, they tend to develop a more caring attitude towards themselves. Stop looking at everything you have lost and start looking at all that you have. Believe that things are going to change for the better, not because you deserve it, but simply because God loves you that much! Self-acceptant is linked to low prejudice. Affirm people, and they will evaluate other groups more beneficially. Threaten their self-esteem, and they will seek to restore it by putting others down. Optimistic thoughts about one’s potential also pays dividends. Those who believe they can control their own destiny, who have what researchers in more than a thousand studies have called internal locus of control, achieve more, make more money, and are better able to cope with problems. Believe that things are beyond your control and they probably will be. Believe that you can do it, and maybe, just maybe, you will. #RandolphHarrs 15 of 17

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

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

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Do Not Allow Circumstances to Dull Your Enthusiasm for Life and Imprison You!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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However, if one does nothing more, the government would have a difficult time making itself obeyed if it limits itself to obedience. If it is good to know how to use humans as they are, it is better still to turn them into what one needs them to be. The most absolute authority is that which penetrates to the inner part of a human and is exerted no less on one’s will than on one’s actions. It is certain in the long run people are what the government makes them. Warriors, citizens, humans when it so wishes; rabble and riff-raff when it so pleases. And every prince who belittles his subjects dishonours oneself by showing that one did not know how to turn them into something worthy of respect. Therefore train humans if you want to command them. If you want the laws obeyed, make them beloved, so that to get humans to do what they should, they need only consider that they ought to do it. That was the great art of governments of old, in those remote times when philosophers gave laws to the peoples, and merely used their authority to make them wise and happy. From this same the many sumptuary laws, the many regulations concerning mores, the many public maxims accepted or rejected with the greatest of care. Even the tyrants did not forget this important part of administration, and they took as many pains in corrupting the more of their slaves as did the magistrates in correcting the mores of their fellow citizens. However, our modern governments, which are under the impression they have done all there is to do when they have raised money, never imagine it to be either necessary or possible to go that far. When modern writers talk of the Resurrection, they usually mean one particular moment—the discovery of the Empty Tomb and the appearance of Jesus Christ a few yards away from it. The story of that moment is what Christian apologists now chiefly try to support and sceptics chiefly try to impugn. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

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However, this almost exclusive concentration on the first five minutes of the Resurrection would have astonished the earliest Christian teachers. In claiming to have seen the Resurrection, they were not necessarily claiming to have seen that. Some of them had, some of them had not. It had no more importance than any of the other appearances of the risen Jesus Christ—apart from the poetic and dramatic importance which the beginnings of things must always have. What they were claiming was that they had all, at one time or another, met Jesus during the six or seven weeks that followed His death. Sometimes they seem to have been alone when they did so but on one occasion twelve of them saw Him together, and on another occasion about five hundred of them. St. Paul says that the majority of the five hundred were still alive when he wrote the First Letter to the Corinthians, id est, in about 55 A.D. The “Resurrection” to which they bore witness was, in fact, not the action of rising from the dead but the state of having risen; a state, as they held, attested by intermittent meetings during a limited period (except for the special, and in some ways different, meeting vouchsafed to St. Paul). This termination of the period is important, for, as we shall see, there is no possibility of isolating the doctrine of the Resurrection from that Ascension. “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on Earth,” reports Colossians 3.2. This is a new dimension of consciousness, where it is coming to itself, demesmerized from the limitation imposed upon the ego. In that moment humans have come to oneself. Before then one has been dwelling in alien things, in one’s passions, one’s thoughts, one’s emotions, and one’s desires. In this ecstatic mental silence, the personal will is given up, the impersonal Overself is given mastery. One’s personal identity is taken away for a while, to be replaced by a higher one. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

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To be born again, in the sense that Jesus Christ used this phrase when speaking to Nicodemus, means to leave the ego’s limited and outward awareness for the Overself’s infinite and inward awareness. Within the ego’s life there comes to birth another, utterly dissimilar and outwardly unnoticeable. It tis literally a going out of one’s little self into the liberating enlightening Overself. The search is at an end. The Overself has come toward us even as we went blindly toward It. In that blessed moment, one sinks one’s identity into Reality which one has reached. “One must then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that one (Jesus) must be killed and after three days rise again. He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. However, when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, He rebuked Peter. ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ He said. ‘You do not have in mind the things of God, but the things of humans.’ Then He called the crowd to him along with His disciples and said: ‘If anyone would come after me, one must deny oneself and take up the cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save one’s life will lose it, but whoever loses one’s life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a human to gain the whole World, yet forfeit one’s soul? If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of one when He comes in His Father’s glory with the Holy Angels,’” reports Mark 8.31-38. Creating a blueprint in your mind for success does not happen without effort. One must choose and believe that good things will happen. O Jesus Christ, Splendour of Eternal Glory, Solace of the Wandering Soul, when I am with You, my loquacious mouth loses its eloquence, leaving only my silence to speak to You. However, when I am not with You, I feel I must speak up. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

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Come, my Fleet-footed if Flat-arched Friend, come! Why has it taken You so long to make such a short trip! I am just a verminous pauper huddled in a crumbling doorway, just a shackled prisoner shambling alone on cobbles. Without you, no day, no hour will ever be happy again. Why? Because You are my joy and, besides, without You the conversation grows dull. Only You can lighten up my cell. Only You can restore my freedom. I live only to see Your friendly face turn in my direction. So much for the little prayers of one poor Devout. Others scour the World for You, but they look in all the wrong places. They find everyone else, but they never seem to find You. As for me, in the same interval, I am in just as much of a dither as they. Nothing pleases me either, but here is the difference. The only thing that is likely to please me is You, my God. You are my hope, my salvation. I should keep quiet, I supposed, but I will not. I do not care if I become raucous, obstreperous. I will pray in public until Your grace returns; that is to say, until You return to our chatsworthy place within. When one gets up in the morning, one must focus on the fact that the Lord is here with us, and here He intends to stay. One’s tears and desires, one’s humble soul and contrition of heart, all will turn the Lord toward our little prayers and hasten Him to our side. God is directing our steps. His favour is surrounding us. Goodness and mercy will be on our path. Be excited about the day. Welcome your life in. This glimpse of a state one has never before seen is an effective revelation. For one has now understood, felt, and experienced—lucidly—the exact meaning of that vague word “spiritual.” There is no confusion here of many different and differing cults; the intellect is no presented with contradictory theologies or rival organizational claims. The stillness lifts one to a stratosphere above all such non-sensical choices. Start your day with faith and expectancy, and then go out anticipating good things. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

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

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Only when one when one knows one’s ego as it is known in the Overself can a human be truly said to know oneself. The Overself’s light enters the understanding and enables one to perceive what humans like Jesus really meant when they spoke. The divine self reveals itself for a few thrilling moments and then draws back into the void where it dwells. However, the glimpse is enough to tell one that a higher kind of life is possible and that there is a being beyond the ego. The glimpse gives one a slight inking of what the term Overself means. It shows one—not as intellectual idea but as realized fact—something of the ideal toward which one shall strive. It is in these highest moments of indescribable bliss that a human may know what one truly is and how grand is the relationship that one bears to the Infinite Being. It is from such paradoxical moments that one learns both how insignificant one is and how great one is! It is a message of assurance, a communication of knowledge, and a whisper of trust in the Universal Mind. In these few glorious and luminous moments the truth reveals itself, not to the intellect, but to the inner being. With this experience of one’s own divinity, one discovers a meaning in life. Henceforth, one is able to take part consciously in the higher evolution which is inherent in it. Life announces its divine intention only in the deepest, most secret, and most silent part of our being. It is not felt as just another experience only but also as a truth, so illuminative is it. That is what faith is all about. Start believing that good things are coming your way, and they will! Do not allow circumstances or feelings to dull your enthusiasm for life and imprison you in a negative frame of mind. Expect to experience the greatness of God. The glimpse provides assurance that the Soul exists, that God is, that the purpose of human life must include spiritual fulfilment to be complete, and that the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are more enduring and more rewarding than the Bad, the Ugly, the Lie. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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Thank You, Father, that You want me to get my hopes up, that You want me to start expecting good things to happen in my life, rather than worrying about what evil might come upon me. Where my faith is weak, please help me to grow stronger so I can trust Your for more and have what my faith expects. Whoever wishes to experiment in healing oneself or others need not be deterred by these provisos from trying to do so. One does not need to be an adept in self-actualization or a sage in philosophy to receive the power of grace. Technically, even the slightest realization of the principle involved may suffice to bring success. For the result is not one’s hands, but God’s. And partly because of this put partly because many physical ailments can be traced to their psychological equivalents in defective character, deep repentance is an additional factor of definite importance in such self-treatment. No human oneself, one’s ordinary self, is a real spiritual healer in the way another human could be a medical, herbal, magnetic, homeopathic, or psychotherapeutic healer. Spiritual healing belongs only in the providence of the Overself. The truth that it is not the ego which is instrumental in the higher forms of healing is made evident to every practising healer throughout one’s career. When Saint Augustine was dying, a sick man came to him and begged to be cured. Augustine replied that if he possessed any powers, he would have used them upon himself. However, the visitor said he had been told in a dream to ask Augustine to cure him by the laying on of hands. The saint yielded and followed the instruction. The man was healed. Yes it is a wonderful feeling, this which accompanies a glimpse of the higher self; but when it is also merged with a knowing, a beneficial perception beyond the need of discussion, interpretation, formulation, or judgement, it gives the philosophical seeker a certitude which is like a benediction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The relation of consciousness to the ego expresses itself in the use of the ego. The use expresses itself in the relation between the head and the trunk. Beware of the student’s stoop. The writer whose head is drooped and whose neck is bent by desk work is not in the best posture to generate inspired ideas. This training of the spine has some valuable secondary and incidental results. Although these are connected with the improvement of health and eradication of disease, and as such are not the direct object of the training, their value remains great one for sufferers. For instance, weak and painful backs can be the result of several different causes but one of them is faulty posture when walking. The following way of carrying the torso is bad; drawing the shoulders and chest too far back and pushing he abdomen too far forward. This curves the spine in the wrong direction and unnecessarily throws too much weigh upon it. The spine is so delicately built up it is affected for the worse by the soft beds in which they body sleeps for several hours nightly. A harder surfaced bed is better for it. It is not a necessary accompaniment of spirituality that a human be weak and sickly in body. Those who suffer from spinal troubles or hip diseases should not practise any physical exercises without previous permission from their physician. To see the greatness of a mountain, one must keep one’s distance; to understand its form, one must move around it; at noon and at midnight, in sun and in rain, in snow and in storm, in summer and in winter, and in all the other seasons, one who can see the mountain like this comes near to the life of the mountain. Mountains grow and decay, they breathe and pulsate with life. They attract and collect invisible energies from their surroundings the forces of the air, of the water, of electricity and magnetism; they create winds, clouds, thunderstorms, rains, waterfalls and rivers. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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Mountains fill their surroundings with active life and give shelter and food to innumerable beings. Such is the greatness of mighty mountains. A glimpse may exalt the human and give one inspiration, but above everything else it attests for one the fact that one is fundamentally Spirit. This is the commonest kind of Glimpse but there is another kind which, in addition to doing these things, opens mysterious doors and provides inlooks to the working of secret laws and occult processes in Nature, the World and the life of the human. This kind of glimpse may fitly be termed “a revelation.” One sees the Universe as one might see a great mosaic picture opening before one. This knowledge best comes to a human by interior revelation rather than by exterior. Thus the existence of a higher possibility for humans, which or ethical sense demands and to which our metaphysical reasoning points, is confirmed at last by our best experience. All that one now experieces will be seen by the glow of is better light, while the memory of all that one experienced in the past, however distressing or vile, will be transmuted into effective educational forms. The light of truth removes the falsities in one’s World view, and diminishes the feebleness in one’s character. It brings one a new strength. One knows that one has a place in the cosmos, that one is part of the World-Idea. Hoshana Rabba calls to mind the colourful and joyous ceremony of the Drawing of Water for the alters of the Temple. On Hoshana Rabba we pray that we may be worthy of God’s sustaining care and that He may confer upon us the bounties of nature. Hence, many prayers of Hoshana Rabba plead for the forgiveness of sin. The Service takes on a solemn character of Yom Kippur. In his mood there is knowledge without thoughts, understanding without words. What goes on within one’s ego could be better seen, and judged, if one could climb above it for a short time. This is just what the glimpse enables one to do. It clears the sight. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

May be an image of furniture, twilight and living room

CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s

Now Selling!

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Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood is the newest Cresleigh community coming to Lincoln, CA.

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With four distinct floor plans to choose from ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet offering up to five bedrooms, we are sure you’ll find your dream home here at Havenwood. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/

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A Word is a Sign for a Unique Experience!

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Many people look at these beautiful homes, and want to one day live in a home just like that. However, their desires and reality do not always seem to match up. It may even see impossible to some that they will achieve the American Dream of home ownership. Therefore it is important to speak the words of faith and realize God did not bring this far to tour this model home, just to be let down. Keep on believing and know that with God, the impossible is possible. See yourself living in that enchanting home, even while you are living in your current situation. Through hard work, perseverance and determination and by having faith in God and continuing to reach for the stars, you will achieve your vision. God wants you time on this Earth to be the best time of your life. To receive the favour of God, one must draw closer to God. Start by studying the Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible and try to become a better person. Repent of your sins and practice forgiveness. Then you can expect more than the grace of God, you can expect His blessings. You must know in your heart and mind that whatever you want will come true, but you must follow the steps to make your dream a reality. Let go of old, defeated, negative, limiting thoughts. Have the courage to step out of your shell and become a new, more confident, and successful person. Do not think discrimination is going to hold you back. Know that you are the best in your field and God will place someone in your path to open the doors for you. You cannot be if your attitude is one of defeat and hatred and envy, America’s Next Top Model. God is ready for you to become more loving, for you to have harmony in your home, for your medical report to say you are in tip top shape. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

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It pleases God to help you advance n live. The Lord wants to give you abundance. Father, I believe in You at this moment and forever. I know that you have my best interest at heart and are protecting me from things that I cannot see. However, Father, I am ready to enjoy this life and for things to come to me easily, without let down or hardship. I will walk by faith and not by sight, and please fill my heart with joy and gratitude as I try to become more like Jesus Christ. Take flight, my Soul, and circle creation until you find a perch. Not just any perch. Certainly not one with a view. A place for a rest is what I need. A perch with the Lord would be best. That is where the Saints are pillowed, or so I have been given to understand. To that end I have composed these little prayers with big faith. Please grant me, Sweet Jesus, Loving Friend, rest, not in the rest of creation, but in You. That is to say, not in beatitude or pulchritude, glory or honour, science or subtlety, richness or artistry, jig or dance, fame or praise, consecration or consolation, hope or promise, merit or desire, beneficence or munificence, joy or jubilation, Angels or Archangels or any other Heavenly Militia, or indeed any of the other Visibles or Invisibles. That is simply to say, please grant me rest only in Your company. I welcome you into my home and heart and into my family for eternity. Without God, other goods are nothing. I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold. No fame or fortune, no riches untold, I would rather have Jesus than silver and God. More than once over the eons, my Timeless if Timely Lord and God, You have been pronounced overall best of show. The tallest and strongest, the most beautiful of all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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Lord, You are the most self-sufficient and best equipped. The smoothest-cheeked and cheeriest of cheeks. The handsomest and friendliest. The noblest and brightest. All these have been true in the past and no doubt will continue to be true in the future. From these superlatives, however, there flows one horrific inexorable. Yet first, whatever You may give me by way of gift or revelation or promise, will, of course, always be welcomed. Now if that gift or revelation or promise has nothing of Yourself in it, it will always be regarded by me as one brick short of a load; that is to say, it is something less than perfection. All of which is another way of saying, I look forward to the time when I will see You in person and grasp Your Holy Hands. As the Great Augustine prayed in his Confessions (1.1), my heart can neither truly rest nor totally relax until it rests—no, not in all Your creatures or all Your creations—only in Your Yourself. When I told my friends that one day I would own a Cresleigh Home, they replied, “You’re crazy!” The word crazy is typical for defining that which is unthinkable. Most people call certain ideas “crazy” because “sane” is only that which is within the frame of reference of conventional thought. Some people are not on your level. Their thoughts and expectations in life might be lower than the standards you hold yourself to. That which transcends the conventional is crazy in the view of the average person. The scientist can stand his uncertainty precisely because of one’s faith in human reason. What matters to one is not to arrive at a conclusion but to reduce the degree of illusion, to penetrate deeper to the roots. The scientist is not even afraid of being wrong; one knows that the history of science is a history of erroneous but productive, pregnant statements from which new insights are born that overcome the relative wrongness of the older statement and lead to new insights. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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If scientists were obsessed by the wish not to be wrong, they would never have arrived at the insights which are relatively right. Of course if the social scientist has only trivial questions and does not turn one’s attention to fundamental problems, one’s “scientific method” achieves results sufficient for the endless papers which one needs to write in order to promote one’s academic career. The combination or wide-ranging imagination and objectivity is seldom reached and this is probably the reason why great scientists, who would have to fulfill both conditions, are rare. High intelligence is necessary but is not by itself sufficient for becoming a creative scientist. In fact a condition of complete objectivity can hardly ever be fully achieved. In the first place the scientist, as we have discussed, always is influenced by the common sense of one’s time, and furthermore only extraordinary persons of great gift are immune from narcissism. Yet altogether the discipline of scientific thinking has produced a degree of objectivity and what one might call scientific conscience that is hardly matched in other areas of cultural life. Indeed the fact that the great scientists more than anybody else have seen the dangers threatening humankind today and warned of them is the expression of their capacity to be objective and unswayed by he clamour of misguided public opinion. The living person can be understood only as a whole and in one’s aliveness, in the constant process of change. Since every individual is different from any other, even the possibility of generalization and the formulation of laws is limited, through the scientific observer will always try to find some general principles and laws in the manifoldness of individuals. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

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There is another difficulty in the scientific approach to the understand of the human. The data which we obtain from a person are unlike the data we obtain in other scientific endeavours. One has to understand a human in one’s full subjectivity to understand one at all. A word is not “a” word because a word is that which it means to a certain person who uses it. The dictionary meaning of the word is only an abstraction compared to the real meaning which a word has for the person who pronounces it. That of course is irrelevant for words for physical objects, although not entirely, but it is relevant for words referring to emotional or intellectual experiences. A four-page love letter from the beginning of the century sounds to us sentimental, contrived, and kind of silly. A four-page love letter from our tine which wanted to convey the same sentiments would have appeared to people living one hundred years ago as cold and feelingless. The words love, faith, courage, hate have an entirely subjective meaning for every individual and it is no exaggeration to say that it is never the same meaning for two people because there are no two people who are identical. It may not have even the same meaning for one person that it had ten years earlier because of the changes that one has undergone. The same holds true of course for dreams. Two dreams which are identical in their content may still have two very different meanings for two different dreamers. We should not take a word a person uttered for granted, but raise the question of what this particular word at this particular moment in this particular context meant for this particular person. This subjectivity in fact enhances the objectivity of one’s scientific method considerably. Any psychologist who is naïve enough to think “a word is a word is a word” will communicate with another person only on a highly abstract and fictitious level. A word is a sign for a unique experience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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O Jesus Christ, Sweetest Friend of My Friendless Soul, how can You lord over the whole Universe and yet at the same time grant me license to fly anywhere in creation? And here I am reminded of the Psalmist’s dove who flew the cote and set sail for the wilderness where You reside. Please fill me with courage so that I can empty my soul. Flood my soul with Your love so that I can drain the soil of self-love. Just You, O Lord. No sensibilities. No methodologies. No intellectual monkey business of any kind. Just You alone and in a manner as yet unknown. However, that will be then, and this is now. At my Earthly unhappiness I frequently groan to myself, but at the same time I make a great show of my pain. It is to be expected, I suppose, what with the many evils that take place in this value of misery. However, in quick succession I become annoyed, morose, confused. More often than not, these evils impede, then distract, unfold, then fold up. Thought multifarious, the one purpose they have in common is to obstruct my access to You. I know the Blessed Spirits must be enjoying Your manly hugs, but somehow I am prevented from joining them in that jolly exercise. All of which is another way of saying, may my snortings and snottings about the many distractions and desolations I encounter on Earth move you to Help. The first suburban communities had a goal of making them accessible to public transportation, but also they were designed to emphasize the open public green areas and rural ambience of earlier romantic Victorian suburbs. In practice as well as philosophy, they were not outlying bucolic communities, but true suburbs. Physically and socially, they were more closely tied to the city. Roland Park, for example, reflected more urban than rural traditions. Roland Park was clearly oriented toward downtown Baltimore. Roland Park, Forrest Hills, and Shaker Heights each would come over time to represent the affluent inner-ring urban-oriented suburbs of the pre-World War II era. To many they would become the quintessential American suburbs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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All three suburbs shared features such as strictly enforced building codes, including houses-setback regulations, but they different in the degree of developer control. Forrest Hills was designed by its backer, the Russell Sage Foundation, to be totally planned. This can be seen today in the community’s buildings, with their solid masonry construction and red tiled roofs. The Van Sweringens brothers, who founded Shaker Heights, compulsively oversaw the building of all the homes, mandating not only acceptable architectural plans but even what materials and colour schemes could be used. All homes in Shaker Heights had to be designed by an architect whose plans were approved by the brothers. They advertised their control over the community as one of its major advantages. The brothers sought “tasteful” designs and banned any too original designs as undermining the aesthetic, and financial, stability of Shaker Heights. In Roland Heights, on the contrary, house styles were not mandated. You could build your home in Dutch colonial, English Tudor, or any other style of your choice as long as you met the other community standards. Roland Park soon became incorporated into Baltimore, but it was never lost its reputation as a somewhat reclusive upper-middle class WASP enclave. Roland Park represented not just an area, but also a WASP way of life. The novelist Ann Rice and Ann Tylor,  in the respective novels, Merrick (Rice)and The Accidental Tourist and Searching for Calib (Taylor) makes the Character of Roland Park itself an essential ingredient of the novels. While Mrs. Rice talks about the decadence of design, amongst other things. Mrs. Tylor portrays Roland Park residents as living very much self-satisfied and self-restricted lives; they have little interest in going out of the neighbourhood or matter beyond Roland Park. This view of the culturally restricted nature of the upper-middle-class suburban life may or may not be an accurate reflection of reality, but it has been the basis of many good novels. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

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Planned communities have a long, if not always successful, lineage in American urban life. They share with the romantic suburbs the belief that humans can be made over by proper surroundings. Many of he nineteenth-century new town examples, such as New Harmony, Indiana or Salt Lake City, were founded with an ideological-religious emphasis. Other new communities began as company towns—but company towns that also had a visionary or social component. Lowell, Massachusetts, began in the early nineteenth century as an idealistic community with a paternalistic interest in its workers, but by midcentury it was just another New England mill town. The classic American attempt to create a totally paternalist suburban community was Pullman, Illinois, which was at the southern extremity of Chicago urban area. Pullman, founded in the 1880s, was designed with solid urban planning to be a complete community with well-managed services. George Pullman, of Pullman car fame, was the founder and sole landlord. His goal was to provide a community of solid housing and few temptations (saloons were barred) so that workers would remain productive. He stated that, “With such surroundings and such human regard for the needs of the body as well as the soul the disturbing conditions of strikes and other troubles that periodically convulse the World of labour would no be found here.” He was a poor prophet, for Pullman is best known today for the famous biter and violent strike that occurred there in 1894. The strike was only crushed when National Guardsmen were brought in as strike breakers. Today pullman is part of Chicago. Nineteenth-century planned utopian communities, such as John Noyes’s Oneida, New York, with is system of group marriage, or political-philosophical communities such as New Harmony, Indiana, generally had difficulty maintaining themselves. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

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In addition to having ideological disputes, the communities were always undercapitalized. Alice Austin’s early-twentieth-century attempt to create the feminist planned “Socialist City” of Llano Del Rio in southern California suffered this fate. After struggling for many years, the community went bankrupt in 1917. As noted earlier, a unique feature of Llano del Rio was the building of homes without kitchens. Rather than having individual kitchens, the homes backed into a communal eating area. This was to save housewives from the drudgery of cooking. At the close of the nineteenth century, revulsion against the evils of the city and reaction to the isolation of the suburbs led to attempts to build entirely new communities in which the benefits of both types of living could be realized. The resulting communities thus grew out of a much different orientation then had led to the building of the earlier upper-status romantic suburbs. These communities had much more of a reformist and middle-or working-class orientation. Our suburbs of today are a melding of the two traditions. The turn of the century new towns were planned to be communities with fully developed commercial, residential, and industrial sectors. Much of the concern with new owns was because of the visionary efforts of Ebenezer Howard in England. His new towns, which were called “garden cities,” were to be self-contained communities of 30,000 residents. There were to be totally planned communities surrounded by a “green belt” of open land. Mr. Howard was going to solve the problem of the cities by abandoning them for a fresh environment of self-sufficient garden cities. Mr. Howard and his Garden City Association stared the first new town a Letchworth, some thirty miles by train from London, in 1902. After many financial troubles, Mr. Howard launched the second town, Welwyn Garden City, in 1920. Today it is a pleasant small city. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

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Following World II, in 1946, Britain passed the New Town Act, which made the building of new towns an official government policy in Great Britain. Since that time some fifty-six new towns have been constructed. During the 1920s some of the leading planners in the United States of America organized into the Regional Planning Association of America in order to promote comprehensive planning and new towns. The most famous new town which members were associated was Radburn, New Jersey, started in 1928 outside New York by City Housing Corporation. Radburn is often considered the first of the American new towns. Designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the houses were arranged in superblocks that fronted on open parkland while automobiles were restricted to peripheral areas. The superblocks were to be free of traffic and congestion. Radburn was thus the first community specifically planned for controlling the problems of the “motor age.” An extensive pathway system, for example, was designed to separate pedestrians from automobiles. For financial reasons, it was not possible to build the external protecting green belt, and there was no provision for industry. Then English new town model of communal ownership and property leaseholds also was not followed, since it would not be accepted in the American environment. From the first, Radburn, the first homeowners moved into the community in May 1929, and the stock market collapsed half a year later. The community was begun stillborn. Now largely forgotten except by urbanists, three government-sponsored new towns were built over half a century ago by the United States of America’s government. They were built essentially as experimental or demonstration projects during the great Depression of the 1930s. The new towns were authorized with the three goals of demonstrating the advantages of community planning, providing good housing at reasonable rents, and giving jobs to thousands of unemployed workers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

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The three towns constructed were Greenbelt, Maryland, outside of Washington D.C.; Greendale, Wisconsin, southwest of Milwaukee; and Green Hills, Ohio, near Cincinnati. Although they lacked their own industries, all three were successful. However, Congress, responding to claims by the real estate industry that having government-built housing was socialists and a danger to the free-enterprise system, the surrounding green belt be sold. Since then, all new town developers have built their communities in the expectation of making money. They have not always achieved this expectation. Given this flowering of a multiplicity of family forms, it is too early to tell which will emerge as significant style in a Third Wave civilization. Will our children live alone for many years, perhaps decades? Will they go childless? Will we retire into old-age communes? What about more exotic possibilities? Families with several husbands and one wife? (If genetic tinkering lets us preselect the gender of our children, that could happen.) What about homosexual families raising children? The courts are already debating this issue. What about the potential impact of cloning? If each of us moves through a trajectory of family experiences in our lives, what will the phases be? A trial marriage, followed by a dual-career marriage with no children, then a homosexual marriage with children? The possible permutations are endless. Nor, despite the cries of outage, should any of these be regarded as unthinkable. As Jessie Bernard has put it, “There is literally nothing about marriage that anyone can imagine that has not in fact taken place…All these variations seemed quite natural to those who lived with them.” Which specific family forms vanished and which ones proliferate will depend less on pulpit-pounding about the “sanctity of the family” than on the decisions we make with respect to technology and work. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

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While many forces influence family structure—communication patterns, values, demographic changes, religious movements, even ecological shifts—the linkage between family form and work arrangements is particularly strong. Thus, just as the nuclear family was promoted by the rise of the factory and office work, any shift away from the factory and office would also exert a heavy influence on the family. It is impossible, in the space of a single essay, to spell out all the ways in which the coming changes in the labour force and in the nature of work will alter the family life. However, one change is so potentially revolutionary, and so alien to our experience, it needs far more attention than it has received so far. This is, of course, the shift of work out of the office and factory and back to the home. Assume for a moment that twenty-five years from now 45 percent of the work force is employed part- or full-time in the home. How would working at home change the quality of our personal relationships or the meaning of love? What would life be like in the electronic cottage? Whether the work-at-home task is programming a computer, writing a pamphlet, monitoring distant manufacturing processes, designing a building, or typing electronic correspondence, one immediate change is clear. Relocating work into the home means that many spouses who now see each other only a limited number of hours each day would be thrown together more intimately. Some, no doubt, would find their marriages saved and their relationships much enriched through shared experience. Let us visit several electronic cottages to see how people might adapt to fundamental a change in society. Such a tour would no doubt reveal a wide diversity of living and working arrangements. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

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In some houses, perhaps the majority, we might well find couples dividing things up more or less conventionally, with one person doing the “job-work” while the other keeps the house—he, perhaps, writing programs while she looks after the kids. They very presence of work in the home, however, would probably encourage a sharing of both job-work and housekeeping. We would find many homes, therefore, in which man and wife split a single full-time job. For example, we might find both husband and wife taking turns at monitoring a complex manufacturing process on the console screen in the den, four hours on, for hours off. Down the street, by contrast, we would likely discover a couple holding not one, but two quite different jobs, with each spouse working separately. A cellular physiologist and a CPA might each work at one’s craft. Even here, however, with the jobs differing sharply in character, there is still likely to be some sharing of problems, some learning of each other’s work vocabulary, some common concerns and conversation relating to work. It is almost impossible under such conditions for the work life of an individual to be strictly segregated from personal life. By the same token, it is next to impossible to freeze one’s mate out of a whole dimension of one’s existence. Right next door (continuing our survey) we could well come upon a couple holding two different jobs but sharing both, the husband working as a part-time insurance planner and part-time as an architect’s assistant, with the wife doing the same work on alternating shifts. This arrangement would provide more varied, and therefore more interesting, work for both. In such homes, whether one or several jobs are shared, each partner necessarily learns from the other, participate in the problem-solving, engages in complex give-and-take, all of which cannot but deepen intimacy. Forced proximity, it goes without saying, does no guarantee happiness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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The extended family units of the First Wave era, which were also economic production units, were hardly models of interpersonal sensitivity and mutual psychological support. Such families had their own problems and stresses. However, there were few uncommitted or “cooled out” relationships. Working together assured, if nothing else, tight, complex, “hot” personal relationships—a committedness many people envy today. In short, the spread of work-at-home on a large scale could not only affect family structure but transform relationships within the family. It could, to put it simply, provide a common set of experiences and get marriage partners talking to one another again. It could shift their relationships along the spectrum from “cool” to “hot.” It could also redefine love itself and bring with it the concept of Love Plus. The Christian Bible does warn us against self-righteous pride—pride that alienates us from God and leads us to disdain one another. Such pride is at the heart of racism, sexism, agism, and all the other deadly sins that lead one group of people to see themselves as more moral, deserving, or able than another. The opposite side of being proud of our individual and group achievements, and of taking credit for them, is blaming the poor for their poverty and the oppressed for their oppression. Self-control is worth ten times as much as self-esteem. And so for centuries pride had been considered the fundamental sin, the original sin, the deadliest of the seven deadly sins. Vain self-love corrodes human community and erodes our sense of dependence on one another and on God. If we seem confident about the pervasiveness and potency of pride, it is not because we have invented a new idea, but rather because the new findings reaffirm a very old idea. There is indeed tremendous relief in confessing our limits and our pride and in being known as we truly are. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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Having been forgiven and accepted, we gain release, a feeling of being given what formerly we were struggling to get: security, peace, love. Having cut the pretensions and encountered divine grace, we feel more—not less—value as persons, for our self-acceptance no longer depends exclusively upon our own virtue and achievement or upon others’ approval. The feelings one can have in this encounter with God are like those we enjoy in a relationship with someone who, even after knowing our inmost thoughts, accepts us unconditionally. This is the delicious experience we no longer feel the need to justify and explain ourselves to be on guard, in which we are free to be spontaneous without fear losing the other’s esteem. Such was the psalmist’s experience: “Lord, I have given up my pride and turned away from my arrogance…I am content and at peace.” And it was St. Paul’s experience: “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Beware, for fiends in triumph laugh over one who learns the truth by half! Beware; for God will not endure for humans to make their hope more pure than His good promise, or require another than the five-stringed lyre which He has vowed again to the hands Devout of one who understands to tune it justly here! In the earliest days of Christianity an “apostle” was first and foremost a human who claimed to be an eye-witness of the Resurrection. Only a few days after the Crucifixion when two candidates were nominated for the vacancy created by the treachery of Judas, their qualification was that they had known Jesus personally both before and after His death and could offer first-hand evidence of the Resurrection in addressing the outer World (Acts i. 22). A few days later St. Peter, preaching the first Christian sermon, makes the same claim—“God raised Jesus, of which we all (we Christians) are witness” (Acts ii. 32). In the first Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul bases his claim to apostleship on the same ground—“Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen the Lord Jesus?” (i.9). #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

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As this qualification suggests, to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the Resurrection. Thus people who had heard only fragments of St. Paul’s teaching at Athens got the impression that he was talking about two new gods, Jesus and Anastasis (id est Resurrection) (Acts xvii. 18). The Resurrection is the central theme in every Christian sermon reported in the Acts. The Resurrection, and its consequences, were the “gospel” or good news which the Christians brought: what we call the “gospels,” the narratives of Our Lord’s life and death, were composed later for the benefit of those who had already accepted the gospel. They were in no sense the basis of Christianity: they were written for those already concerted. The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as construction upon it. The first in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. They had died without making anyone else believe the “gospel” no gospel would ever have been written. Water. Lakes and rivers. Oceans and streams. Spring, pools, and gullies. Arroyos, creek, watersheds. Pacific. Atlantic. Mediterranean. Indian. Caribbean. China Sea. (Lying. Dreaming on shallow shores.) Arctic. Antarctic. Baltic. Mississippi. Amazon. Columbia. Nile. Thames. Sacramento. Snake. (Undulant woman river.) Seine. Rio Grande. Willamette. McKenzie. Ohio. Hudson. Po. Rhine. Rhone. Rain. After a lifetime of drought. That finally cleanses the air. The soot from our eyes. The dingy windows of our western home. The rooftops and branches. The wings of birds. The new light on a slant. Pouring. Making everything new. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

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Francis Schlatter replied to a query as to the secret of his successful healings: “I am nothing, but the Father is everything. Have in the Father and all will be well. The Father can grow a pair of lungs just as easily as He can cure a cold.” The secret exercising spiritual power is to turn toward the other and high being which is the soul. The price of exercising it is self-abandonment. This is as true of spiritual healing as it is of spiritual initiation. An hones healer can say only that one’s healing depends on two conditions being fulfilled: the faith of the patient and the permission of the higher powers. A self-actualized who attained great renown and reputation in Rumania for one’s selfless character, inspired preaching, and miraculous healing said that he asked all patients to make a confession privately to him of their wrong attitudes and wrong-doing before the work of healing could begin, as this opened the door. This healing quality in his highly developed being passes into others, although only into those who can absorb it through devotion or receive it through faith. It is risky for one to forget what one primarily still is—layperson, not medical person. One ought not attempt to occupy position which does not belong to one. O Lord and Redeemer, beside Thee there is none to save. Thou art mighty and redeemest. I was brought low, but Thou didst save me. O God of salvation who deliverest and savest, save Thy supplicants, save them that hope in Thee. Sustain Thy lambs; increase the Earth’s riches. Cause to flourish and save each shrub, and condemn not the Earth to infertility, but sweeten and save is fruit. Urge on the rain-mists that they discharge their showers, and hold not back the clouds. Thou who openest Thine hand to sustain Thy creatures, please satisfy the thirsty with water. Please save them that call on Thee, Thou who art mighty to save. Save them that seek Thee at morn, yes, do Thou save them. Please save Thy whole-hearted servants, yea save them, we beseech Thee. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, please save us now. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Cresleigh Homes

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A spacious great room allows for maximum flow throughout the house. 👌 Plush but neutral furniture allows for luxe comfort! We can’t wait to see what you do with your Meadows Residence 2 home! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/

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This single story home boats an ideal layout with 2,372 square feet, of thoughtfully designed living space, three bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a three car garage.

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Does Not Success Certify Sanity?

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Your solicitude in my behalf has been greater than mine in my own behalf. For a Devout like me seems entirely too casual when one does not forward You all in one’s own solicitude; that is the sort of advice Peter offered in his First Letter (5.7). O Lord, while my will is aimed at and locked firm in You, do for me what You feel and think best. For whatever You do for me cannot be anything but good. If You want me to be blanketed in darkness, my blessing to You. If bathed in lightness, my blessing to You also. If You think me worth a quick hug, blessings on Your house. If you think I deserve a swift kick, more blessings on Your house. All of which is to day, whatever the holy day or holly day, may my blessings festoon Your hallowed halls. Lord, I suffer willingly for Your sake whatever You want to lay on me. I wish to accept from Your hand—I do not care what the sequence—good to bad or bad to good, and so on with the sweet and the bittersweet, the happy and the sad, and to give thanks for all the things that happen to me. Please guard me from every sin and neither Death nor Hell will be a stranger to me. In the meantime do not cast me into eternity, as the Psalmist feared would happen to him (77.7); and please do not delete me from the Book of Life; that is the terrible threat, one of many, in Revelation (3.5). Whatever the tribulation laid upon me, it may hurt me now but will not affect me in the long run. “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. We must continue to push for the excellence that God has put in our heart. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

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Do not be satisfied with a little improvement. Instead, believe for better progress, and persevere for God’s best. Jesus Christ descended from Heaven for the purpose of our salvation. He took on our miseries, drawn not by necessity but charity. Why? So that we could learn patience and consider it a not unworthy task to tote some of our temporal miseries ourselves. We must step out of our comfort zone. God has so much more in store as long as we keep pursuing and believing. It does not take any more effort to believe and stay filled with faith than it takes to develop a negative and defeated attitude. However, perhaps some of us are broken. We have been optimistic in the past, but things kept going wrong and crushing our optimism. Maybe unimagined wrongs were heaped upon us and our faith is still rebounding. However, Christ’s Holy Example and the footprints of the Saints have led the way, and because of that, the trudge is made the more bearable even for the weakest among us. That is not to say the Old Testament did not offer some hope and consolation in the regard. However, in those holy pages the Gate of Heaven appeared to be closed. Did it really matter? So few took pains to seek the Kingdom of Heaven, and those that did often found the road to Heaven heavily fogged. Somehow, though, the Just and their friends made it through to the gate, that brazen barrier, but there they had to wait before they could enter. First, O Lord, You had to pay the entrance fee, that is to say, expunge the debt of debts by dying the death of deaths. How can I thank You enough! #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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To show me and all the faithful the right and good way to Your Eternal Kingdom was a gamble on Your part, and as happened, it turned into a gambol on your part. Yes, Your life is our way, and through holy patience we walked toward You, who are our Crown. However, I have to ask, who on Earth would follow You if You had not already charted the path and acted as guide? If we had no had Your astonishing model of spiritual behaviour before us, we would still be milling around on Earth. Up to the time of Your arrival, You know, Humankind was neither hot nor cold about this Heavenly Enterprise. Of course, there were signs along the way, from the Old Dispensation as well as the New (John 12.37). And are not these great illuminations that John spoke of (8.12)? Without them—which is to say, without You, O Lord—would not we still be stumbling around in he dark instead of staggering up toward the light? It does not come easily. People who see their dreams come to pass are people who have some resolve, some internal strength; people who refuse to settle for second best. Nothing may be going my way right now, but I am going to keep drawing closer to God. I am going to trust God to help me expand my horizons and keep believing for all that He has for me will come to fruition. God will help me make it all the way to the Promised Land. Dear Lord in Heaven, I am excited to be on this new journey of faith with you. Please help me to develop a brand-new vision for my life, to believe You for better days ahead, and to know that You will continually expand my horizons as I trust You to do more in and through my life. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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 If the Lord and Tailor of the Universe had to suffer and die, and if the legions of His saintly followers had to suffer, many of them to the point of martyrdom, then, at the very least, will I not have to suffer, too? The answer is, of course, yes, but as for my so-called sufferings to date, I just might paraphrase the Letter to the Hebrews (12.4). “You have suffered all right, and you have made a great squawk about it, but I do not see one single drop of your precious red blood on the pavement!” Whatever one may have suffered to date, is but a jot, a tittle, a smidge, a skosh, especially when compared to those over the centuries who have been battered so much, tempted so relentlessly, troubled so grievously, twisted and tortured in so many hard and horrid ways. Therefore, one should take another look at the rather grand suffering of others. Why? That one might learn to bear one’s own rather grandiose discomfits. To one they seem mountains; to God, they are molehills. How could this happen? One’s impatience has magnified them out of all proportion. Nevertheless, whether the aching of your soul is small or large, be a good patient; strive to endure them all. There is an advantage to one’s bettering one’s attitude toward battering and getting battered. One will begin to appear sagacious and meritorious not only to oneself, but also to others. There is another advantage. No doubt suffering lays a terrible load on a person, but the proper spiritual attitude lightens the load. That will be especially true in one’s case, what with one’s having so carelessly prepared in one’s mind and body up to this point. That is to say, any adjustment on one’s part is bound to be an improvement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

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God created us as visual beings with incredible imagination. “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. However, if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness,” reports Matthew 6.22-23. Unfortunately, many people have a negative vision for their lives. They do not see themselves rising higher or overcoming their obstacles. Consequently, they are limited by their own vision. “He hit me first, and I just do not have the strength to suffer another blow. I think I must be in the wrong walk of life.” “That person brought a serious charge against me, and harried me with all sorts of horrid stuff I could not possibly think up myself! I cannot accept that, and from him of all people! Is that the sort of miserable suffering I am supposed to put up with, O Lord and Tailor of the Universe?” What vapid and insipid thoughts! First, it does not do justice to the virtue of patience or—ahem—to the Person who rewards all patience. Second, all it does is focus attention on your and the garbage that person dumped on you.  If one can dictate just how much and at whose hand, one is not really getting serious about suffering. Another, though, is indeed serious about it when one pays no attention to the person wielding the lash. One does not care whether it is one’s superior, one’s peer, or one’s inferior; it can be a good and holy human with knotted cords or just a vulgarian or barbarian with a whip. As much and as often as the Devout encounters rough skating or tough sledding, one gratefully accepts it all as coming from the hand of God; one even counts it not as a loss, but as a substantial gain. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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How? Nothing in the presence of Good, however minuscule, however majuscule, as long as it is a step taken for God, can be transacted without an increase in merit. Suffering it is then. If you want to have the victor, ready yourself for battle. If you truly want the crown of patience, wrote Paul in his Second Letter to Timothy (2.5), then engage the Enemy. However, what if you change your mind and do not want to suffer? Then you are in the wrong line of work. However, if you truly want to be a Devout, then you will have to fight manfully, endure vigorously. Without huffing and puffing there is no movement along the road to peace. Without slugging it out there is no decisive victory. Make possible through grace, O Lord, what seems so impossible through nature. Is that not what You promised You would do when the people of Jerusalem asked who would be saved? Luke wrote that You did (18.27). You know what little I can put up with and how quickly I give up, even when it is only a tiny adversity that rears its timorous head. What I should really do is consider every tribulation as a token of affection from You. After all, to suffer a little physically and spiritually is no exactly unhealthy for the soul. The Christian Bible says your eye is the lamp of your body. Obviously, that is not talking about your physical sight; it is talking about what you see through your eyes of faith, your spiritual vision. It is talking about the type of image you are keeping in front of you. God is telling us that if we focus on our problems, on what we cannot do, of if we think we have already reached our limits, then that image of mediocrity will keep us stuck right where we are. It is not because God does not want to promote us; it is simply because we are focused on the wrong things. We are developing the wrong images in our mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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However, if we can learn to look at life through our eyes of faith and see ourselves rising to higher levels, accomplishing our dreams, receiving more blessings, giving assistance to others, becoming more loving, and enjoying life, seeing our family and friends serving God, then we will experience God’s blessings and favour our over lives. We produce what we continually keep in front of us. “Against my better judgment I will confess my injustice,” sang the Psalmist (32.5). And I too shall confess my infirmity, O Lord. Often it is a small thing that jogs me off my strive; it makes me so mad at first, and then I grow sad. To remedy that, I resolve to act more energetically in the future. However, a modest temptation comes along, and I am completely thrown for a loss. Something trivial trips me, and I end up on my face. Just when I recover and think myself safe again—the moment when I least expect it—the briefest wisp whispers me away. Therefore, O Lord, about my humility and fragility, there is nothing new for You to know. Have mercy on me. “Rescue me,” as the Psalmist has had to cry out on more than one occasion “before I am sucked up by the mire,” (69.14). This thrashing about in the muck has got to stop! Yes, it embarrasses me to have to confess one again that I have made no progress. However, when it comes to putting up a front against the passions, I am still so nervous and cowardly. It is not as though I open the floodgates to them, but the leakage in the dikes is so persistent and pervasive that it is driving me crazy. All of which is another way of saying, do lecture me about my infirmity. I need to know, because these foul fantasies are seeping in more quickly than they are draining out. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

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

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

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

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

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

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Love begins as a result of the child being fed by mother. It ends in the male’s owning the female who still has to feed him with affection, pleasures of the flesh, and food. Indeed what some are saying is that in between the lines is probably fitting for patriarchal society to have the male remain a dependent creature but denying this by boasting of one’s strength and proving it through making the female his property. The main factors in the patriarch male’s attitude are dependence on the female and its denial by controlling her. Patriarchal male love has transformed a specific phenomenon, that of patriarchal male love into a universal human one. Another significant change has been the growth in the number of those consciously choosing what is coming to be known as a “child-free” lifestyle. We are seeing a massive shift from “child-centered” to “adult-centered” homes. At the turn of the 20th century there were few singles in society, and relatively few parents lived very long after their youngest child left home. Thus must households were, in fact, child-centered. By contrast, as early as 1970 in the United States of America only one in three adults lived in a home with children; and in 2020 that number was 48 percent. Today organizations are springing up to promote the child-free life, and a reluctance to have children is spreading in many industrial nations. In 1960 only 20 percent of “ever-married” American women under age thirty were child-free. As of 2021 49 percent were child-free. A vocal organization, the National Alliance for Optional Parenthood, has arisen to protect the rights of the childless and to combat pronatalist propaganda. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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A similar organization, the National Association for the Childless, has sprouted in Britain, and many couple across Europe are also deliberately choosing to remain childless. In Bonn, Germany, for example, Theo and Agnes Rohl, both in their mid-thirties, he a city official, she a secretary, say “We don’t think we’ll have children.” The Rohls are modestly affluent. They own a small home. They manage a vacation trip to California or Southern France now and then. Children would drastically alter their way of life. “We’re used to our life-style the way it is,” they say, “and we like being independent.” Nor is this reluctance to bear children a sign of capitalist decadence. It is present in Russia, too, where many young Russian couples echo the sentiment of the Rohls and explicitly reject parenthood—a fact that worries Russian officialdom in view of the still-high birth rates among several non-Russian national minorities. Turning now to those with children, the breakdown of the nuclear family is even more sharply evidenced in the spectacular increase in single-parent families. So many divorces, breakups, and separations have occurred in recent years—mainly in nuclear families—that today a staggering one-in-seven American children is raised by a single parent and the number is even high—one in four—in urban areas. The huge growth in such household has brought a growing recognition that despite severe problems, a one-parent household can, under certain circumstances, be better for the child than a nuclear household continually torn by bitter strife. Newspapers and organizations now serve single parents and are heightening their group consciousness and political clout. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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

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

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

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The Door to Nowhere—The Curse of Evil Has Come into His Body!

Some people do not believe in ghost. For that matter, some people do not believe in anything. There are persons who even affect incredulity concerning the “Door to Nowhere,” at the Winchester mansion. They said that it did not stand wide open—that it was not a gateway to the Spirit World and that they could have shut it; that the whole affair was a delusion; that they are sure it must have been a conspiracy; that they are doubtful whether there is such a place as the Winchester mansion on the face of the Earth; that the first time they are in California they will look it up. Perhaps, before going further, I ought to premise there was a time when I did not believe in ghosts either. If you had asked me one summer’s morning years ago when you met me on the Golden Gate Bridge if I held such appearances to be probable or possible, you would have received an empathic “No” for answer. However, at this rate, the story of the Door to Nowhere will never be told; so we will, with your permission, plunge into it immediately. I was interested in why this “Door to Nowhere” in the Winchester mansion would not keep shut? They say the place is haunted. What nonsense. There was one thing I can truly say about our office, we were never serious in it. I fancy that is the case in most offices nowadays; at all events, it was the case in ours. We were always chaffing each other, playing practical jokes, telling stupid stories, scamping our work, looking at the clock, counting the weeks to next Christmas, counting the hours to Saturday. For all that we were earnest in our desire to have our salaries raised, and unanimous in the opinion no fellows ever before received such wretched pay. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

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I had $75,000 a year, which I was aware did not half provide for what I ate at home. My mother and sisters left me in no doubt on the point, and when new clothes were wanted I always hated to mention the fact to my poor worried father. We had been better off once, I believe, though I never remember the time. My father owned a small property in the country. I wanted money badly—I must say I never had sixpence in the World of my own—and I thought if I could earn two sovereigns I might buy some trifles I needed for myself, and present my father with a new Ultimate Driving Machine. Then I recalled the amount of the rent was being asked for the Winchester mansion; then I decided gladly this would be a great place to stay if only the ghost turned out of possession. I decided I should like to try to whether, I could not solve the mystery. I was accustomed to lonely houses, and I would not feel at all nervous; I did not believe in ghost, and as for burglars, I was not afraid of them. I was told to just try it out first. To stay in the house for a week; if as tht end of that time I could keep the door shut, locked, bolted, or nailed up, to telegraphy the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and they would actually pay me to stay there. To me, this sounded like a great bargain. If I lay the ghost, or find out the ghost, I think I ought to have enough money to buy a small house for myself. However, I could not have said what frightened me about this endeavour. A week after I moved into the Queen Anne mansion, Mr. van Buuren from the Winchester Repeating Arms Company came to visit me. He wanted to speak to me about the mansion. I heard a sound of irritation in his voice. “The Winchester Mansion!” he said; “and what have you got to say about the Winchester Mansion?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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“That is what I wanted to tell you, Mr. van Buuren,” I answered, and a dead hush seem to fall over the office as I spoke. The silence seemed to attract his attention, for he looked sternly at the clerks, who were not using a pen or moving a finger. “Come this way, then,” he said abruptly; and next minute I was in his private office. “Now, what is it?” he asked, flinging himself into a chair, and addressing me, who stood hat in hand beside the great table in the middle of the room. I began—I will say he was a patient listener—at the very beginning, and told my story straight through. I concealed nothing. I enlarged on nothing. A discharged clerk I stood before him, and in the capacity of a discharged clerk I said what I had to say. He heard me to the end, the he sat silent, thinking. At last he spoke. “You have heard a great deal of conversation about the Winchester, I suppose,” he remarked. “No, sir; I have heard nothing expect what I have told you.” “And why do you desire to strive to solve such a mystery?” “If there is any money to be made, I should like to make it, sir.” “How old are you?” “Two-and-twenty last January.” He laughed—he lay back in his chair and laughed—and I laughed myself, though ruefully. We went on talking for a long time after that; he asked me all about my father and my early life, and how we lived and the people we knew; and, in fact, put more questions than I can well remember. “It seems a crazy thing to do,” he said at las; “and yet I feel disposed to trust you. The house is standing perfectly empty. I cannot live it in, and I cannot get rid of it; all my own furniture I have removed, and there is nothing in the place except a few old-fashioned articles belonging to Mrs. Winchester. The place is a loss to me. It is of no use trying to let it, and thus, in fact, matters are at a deadlock. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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“You will not be able to find out anything, I know, because, of course, other have tried to solve the mystery ere now; still, if you like to try you may. I will make this bargain with you. If you like to go down, I will pay your reasonable expenses for a fortnight; and if you do any good for me, I will give you a $1,000,000 note for yourself. Of course I must be satisfied that what you have told me is true and that you are what your represent. Do you know anybody in the city who would speak for you?” I could think of no one but my uncle. I hinted to Mr. van Buuren he was no grand enough or rich enough, perhaps, but I knew nobody else to whom I could refer him. “What?!” he said, “Greg Ryan, of Lakeview Street. He does business with us. If he will go bail for your good behaviour I shan’t want any further guarantee. Come along.” And to my intense amazement, he rose, put on his hat, walked me across the outer office and along the pavements till we came to Lakeview Street. “Do you know this youth, Mr. Ryan?” he said, standing in front of my uncle’s desk, and laying a hand on my shoulder. “Of course I do, Mr. van Burren,” answered my uncle, a little apprehensively; for, as he told me afterwards, he could not imagine what mischief I have been up to. “He is my nephew.” “And what is your opinion of him—do you think he is a young fellow I may safely trust?” My uncle smiled, and answered, “That depends on what you wish to trust him with.” “A long column of addition, for instance.” “It would be safer to give that task to somebody else.” “Oh, uncle!” I remonstrated; for I had really striven to conquer my natural antipathy to figures—worked hard, and every bit of it against the collar. My uncle got off his stool, and said, standing with his back to the empty fire-grate: “Tell me what you wish the boy to do, Mr. van Buuren, and I will tell you whether he will suit your purpose of not. I know him, I believe, better than he knows himself.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

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In an easy, affable way, for so rich a man, Mr. van Buuren took possession of the vacant stool, and nursing his right leg over his left knee, answered: “He wants to go and shut the “Door to Nowhere” at the Winchester Mansion for me. Do you think he can do that? My uncle looked steadily back at the speaker, and said, “I thought, Mr. van Buuren, I was quite settled no one could shut it?” Mr. van Buuren shifted a little uneasily on his seat, and replied: “I did not set your nephew the task he fancies he would like to undertake.” “Have nothing to do with it, Justin, advised my uncle, shortly. “You do not believe in ghost do you, Mr. Ryan?” asked Mr. van Burren, with a slight sneer. “Do you not, Mr. van Buuren?” retorted my uncle. There was a pause—an uncomfortable pause—during the course of which I felt the million dollar note, which in imagination, I had really spent, trembling in the scale. I was not afraid. For one million dollars, or half the money, I would have faced all the inhabitants of spirit land. I longed to tell them so; but something in the way those two men looked at each other stayed my tongue. “If you ask me the question here in the heart of the city, Mr. Ryan,” said Mr. van Buuren, at length, slowly and carefully, “I answer ‘No’; but if you were to put me on a dark night at the Winchester, I should beg time to consider. I do not believe in supernatural phenomena myself, and yet—the ‘Door to Nowhere’ at the Winchester is as much beyond my comprehension as the ebbing and flowing of the sea.” “And you cannot live at the Winchester?” remarked my uncle. “I cannot live at the Winchester, and what is more, I cannot get anyone else to live at the Winchester.” “And you want to get rid of your lease?” “I want so much to get rid of my lease that I told Tuck I would give him a handsome sum if he could induce anyone to solve the mystery. Is there any other information you desire, Mr. Ryan? Because if there is, you have only to ask and have. I feel I am not here in a prosaic office in the city of Santa Clara, but in the Palace of Truth.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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My uncle took no notice of the implied compliment. When company is good it needs nothing else. If a man is habitually honest in his speech and in his thoughts, he desires no recognition of the fact. “I do not think so,” he answered; “it is for the boy to say what he will do. If he be advised by me he will stick to his ordinary work in his employers’ office, and leave ghost-hunting and spirit-laying alone.” Mr. van Buuren shot a rapid glance in my direction, a glance which implying a secret understanding, might have influenced my uncle could I have stooped to deceive my uncle. “I cannot stick to my work there any longer,” I said. “I got my marching orders today.” “What had you been doing, Justin? Asked my uncle. “I wanted one million to go and lay the ghost!” I answered, so dejectedly, that both Mr. van Buuren and my uncle broke out laughing. “One Million dollars!” cried my uncle, almost between laughing and crying. “Why, Justin boy, I had rather, poor man though I am, have given thee one million dollars than thou should’st go ghost-hunting or ghost-laying.” When he was very much in earnest my uncle went back to thee and thou his native dialect. I liked the vulgarism, as my mother called it, and I knew my aunt loved to hear him use the caressing words to her. He had risen, not quite from the ranks it is true, but if ever a gentleman came ready born into the World it was Greg Ryan, upon whom at our home everyone seemed to look down. “What will you do, you man?” asked Mr. van Buuren; “you hear what your uncle says, “Give up the enterprise,” and what I say; I do not want either to bribe or force your inclinations.” “I will go, sir,” I answered quite steadily. “I am not afraid, and I should like to show you—” I stopped. I had been going to say, “I should like to show you I am not sure a fool as you all take me for,” but I felt such an address would be too familiar, and refrained. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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When I got to the Lodge, I showed Mr. van Buuren’s letter to the woman, and received the key. “You are not going to stop up at the Winchester alone, are you, sir? she asked. “Yes, I am,” I answered, uncompromisingly, so uncompromisingly that she said no more. The avenue led straight to the mansion; it was uphill all the way, and bordered by rows of the most magnificent limes I ever beheld. A light iron fence divided the avenue from the park, and between the trunks of the trees I could see the deer browsing and cattle grazing. Ever and anon there came likewise to my ear the sound of a sheep-bell. It was a long avenue, but at length I stood in front of the mansion—a square, solid-looking, Victorian mansion, four stories high, with several towers and a steeply pitched roof, beautiful stained-glass windows and statues, a basement; a flight of steps up to the principal entrance; several windows to the right of the door, several to the left of the door; the whole mansion flanked and backed with trees; all the curtains closed, a dead silence brooding over the place; the sun westering behind the great trees studding the park. I took all this in as I approached, and afterwards as I stood for a moment under then ample porch; then remembering he business which has brought me so far, I fitted the great key in the lock, turned the handle, and entered the Winchester Mansion. For a minute—stepping out of the bright sunlight—the place looked to me so dark that I could scarcely distinguish the objects by which I was surrounded; but my eyes soon grew accustomed to the comparative darkness, and I found I was in an immense hall, lighted from the roof; a magnificent old oak staircase conducted to the upper rooms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

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The floor was of white marble. There were two fireplaces, fitted with dogs for burning wood; around the walls hung pictures, antlers, and horn, and in odd niches and corners stood groups of statues, and the figure of men in complete suits of armour. To look at the place outside, no one would have expected to find such a hall. I stood lost in amazement and admiration, and then I began to glance more particularly around. Mr. van Buuren has not given me any instructions by which to identify the ghostly chamber—which I concluded would most probably be found on the first floor. I knew nothing of the story connected with it—if there were a story. I was perfectly unencumbered of the mystery. I had not the faintest idea in which apartment it resided. Well, I should discover that, no doubt, for myself ere long. I looked around me—doors—doors—doors. I have never before seen so many doors together all at once. Two of them stood open—one wide, the other slightly ajar. “I will just shut them as a beginning,” I thought, “before I go upstairs.” The doors were of oak, heavy, well-fitting furnished with good locks and sound handles. After I had closed I tried them. Yes, they were quite secure. I ascended the great staircase feeling curiously like an intruder, paced the corridors, entered the many bed chambers—some quite bare of furniture, others containing articles of an ancient fashion, and no doubt of considerable value—chairs, antique dressing-tables, curious wardrobes, and such like. For the most part the doors were closed, and I shut those that stood open before making my way into the attics. I was greatly delighted with the attics. The window lighted them did not, as a rule, overlook the front of the Manion, but commanded wide views over wood, and valley, and meadow. Leaning out of one, I could see, that to the right of the mansion the ground, thickly planted, shelved down to a stream, which came out into the daylight a little distance beyond the plantation, and meandered through the deer part. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

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At the back of the mansion the windows looked out on nothing save a dense wood and a portion of the stable-yard, whilst on the side nearest the point from whence I had come there were spreading gardens surrounded by thick yew hedges, and kitchen-gardens protected by high walls; and further on a farmyard, where I could perceive cows and oxen, and, further still, luxuriant meadows, and fields glad with waying and fruit orchards. “What a beautiful place!” I said. “van Buuren must have been a duffer to leave it.” And then I thought what a great ramshackle house it was for anyone to be in all alone. Getting heated with my long walk, I suppose, made me feel chilly, for I shivered as I drew my head in from the last dormer window, and prepared to go down stairs again. In the attics, as in the other parts of the house I had as yet explored, I closed the doors, when there were keys locking them; when there were not, trying them, and in all cases, leaving the securely fastened. When I reached the ground floor the evening was drawing on apace, and I felt that if I wanted to explore the whole house before dusk I must hurry my proceedings. “I will take the kitchens next,” I decided, and so made my way to a wilderness of domestic offices lying to the rear of the great hall. Stone passages, great kitchens, an immense servants’-hall, larders, pantries, coal-cellars, beer-cellars, laundries, brewhouses, housekeeper’s room—it was not of any use lingering over these details. The mystery that trouble Mr. van Buuren could scarcely lodge amongst cinders and empty bottles, and there did not seem much else left in this part of the building. I would go through the living-rooms, and then decide as to the apartments I should occupy myself. The evening shadows were drawing on apace, so I hurried back into the hall, feeling it was a weird position to be there all alone with those ghostly hollow figures of men in armour, and the statues on which the moon’s beams must fall so coldly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

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I would just look through the lower apartments and then kindle a fire. I had seen quantities of wood in a cupboard close at hand, and felt that beside a blazing hearth, and after a good cup of tea, I should not feel the solitary sensation which was oppressing me. The sun had sunk below the horizon by this time, for to reach the Winchester I had been obliged to travel by cross lines of railway, and wait besides for such trains as condescended to carry third-class passengers; but here was still light enough in the hall to see all object distinctly. With my own eyes I saw that one of the doors I had shut with my own hands was standing wide! I turned to the door on the other side of the hall. It was as I had left it—closed. This, then, was the room—this with the open door. For a second I stood appalled; I think I was fairly frighted. That did not last long, however. There lay the work I had desired to undertake, the foe I had offered to fight; so without mor ado I shut the door and tried it. “Now I will walk to the end of the hall and see what happens,” I considered. I did so. I walked to the foot of the grand staircase and back again, and looked. The door stood wide open. I went into the room, after just a spasm of irresolution—went in and pulled up the blinds: a good-sized room, twenty by twenty (I knew because I paced it afterwards), lighted by two long windows. The floor, of polished oak, was partially covered with a Turkey carpet. There were two recesses beside the fireplace, one fitted up as a bookcase, the other with an old and elaborately carved cabinet. I was astonished also to find a bedstead in an apartment so little retired from the traffic of the house; and there were also some chairs of an obsolete make, covered, so far as I could make out, with faded tapestry. Beside the bedstead, which stood against the wall opposite to the door I had as yet met with the interior of the house. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

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It was a dreary, gloomy room: the dark panelled walls; the black, shining floor; the windows high from the ground; the antique furniture; the dull four-poster bedstead, with dingy velvet curtains; the gaping chimney; the silk counterpane that looked like a pall. “Any crime might have been committed in which a room,” I thought pettishly; and then I looked at the door critically. Someone had been at the trouble of fitting bolts upon it, for when I passed out I not merely shut the door securely, but bolted it as well. “I will go and get some wood, and then look at it again,” I soliloquized. When I came back it stood wide open once more. “Stay open, then!” I cried in a fury. “I will not trouble myself any more with you tonight!” Almost as I spoke the words, there came a ring at the front door. Echoing through the desolate house, the peal in the then states of my nerves startled me beyond expression. It was only the man who had agreed to bring over my traps. I bade him lay them down in the hall, and while looking out some small silver, asked where the nearest-post-office was to be found. Not far from the Winchester Estate’s Park gates, he said; if I wanted any letter sent, he would drop it in the box for me; the mail-cart picked up the bag at ten o’clock. I had nothing ready to post then, and told him so. Perhaps the money I gave was more than he expected, or perhaps the dreariness of my position impressed him as it had impressed me, for he paused with his hand on the lock, and asked: “Are you going to stop here all alone, master?” “All alone, I answered, with such cheerfulness as was possible under the circumstances.” “That is the room, you know,” he said, nodding in the direction of the open door, and dropping his voice to a whisper. “Yes, I know,” I replied. “What, you have been trying to shut it already, have you? Well, you are a game one!” And with this complimentary if not very respectful comment he hastened out of the house. Evidently he had no intention of proffering his services towards the solution of the mystery. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

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I cast one glance at the door—it stood wide open. Through the windows I had left bare to the night, moonlight was beginning to stream cold and silvery. “Look here, Justin,” I said, all of a sudden; “life is not child’s play, as uncle truly remarks. That door is just the trouble you have now to face, and you must face it! However, for that door you would never have been here. I hope you are not going to turn coward the very first night. Courage!—that is your enemy—conquer it.” “I will try,” my other self answered back. “I can but try. I can but faith.” The moon’s beams were streaming down upon the mansion; I could see every statue, every square of marble, every piece of armour. For all the World it seemed to me like something in a dream; but I was tired and sleepy, and decided I would not trouble about fire or food, or the open door, till the next morning: I would go to sleep. However, I felt like an army of Devil’s was horribly broke in upon this place which is the center, and after a sort, the first-born of our Californian settlements. If a ghost was responsible for the hanging of nineteen people in this mansion, what was responsible for the burning of nine hundred people? What more likely time would the “Door to Nowhere” open up and let our arch-enemy, the Devil, choose a time for his attack? I spent the forenoon considering that door. I looked at it from within and from without. It was on the second floor and opened up to a two story drop outside of the house. What would possess someone to build a door like this, unless they had some knowledge of it being a portal? I eyed it critically. I tried whether there was any reason why it should fly open, and I found that so long as I remained on the threshold it remained closed; if I walked even so far away as the opposite side of the mansion, it swung wide. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

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Do what I would, it burst from latch and bolt. I could not lock it because there was no key. I was baffled. Then I stumbled upon a note which read: “One that shall use, practise, or exercise any invocation or conjuration of any evil or wicked spirit, or consult, convenient with, entertain or employ, feed or reward any evil or wicked spirit, to or for any intent or purpose; or take up any dead man, woman, or child, out of his, her, or their grave, or any other place, where the dead body resteth; or the skin, bone, or other part of any dead person, to be employed or used in any manner of witchcraft, sorcery, charm or enchantment; or shall use, practise, or exercise any witchcraft, enchantment, charm, or sorcery, whereby any person shall be killed, destroyed, wasted, consumed, pined, or lamed in his or her body, or any part thereof: such offenders duly and lawfully convicted and attained, shall suffer death.” Then it dawned of me. Perhaps the mansion has been attraction people who are into the occult and they are the nearly 920 people who have been burned alive or hanged. And that is why the house cannot find renters, it consumes them all. Perhaps this is something like the Atonement of Christ. How God gave His one and only Son to pay the wages of sin man had created, this mansion is consuming souls of those who practise the occult to atone for the death of those killed by the Winchester rifle. The afflicted state of our poor neighbours that are now suffering by molestations from the invisible World, we apprehended so deplorable that we think their condition calls for the utmost help of all persons in their several capacities. We cannot but with all thankfulness acknowledge the success which the merciful God has given unto the sedulous and assiduous endeavours of our honorable rulers to detect the abominable witchcrafts which have been committed in the country, humbly praying that the discovery of these mysterious and mischievous wickedness may be perfected. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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We judge that in the prosecution of these, and all such witchcrafts, there is need of a very critical and exquisite caution, leas by too much credulity for things received only upon the Devil’s authority there be a door opened for a long train of miserable consequences, and Satan get an advantage over us, for we should not be ignorant of his devices. After all, it was this mansion people could not live in—his door that would not keep shut; and it seemed to me these were facts he might dislike being forced upon the attention of the public. What had I seen? What did I think of the matter? Very honestly I did not know what to say. The door certainly would not remain shut, and there seemed no human agency to account for its persistent opening; but then, on the other hand, ghost generally did no tamper with fire arms, and my rifle, though not loaded, had been tampered with—I was sure of that. Mr. van Buuren later disclosed to me his theory that open door: “This is the room my uncle was murdered in, they say the door will never remain shut till the murderer is discovered.” “Murdered!” I did not like the word at all; it made me feel chill and uncomfortable. “Yes—he was murdered sitting in his chair, and the assassin has never been discovered. At first many persons inclined to the belief that I killed him; indeed, may are of that opinion still. “But you did not, sir—there is not a word of truth in that story, is there?” He laid his hand on my shoulder as he said: “No, my lad; not a word. I loved the old man tenderly. Even when he disinherited me for the sake of his young wife, I was worry, but not angry; and when he sent for me and assured me he had resolved to repair a wrong, I tried to induce him to leave the lady a handsome sum in addition to her jointure. “If you do not, people may think she has not been the source of happiness you expected,” I added. “Thank you, Reuban,” he said. “You are a goof fella; we will talk further about this tomorrow.” And then he bade me goodnight. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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“Before morning broke—it was in the about one hundred years ago—the household was arounds by a fearful scream. It was his death-cry. He had been stabbed from behind in the neck. He was seated in his chair writing—writing a letter in Latin. Part of it said, ‘Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus, omnis incursion adversarii, omne phanatasma, omnis leigo, in nominee Domini nostri Jesu Christi eradicare, et effugare ab hoc plasmate Dei.’ The rest of the letter was torn. His solicitor came forward and said he had signed a will leaving all his personalty to me—he was very rich—unconditionally, only three days previously.” Mr. van Buuren went away, and I stayed in the house. I never left it all day. I did not go into the garden, or the stable-yard, or the shrubbery, or anywhere; I devoted myself solely and exclusively to that door. If I shut it once, I shut it a hundred times, and always with the same result. Do what I would, it swung wide. Never, however, when I was looking at it. So long as I could endure to remain, it stayed shut—the instant I turned back, it stood open. Though feeling convinced that no human agency did or could keep the door open, I was certain that some living person had means of access to the house which I could not discover. This was made apparent in trifles which might well have escaped unnoticed had several or even two people occupied the mansion. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sound like the rattling of chains, distant at first, but approaching nearer by degrees: immediately afterward a spectre appeared in the form of an old man, of extremely emaciated and squalid appearance, with a long beard and dischevelled hair, rattling the chains on his feet and hands. The distressed occupants meanwhile passed their wakeful nights under the most dreadful terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their rest, ruined their health, and brought on distempers, their terrors grew upon them, and death ensued. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

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Even in the daytime, though the spirit did not appear, yet the impression remained so strong upon their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and kept them in perpetual alarm. Consequently the mansion was at length deserted, as being deemed absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost of the Winchester rifle. That night, I prepared to retire. However, I was open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and spirits. The first part of the night passed in entire silence, as usual; at length a clanking of iron and rattling of chains was heard: however, I neither lifted up my eyes, nor got out of bed, but in order to keep calm, I pretended the sound was something else. The noise increased and advanced nearer, until it seemed at the door, and at last in my chamber. I looked up, saw, and recognized the ghost exactly as it has been described to me: it stood before me, beckoning with a finger, like a person calls another. I immediately arouse, and, candle in hand, followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along as if encumbered with its chains, and, turning into the area of the house where the “Door to Nowhere, was and suddenly vanished. What an idiot I have been! If I wanted to solve the mystery of the open door, or course I must keep watch in the room itself. The door would not stay wide unless there was a reason for it. When I walked into the room, it was deadly cold, and the scene was horrible. The door was wide open. A party of ghosts were assembled with, and were feasting on the flesh of corpses. I was astonished by this hideous banquet. As soon as I could safely escape, I stole back into my bed. I was rather crossed at being disturbed. The next day word on—the long, dreary day; evening approached—the night shadows closed over the Winchester mansion. The moon would not rise for a couple hours more. Everything was still as death. The house had never before seemed to me so silent and so deserted. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

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I took a candle, and went up to my accustomed room, moving about for a time as though preparing for bed; then I extinguished the candle, softly open the door, turned the key, and put it in my pocket, slipped softly downstairs, across the hall, through the open dor. Then I knew I had been afraid, for I felt a thrill of terror as in the dark I stepped over the threshold. I paused and listened—there was not a sound—the night was still and sultry, as though a storm were brewing. Not a leaf seemed moving. Noiselessly I made my way to the other side of the room. There was an old-fashioned easy-chair between the bookshelves and the bed; I sat down in it, shrouded by the heavy curtains. The hours passed—where ever hours so long? The moon rose, came and looked in at the windows, and then sailed away to the west; but not sound, no, not even the cry of a bird. I seemed to myself a mere collection of nerves. Every part of my body appeared twitching. It was agony to remain still; the desire to move became a form of torture. The locked door opened—so suddenly, so silently, that I barely had time to draw back behind the curtain, before I saw a woman in the room. A slight, lithe woman, not a lady, clad in all black—not a bit of white about her. What on Earth could she want? Then she fell on me with her nails and teeth, and tore at my throat, she was as strong as twenty devils. I felt something like a red-hot iron enter my neck. She opened a vein and sucked by blood, and I could but rush from the room before I fell senseless on the marble pavement of the hall. When the post man came that morning, finding no one stirring, he looked through one of the long windows that flanked the door; then he ran to the farmyard and called for help. “There is something wrong inside,” he cried. “That young gentleman is lying on the floor in a blood of blood.” To this day, the “Door to Nowhere” is still a mystery. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Winchester Mystery House

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24 Hours till opening night of All Hallows’ Eve and our caretakers are working non stop to put the finishing touches on the show! Be here for the opening weekend! Tickets are still available. A 160-room mansion built to appease the spirits who died at the hands of the Winchester Rifle 👻

All Hallows’ Eve:
🎟️ Link in bio. 🗝 winchestermysteryhouse.com

When there are No Adults Left at Home, the Nuclear Family Has No Nucleus!

Machines are of little value unless humans can operate them. A pocket calculator that is difficult to handle might just as well be a paperweight. An automobile design that blocks large areas of the driver’s vision could be deadly. To adapt machines for human use, the engineering psychologist (human factors engineer) must make them compatible with our sensory and motor capacities. For example, displays must be easy to perceive, controls must be east to use, and the tendency to make errors must be minimized. (A display is any dial, screen, light, or other device used to provide information about a machine’s activity to a human user. A control is any knob, handle, button, lever, or other device used to alter the activity of a machine.) Many of the machines we rely on each day were designed, in part, by human factors engineers. Some familiar examples include push-button telephones, “user-friendly” computers, home appliances, cameras, PDAs, airplane controls, and traffic signals. Psychologist Donald Norman refers to successful human factor engineering as natural design. Effective design makes use of perceptual signals that people understand naturally, without needing to learn them. An example is the row of vertical buttons in elevators. The buttons mimic the layout of the floors. This is simple, natural, and clear. Effective design also provides feedback (information about the effect of making a response). The audible click designed into many computer keyboards is a good example. As Dr. Norman points out the cause of many accidents is not just “human error.” The real culprit is poor design. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

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One should also distinguish carefully between the public economy, and government, and the supreme authority called sovereignty. This distinction consists in the one having the right of legislation and, in certain cases, in placing an obligation on the very body of the nation, while the other has only executive power and can place an obligation only upon private individuals. The body politic, taken individually, can be considered to be like a body that is organized, living and similar to that of a human. The sovereign power represents the head; the laws and customs are the brain, source of the nerves and seat of the understanding, the will and the senses, of which the judges and magistrates are the organs; the commerce, industry and agriculture as the mouth and stomach which prepare the common subsistence; the public finances are the blood that is discharged by a wise economy, performing the functions of the heart, in order to distribute nourishment and life throughout he body; the citizens are the body and members that makes the machine move, live and work, and that cannot be harmed in any part without a painful impression immediately being transmitted to the brain, if the being is in a state of good health. The life of both is the self common to the whole, the reciprocal sensibility and the internal coordination of all the pars. What if this communication were to cease, if the formal unity were to disappear, and if contiguous parts were to be related to one another solely by their juxtaposition? The man is dead and the state is dissolved. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

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

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

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

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Thus the most corrupt of humans always pay some sort of homage to the public faith. Thus even bandits, who are the enemies of virtue in the large society, worship something like virtue in their lairs. Whatever I want and think with regard to solace, to comfort, I do not expect to find it here in this life, but in the next. Even if I could have every Earthly solace and enjoy all Earthly delight, one thing is certain: they would not last for long. Whence, O Soul, do not expect to find full solace, perfect refreshment, until and unless it is in God, whom we have come to know as Consoler of the Poor and Protector of the Low. Wait a while, my Soul. Expect the Divine Promise, yes, and then you will have more than you can handle in Heaven. Drool over these things on Earth, and you will let loose—that is to say, you will lose—the Eternals and Celestials. Use Temporals that are around you, yes, but desire Eternals that are yet to come. Temporals offer no True Satisfaction. That is because your creation is not totally suited to enjoyment of that kind. Even if you had the whole World in your pocket, you would not feel particularly happy or especially blessed. However, in God, who created everything, your True Beatitude and Felicity will surely be found. That is not how the Stupids, sotted and sodden with the things of this World, approach and appraise it. However, that is exactly how the Spiritually-minded and Clean-hearted, whose chatsworth is already in the clouds, as Paul and Timothy described it to the Philippians (3.20), interpret it in the interval between now and then; that is to say, between this life and the next. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

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The One True Solace—that is what Truth has detected within. The Devout brings one’s friends Jesus with one wherever one goes, chatting one up along the way. “Keep up with me, Lord Jesus! I mean to keep a mean pace.” Let this by my consolation, to freely wish to do without every human solace. And if, as a result of my wish, consolation is nowhere to be found, I will gladly settle for Your good favour and approval. In this regard I could quote the Psalmist (103.9). “You will not be hounding and harassing me for long, O Lord! You will not be shouting and scaring me out of my wits for ever!” If we really want to restore the nuclear family to its former dominance, there are things we could do. Here are a few: Freeze all technology in its present stage to maintain a factory-based, mass-produced society. Begin by using the computer only when necessary. The computer is a greater threat to family than the abortion laws and homosexual rights movements and pornography in the World, for the nuclear family needs the mass-production system to retain its dominance, and the computer is moving us beyond mass production. Subsidize manufacture and block the rise of the service sector in the economy. White-collar, professional, and technical workers are less traditional, less family-oriented, more intellectually and psychologically mobile than blue-collar workers. Divorce rates have risen along with the rise in service occupations. “Solve” the energy crisis by applying nuclear and other highly centralized energy processes. The nuclear family fits better in a centralized than a decentralized society, and energy systems heavily affect the degree of social and political centralization. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

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

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Cut the standard of living of the entire society to pre-1990 levels, since affluence makes it possible for single people, divorced people, working women, and other unattached individuals to “make it” economically on their own. The nuclear family needs a touch of poverty (not too much, not too little) to sustain it. Finally, re-massify our rapidly de-massifying society, by resisting all changes—in politics, the arts, education, business, or other fields—that lead toward diversity, freedom of movement and ideas, or individuality. The nuclear family remains dominant only in a mass society. In short, if we insist on defining family as nuclear, this is what a pro-family policy would have to be. If we truly wish to restore the Second Wave family, we had beer be prepared to restore Second Wave civilization as a whole—to freeze not only technology but history itself. For what we are witnessing is not the death of the family as such, but the final fracture of the Second Wave family system in which all families were supposed to emulate the idealized nuclear model, and the emergence in its place of a diversity of family forms. Just as we are de-massifying our media and our production, we are de-massifying the family system in the transition to a Third Wave civilization. However, the problem with the past is that many of us do not see the truth. Many people were unhappy in nuclear families. Women wanted to work, children wanted to grow up and work and gain independence, and everyone wanted to become affluent so they would not have to live with lack and limitations. So, although the nuclear family seemed happy, perhaps it was not. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

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The earliest planned suburbs, which have come to be known as romantic, or garden suburbs, emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thee suburbs provided not just housing but planned communities in which homes were placed in a created landscape that was designed to embellish nature by the picturesque placement of greenery, trees, ponds, and parks. An informal, naturalistic environment was created, which was to improve upon nature. The romantic suburb came out of the same impulses that led to Frederick Law Olmsted’s design for the naturalistic Central Park in New York and to naturalistic cemeteries designed with hills, trees, and curving roadways, such as Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia USA. Implicit in the emphasis on nature was an American version of the neo-Platonic concept of nature being a source of contact with the divine and the World being a garden that needs to be improved. Olmstead’s Central Park thus can be seen as a practical application of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s belief in the necessity to “unite rural and urban in order to promote spiritual and social advancement. Foremost among the planned romantic suburbs was Llewellyn Park, started in 1853. Constructed in New Jersey a mile from the North Orange railroad station, its location permitted property owners to commute 15 miles to Manhattan, New York USA. The goal of the developer, Llewellyn Haskell, and his architect, Alexander Jackson Davis, was to build a private community of villas in a park-like setting. All this was to be situated in a scenic location in the foothills of the Orange Mountains. Llewellyn Park, planned to provide “country homes for city people,” clearly was influenced by the image of the manor house situated in an English rural park. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

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According to an 1857 advertisement, the community was located on, “a tract of land, containing about 300 Acres, [that] has been divided in Villa Sites, of, from 5 to 10 Acres Each. It was selected with special reference to the wants of citizens doing business in the city, and yet wanting accessible, retired, and healthful homes in the country, by the proprietor, who adopted this method to secure a select and good neighbourhood. Within the community, as if it were the Garden of Eden, nature was to be conveniently domesticated. Thus, all commercial enterprises were banned, even food stores. The site was designed with 7 miles of curvilinear roads that followed the terrain. This was a major break with the straight-right-angle streets that then were nearly universally used. Curvilinear roads today are almost de rigueur for upper-middle-class subdivisions, but their usage traces back to Llewellyn Park. The community was also completely architecturally landscaped. In the center of Llewellyn Park, a naturalistic 50-acre “ramble” was placed. In the community, the natural effect was in no respects left to the chance work of nature. Llewellyn spent the then-huge sum of $100,000 (inflation adjusted for 2021 $3,137,965.52 USD) to have pond dug and azaleas, dogwood, holly, rhododendrons, and other natural looking plants placed to highlight and augment the natural look. However, these advantages of Llewellyn Park were not to be available to uninvited visitors. A stone gatehouse notified outsiders that this was a strictly private Garden of Eden. While Llewellyn Park was remarkable, it was well beyond the reach of any but the wealthy. As a refuge for the well-to-doo, it could never have widespread application. Its very strength was its uniqueness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

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More influence on the future of American landscape and domestic architecture would be upper-middle-class planned suburbs. The Civil War created new fortunes and the Victorian era that followed many have been constrained in areas of behaviour, but it was flamboyant and ostentatious in housing design. Urban housing for those who could afford it often was built without restraint on the premise that more was always better. Surprisingly, this idolization of excess did not invariably affect suburban design. Some now-classic suburbs were built with restraint and tastes during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of these was Riverside, southwest of the Chicago city line. Riverside’s principle architect was Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park. The project was begin in 1868 and was to combine the best of city and country and exhibit “the best application of the arts of civilization to which humankind has yet obtained. What this meant in practice was that the suburb was to be a bridge between the city and the country—an unban community in a rural setting. One of the early residents of Riverside was the architect William Le Baron Jenney, the reputed inventor of the iron-girdered building frame, which made the building of skyscrapers possible. Mr. Jenney designed several homes in Riverside in addition to his own. The site of Riverside, unlike that of Llewellyn Park, was without strong scenic attraction; it comprised 1,600 acres of Illinois prairie. However, the location did have two advantages. The first was that it was along the Des Plaines River, which could be worked into a landscape design. The second, and more crucial, was that Riverside was the first stop west from Chicago’s center on the Burlington Route railroad. Thus, the site was a good location for an affluent commuter suburb. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

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Since the community lacked its own business activity, its residents would, by necessity, be those who could afford the expenditure of money and time for commuting. This meant a homogeneous community of at least an upper-middle-class level (excluding servants). Diversity was not one of the developer’s goals. (Contemporary planned communities, such as Irving, California; Pocket/Greenhaven Sacramento, California; Laguna, California and others, continue this tradition of socioeconomic exclusivity.) Mr. Olmstead was given a free hand in designing Riverside, and today the community still reflects the genius of his decisions. Of the 1,600 acres comprising the site, some 700 were reserved for parks and open spaces. The most picturesque of the parks wound along the banks of the river, but there were also parks and commons areas situated throughout the project. As in Llewellyn Park, the street pattern was curvilinear rather than right-angle grids, but unlike Llewellyn, property lines between homes were clearly drawn. All houses had to be at least 30 feet from the street, and trees were to be planted along the road to shield the homes from traffic and observation. However, Riverside was clearly designed to be a suburb, not a rustic retreat. It was to marry the best of the city and the countryside. Riverside was not designed to be a utopian experiment, but a profit-making land development project. However, before it could be finished, it encountered severe financial difficulties. Turning a profit ran into three obstacles. The first was that the development was located 9 miles from the center of Chicago, and in the early 1870s, that was well beyond the city. It necessitated railroad commuting anytime anyone needed or wanted to go to Chicago. The second and third problems were factors beyond the control of the Riverside Improvement Company. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

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The Great Chicago Fire occurred in 1871, which resulted in neither attention nor investment funds being available for a number of years for peripherally located projects. Then, the financial Panic of 1873 and the depression that followed completed the bankruptcy of the developer. Riverside only slowly recovered, but a century and a half later it remains a well-designed and pleasant suburb—a tribute to Mr. Olmsted’s farsighted vision in combining city and country. Riverside still puts to shame the surrounding more modern, but far less imaginatively designed suburbs. The arrival of the Third Wave, of course, does not mean the end of the nuclear family any more than the coming of the Second Wave mean the end of the extended family. It means, rather, that the nuclear family can no longer serve as the ideal model for society. The little-appreciated fact is that, at least in the United States of American where the Third Wave is most advanced, most people already live outside the classical nuclear family form. If we define the nuclear family as a working husband, a housewife, and two children, and ask how many Americans actually still live in this type of family, the answer is astonishing: while 42 percent of all American household were nuclear families in 1970, today they represent just 22 percent, a decline of nearly half. Seventy-eight percent of the population do not fit this ideal Second Wave model any long. Even if we broaden our definition to include families in which both spouses work or in which there are fewer or more than two children, we find the vast majority—as many as two third to three quarters of the population—living outside the nuclear situation. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that nuclear households (however we choose to define them) are still shrinking in numbers as other family forms rapidly multiply. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

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To begin with, we are witnessing a population explosion of “solos”—people who live alone, outside a family altogether. Since 1950, the proportion of adults living alone in the United States of America has tripled to about 15 percent. Approximately 36 million men and women now live alone, representing a record high of 28 percent of all United States households. Nor are all these people losers or loners, forced into the solo life. Many deliberately choose it, at least for a time. Says a legislative aide to a Seattle councilwoman, “I would consider marriage if the right person came along, but I would not give up my career for it.” In the meantime she lives along. She is part of a large class of young adults who are leaving home earlier but marrying later, thus creating what census specialist Arthur Norton says is a “transitional living phase” that is “becoming an acceptable part of one’s life cycle.” Looking at an older slice of the population, we find a large number of formerly married people, often “between marriages,” living on their own and, in many cases decidedly liking it. The growth of such groups has created a flourishing “singles” culture and a much publicized proliferation of bars, ski lodges, travel tours, and other services or products designed for the independent individual. Simultaneously, the real estate industry has come up with “singles only” condominia, and has begun to respond to a need for smaller apartments and suburban homes with fewer bedrooms, but more flexible space. However, face it, it this new age, everything is about luxury, so everything is expensive and so many people are college educated with jobs that pay well. Almost a fifth of all home buyers in the United States today are single, and nothing is more attractive to some than an individual with a home large enough for a family. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

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We are also experiencing a headlong growth in the number of people living together without bothering about legal formalities (some call this “living in sin”). However, with things being so fast paced and expensive and changing so often, people of the Third Wave like to sample what married life is like before committing. This group of cohabitators has doubled in the past decade, according to United States authorities. The practice has become so common that the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has overthrown tradition and changes its rules to permit such couples to occupy public housing. The courts, meanwhile, from Connecticut to California, are wrestling with the legal and property complications that spring up when such couples “divorce.” Etiquette columnists write about which names to use in addressing partners, and “couple counseling” had sprouted as a new professional service alongside marriage counseling. At the University of Waterloo, Michael Ross has repeatedly found that people will distort their past in ego-supportive ways. In one experiment he exposed some people to a message about the desirability of frequent toothbrushing. Shortly afterward, in a supposedly different experiment, these students recalled brushing their teeth mor often during the preceding two weeks than did an equivalent sample of people who had not heard the message. Noting the similarity of such findings to happenings in George Orwell’s 1984—where it was “necessary to remember that events happened in the desired manner”—Anthony Greenwald surmised that human nature is governed by a totalitarian ego that continually revises the past in order to preserve a positive self-evaluation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

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Because of our mind’s powers of reconstruction, we can be sure, argues Mike Yaconelli, that “Every moving illustration, every gripping story, every testimony, did not happen (at least, it did not happen like the storyteller said it happened).” Every anecdotal recollection told by a Christian superstar is a reconstruction. It is a point worth remembering in times when we are feeling disenchanted by the comparative ordinances of our everyday lives. If an undesirable action cannot be forgotten, misremembered, or undone, then often it is justified. Among psychology’s best-established principles is that our past actions influence our current attitudes. Every time we act, we amplify the idea lying behind what we have done, especially when we feel some responsibility for having committed the act. In experiments, people who oppress someone—by delivering electric shocks, for example—tend later to disparage their victim. Researchers who study human thinking have often observed that people overestimate the accuracy of their beliefs and judgments. As Baruch Fischhoff and others have demonstrated, we often do not expect something to happen until it does, at which point we overestimate our ability to have predicted it—the “I knew it all along” phenomenon. People also fail to recognize their vulnerability to error. Many people employ the Pollyanna Principle, which means that people more readily perceive, remember, and communicate pleasant than unpleasant information. Positive thinking predominates over negative thinking. There is also a consistent tendency toward unrealistic optimism about future events. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

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Most students perceive themselves as far more likely than their classmates to experience positive events such as getting a good job, drawing a good salary, and owning a home, and as far less likely to experience negative events such as getting a divorce, having cancer, and being fired. However, that may be a good thing because they will try harder to work through problems and persevere until their dreams become a reality. It is better than those who do not have dreams and just take what they can get and expect things from others. In various experiments, most people have been observed to act in rather inconsiderate, complaint, or even cruel ways. When other people are told about these conditions and asked to predict how they would act, nearly all will insist that their own behaviour would be virtuous. Similarly, when the researcher Steven Sherman called Bloomington, Indiana, residents and asked them to volunteer three hours to an American Cancer Society drive, only 4 percent agreed to do so. Meanwhile, a comparable group of other residents were being called and asked to predict how they would react were they ever to receive such a request. Almost half claimed they would help. There are additional streams of evidence, but the point is made: the most common error in people’s self-images is not unrealistically low self-esteem, but rather self-serving pride; not an inferiority complex, but a superiority complex. However, those who approach God with their wish to be healed and their faith in His power to bring it to realization, have still not approached Him aright. They must also be willing to have their own contribution to the disease’s existence pointed out. They must also agree to rectify wrong habits of living and thinking. If they come only for pleasant words and a successful cure, if they are not prepared to deny themselves or to discipline themselves, God may not be able to heal them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

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The first and least danger which besets the possessor of occult healing power is he praise or fame it brings one from other people, who are led by it to think one greater than one really is. One feels flattered by the praise and elated by the fame, with the result that one’s ship runs aground on the reef of vanity. One further progress gets stopped. Few can withstand the temptation as Jesus once withstood it. One day an ancient Bengali man prostrated before Jesus Christ and expressed gratitude for His having cured him of chronic paralysis. The man had tried other remedies without success and finally restored to the repeated utterance of Jesus Christ’s name, and was completely cured. When replying, the great liberator of America showed the selfless humility of His character by replying: “It was not I but my Father who cured you.” Deep down within the heart there is a stillness which is healing, a trust in the Universal Laws which is unwavering, and a strength which is rocklike. However, because it is so deep, we need both patience and perseverance when digging for it. To pray for a bodily cure and nothing more is a limited and limiting procedure. Pray also to be enlightened as to why this sickness fell upon you. Ask also what you can do to remove its cause. And above all, ask for the Water of Life, as Jesus bade the woman at the well to ask. If one can apply this teaching now, if one can put one’s faith in and make one’s contact with the higher power from this very moment, if one can forget oneself for an instant, one can receive healing instantaneously. When Jesus told the sick person, “Thy faith has brought thee recovery,” He did not mean, as many now think, faith that the cure will be effected. No—He meant faith in the healing power—God. The first kind keeps the mind still centered in ego, whereas the second kind of faith lifts the mind away from ego. Another translation: “Your faith has made you well.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

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Because the Overself is not outside a human but is one’s own innermost nature, full faith in its presence and power is essential to experience its healing and help. When the pursuit or practice of healing powers diverts one from the higher work of knowing who it is that is seeking or using them, when they no longer serve but make one their servant, one must pause and beware. When one realizes how much is given by the higher power through one, and how little is really done by oneself, the healer or teacher may well become careless of one’s fame, efface one’s own personality, and keep it humbly in the background. Whoever else achieves the same good results will arouse one’s generous joy, not one’s egoistic jealousy. Cattle browse peacefully, trees and plants are verdant, birds fly from their nests, and lift up their wings in your praise. All animals frisk upon their feet, all winged things fly and alight once more—they come to life with your rising. Yachats sail upstream and jet skis downstream, at your coming every highway is open. Before your face the fish leap up from the river, your rays reach the green ocean. You it is who place the male pearl in woman, who create the pearl in man; You quicken the sun in his mother’s belly, soothing him so that he shall not cry. Even in the womb, you are his nurse. You give breath to all your creation, opening the mouth of the newborn and giving him nourishment. For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, please O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, please O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, please save us, we beseech Thee. God contemplates and knows Himself in the moment that ego is withdrawn into Him. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD

Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s

Now Selling!

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

The Paris Experience–Malls are a Ubiquitous Element of Modern American Life!

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Long-term memory stores an immense amount of information in a lifetime. How it is possible to quickly find specific memories? Well, each person’s “memory index” is highly organized. Do you mean that information is arranged alphabetically, as in a dictionary? Not a change! If I asked you to name a black and white animal that lives on ice, is related to a chicken, and cannot fly, you do not have to go from aardvark to zebra to find the answer. You will probably one think of black and white birds living in the Antarctic. Which of these cannot fly? Voila, the answer is penguin. Now, if I ask you who is your Saviour, do you know the answer? One who saves. Jesus Christ, through His Atonement, offered redemption and salvation to all humankind. “Saviour” is the name and title of Jesus Christ. “I am the Lord; and beside me there is no Saviour,” reports Doctrine and Covenant 76.1. My dearest son, may this be your continual prayer. Lord, if You are pleased with what I pray for, please let it happen. Lord, if You are pleased to find some honour for Yourself in my prayer, please let it happen in Your Holy Name. Lord, if You are pleased to find some spiritual advantage in my prayer, please let it happen to Your honour. However, Lord, if what I pray for is harmful to me and not at all helpful to the salvation of my soul, please, please save me from my prayers. As I have already taught you, My friend and son, not every desire comes from the Holy Spirit, not even if it seems in general to be right and good for Humankind. Yes, it is difficult to judge for true whether the spirit that moves one to pray for this or that is a good one or a bad one or whether it just comes from one’s own self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

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Alas, toward the end of their lives, many comes to see that all along they have been deceived by the Bad Spirit. Which is so sad! At the beginning of their spiritual lives, they seemed to have been motivated only by the Spirit of God. Therefore, whatever desirable comes into the mind must be longed for firs, then prayed for, but always with fear of God and humility of heart. Especially must you be resigned to whatever the outcome. That is to say, the prayer must be totally committed to Me and prayed this way. O Lord, You know what is good and bad, what is better and worse, what is best and worst—may my prayer be as You wish it to be. Please Give what You want, and how much You want, and when You want. Do with me as You know how. Pick what is more pleasing, more honouring. Please put me where You want, and deal freely with me in all things. My reins are in Your hand—put me through my paces, as the amatory Ovid might have put it. Mark You, I am Your full-time servant now, prepared for al exigencies. My life is not for me any longer; it is for You to do with it as You want, as the Psalmist has sung (119.125). Would not that be nice, O Lord, if I could ever really pull it off! Here is a prayer for making God happy. Please grant me Your grace, Kindest Jesus, that it may come with me, work with me, preserve with me until the end of the End. Please grant that I may desire and wish this one thing, what fits You more closely and pleases You more dearly. May Your will be mine always—may my will follow Yours in perfect harmony. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

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Two things I crave. Please enable me to will and to nill the way You do. Please limit me from willing and nilling the way You do not. Please grant that I may die in all things that have to do with the World. Please grant that I may grow accustomed to being despised and unknown in the age in which I live, as You did in Yours. Above all other desirables, please grant that I not take our friendship for granted; rather, as the Great Augustine suggested in his Confessions (1.1), to rest in I and quiet my heart in You. You are my heart’s True Peace. Without You all this is too hard, too harsh, if I may echo Augustine again (6.16). In this peace, which is Yourself, the One Great and Eternal Good, if I may bejumble the Psalmist’s verse (4.8), I sleep and take my rest. Amen. In life, there is a fundamental and unavoidable contradiction: on the one hand people have something new to say, something that has not thought or said before. However, in speaking of “newness” one places it only into a descriptive category which does not do justice to what is essential in the creative thought. The creative thought is always critical thought because it does away with certain illusion and gets closer to the awareness of reality. It enlarges the realm of humans’ awareness and strengthens the power of one’s reason. The critical and hence creative though always has a liberating function by its negation of illusory thought. One the other hand the thinker has to express one’s new thought in the spirit of one’s time. Different societies have different kinds of “common sense,” different categories of thinking, different systems of logic; every society has its own “social filter” through which only certain ideas and concepts and experiences can pass; those that need not necessarily remain unconscious can become conscious when by fundamental changes in the social structure the “social filer” changes accordingly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

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Thoughts that cannot pass through the social filter of a certain society at a certain time are “unthinkable,” and of course also “unspeakable.” For the average person the thought patterns of one’s society appear to be simply logical. The thought patterns of fundamentally different societies are looked upon each by the others as illogical or plainly nonsensical. However, not only “logic” is determined by the “social filter,” and in the last analysis by the practice of life of any given society, but also certain thought contents. Take for instance the conventional notion that exploitation among human beings is a “normal,” natural and unavoidable phenomenon. For a member of the Neolithic society in which each human lived from one’s work, individually or in groups, such a proposition would have been unthinkable. Considering their whole social organization, exploitation of human beings by others would have been a “crazy” idea, because there was not yet a surplus to make it sensible to employ others. (If one person had forced another to work for one it would not have meant that amount of goods would have increased, only that the “employer” would have been forced to idleness and boredom.) Another example: the many societies that knew no private property in the modern sense but only “functional property,” like a tool, which “belonged” to a single person inasmuch as he used it but was readily shared with others when needed. What is unthinkable is also unspeakable and the language has no word for it. Many languages do not have a word for to have but must express the concept of possession in other words, for instance by the construction it is to me, which expressed the concept of functional but not of private property (“private” in e sense of the Latin privare, to deprive—that is to say, property the use of which everybody else is deprived of except the owner). #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

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Many languages started out without a word for to have but in the development and, one may assume, with the emergence of private property, they acquired a word for it (see Benveniste, 1966). Another example: in the tenth or eleventh century in Europe the concept of the World without reference to God was unthinkable and hence a word like atheism could no exist. Language itself is influenced by the social repression of certain experiences which do not fit into the structure of a given society; languages differ inasmuch as different experiences are repressed, and hence inexpressible. (I leave aside here quite a different problem, that of the possibility of expressing subtle and complex feelings experiences through language, which can be attempted only in poetry.) It follows that the creative thinker must think in the terms of the logic, the thought patterns, the expressible concepts of one’s culture. That means one has not yet the proper words to express the creative, the new, the liberating idea. One is forced to solve an insoluble problem: to express the new thoughts have been generally accepted.) The consequence is that the new though as one formulated it is a blend of what is truly new and the conventional thought which it transcends. The thinker, however, is not conscious of this contradiction. The conventional thoughts of one’s culture are unquestionably true for one and hence one oneself is little away of the difference between what is creative in one’s thought and what is purely conventional. Only in the historical process, when social changes are reflected in the changes of thought patterns, does it become evident what in the thought of a creative thinker was truly new to what extent one’s system is only a reflection of conventional thinking. It is up to one’s followers living in a different frame of ideas to interpret the “master” by distinguishing one’s “original” thoughts from one’s conventional thoughts, and by analyzing the contradictions between the new and the old, rather than by trying to harmonize the immanent contradictions of one’s system by all kinds of subterfuge. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

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The process of revision of an individual, which distinguishes the essential and new from the contingent, time-conditioned elements, is in itself also the product of a certain historical period that influences the interpretation. In this creative interpretation, again creative and valid elements are mixed with time-bound and accidental ones. The revision is not simply true as the original was not simply false. Some elements of the revision remain true, namely where it liberates the theory from the shackles of a previous conventional thinking. In the process of the critical elimination of previous theories we find an approximation to truth but we do not find the truth, and we cannot find the truth as long as social contradictions and force require ideological falsification, as humans’ reason is damaged by irrational passions which have their root in the disharmony and irrationality of social life. Only in a society in which there is no exploitation, hence which does not need irrational assumptions in order to cover up or justify exploitation, in a society in which the basic contradictions have been solved and in which social reality can be recognized without distortion, can humans make full use of one’s reason, and at that point one can recognize reality in an undistorted form—that is to say, the truth. To put it differently, the truth is historically conditioned: it is dependent on the degree of rationality and the absence of contradictions within the society. Humans can grasp truth only when one can regulate one’s social life in a human, dignified and rational way, without fear and hence without greed. To use a politico-religious expression, only in the Messianic Time can the truth be recognized insofar as it is recognizable. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

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There is a general agreement that contemporary urban decentralization has developed beyond the traditional urban-suburban dichotomy. The old idea of the urban core surrounded by a ring of suburbs no longer neatly fits what we see when we travel to, or through, America’s metropolitan areas. Today’s multinucleated outer cities tear up the old definitions as to what is urban and what is suburban. The suburbs have become as to what is urban and what is suburban. The suburbs have become urban. Places that once were bedroom suburbs now attract commuters. The suburbs’ share of the employment pie had been dramatically increasing. Jobs as well as people have suburbanized. Moveover, most of those still working in the city do not live there. Seven in ten people who work in the District do not live there. The most common commuter trip today is not from suburb to city but within the suburbs. Commuting from a suburban home to a suburban job is more common than commuting from suburb to city. There is no longer a metropolitan area composed of a central city hub and its outlying residential areas spears along the spokes. The metropolitan area no longer has once core hub; it has become multinucleated. Among other things this means that road and rapid transit systems designed to move workers from the suburbs to the central city are becoming outdated. Population and job growth are occurring in areas where transportation facilities often are least developed. Although it stretches the language a bit, it is reasonable to hypothesize that the periphery is the new urban core. Places such as Irving, California; South Sacramento, California; Oceanside, California; Rancho Cordova, California; and Scottsdale, Arizona are no longer bedroom suburbs, but real cities in heir own right. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

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Such increasing economically and politically powerful outer cities can be found sandwiched between somewhat declining central cities and rural areas, both of which are losing their political and economic clout. Economically, the suburban economy is increasingly a service-based economy. Moreover, the marketplace patterns that dominate local economics are largely determined at the national or international rather then the local levels. Outer cities or suburban municipalities sometimes are difficult to define since they do not look like how we think cities should look; not do they behave as we expect cities to behave. They may not even appear on some maps. They are “cities” not subject to their own municipal legislation, codes, or regulations. Shopping malls, business parks, single-family subdivisions, and garden apartment complexes all are placed in a strategic order to make a harmonious community that is visually appealing. Not being legal municipalities, these outer cities also have another unusual characteristic for a city—they have no distinct elected government. Within these edge cities there thus seems to be no real civic order. They appear to be public places, but in reality, they are private. What really makes these new suburban communities break with the past is not only that hey are newer, shiner, or have more glass, and marble, but what really makes them different is that they are private domains rather than incorporated legally defined areas. The old city downtowns, whether planned or unplanned, were public spaces. City downtowns were open to all. The rules governing public dress and behaviour were the laws and ordinances passed by those public officials elected by citizens of the jurisdiction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

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The outer-city malls, for all their open courtyards, fountains, benches, and play spaces, are fundamentally different. They are private property. They are not governed by elected representatives, but by executives appointed by corporate boards. They are governed not by public laws, but by corporate regulations. Fundamental questions, such as who can be in a mall and what they can or cannot do while they are there, are determined by corporate policy rather than ordinances passed by elected representatives. Thus, a mall can exclude those soliciting funds for cancer research, those proselytizing for a religious belief, those handing out literature for a political candidate, or those not meeting a required dress code (exempli gratia, those not wearing shoes or street people with foul odors or wearing dirty clothes). What applies to the malls of the outer cities or edge cities is even more the case for the business parks filled with state-of-the-art offices and facilities. The new outer cities are cities administered by decree. They are not controlled by citizens, not even nominally. Such may be safe, but they are not democratic. In many ways, the edge cities’ privatization of public spaces and activities represents a shift back to the medieval and Renaissance concept of a city as a collection of essentially privately managed places controlled by an oligarchy. The malls are, in effect, separate city-state controlled and administered by the decree of private boards. What is perhaps even more remarkable is that this shift from public to private control has occurred almost completely without public notice. It has certainly occurred without public discussion or debate. The once-public city has been privatized. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

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If you had to pick one symbol that would represent contemporary suburban life, that symbol would very likely be the shopping mall. Malls have become a ubiquitous element of modern American life. You may love the malls or believe they are sterile and without a soul, but it is impossible to discuss suburbia today without noting the importance of the malls not only for retail purchasing but also for social life. As the old downtowns decline, the malls have become the primary site where people greet other citizens. Shopping centers dispense everything from lottery tickets, sports demonstrations, public relations programs to clothes, cars, housing, and even provide an off-campus site for college courses. Some shopping malls offer community activities such as bingo games once a week, periodic health services such as blood tests, and occasional entertainment such as Christmas, Easter and Thanksgiving shows. The malls, with their shops selling mass-produced standardized goods, may also be the site for “Arts and Crafts” shows that sell expensive handmade one-of-a-kind heirloom-quality items. Malls also serve a social function, particularly for adolescents and the elderly. Being a teenage “mall socialite” is part of growing up in many parts of the country. Young ladies like to go to the mall with their parents’ credit cards, pretending like they are Paris Hilton, charge up a bunch of items, and walk out of the store smiling and carrying bags full of clothes and jewelry and perfumes and body washes and lotions. It is called “The Paris Experience.” The malls have also become the place where seniors go to ward off loneliness, a phenomenon that has produced a new variation (and spelling) of an old term, “malingering.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

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However, enclosed malls with two to four anchor department stores, scores of specialty shops, fountains, food courts, and multiplex movie theaters have not always been synonymous with suburbia. Actually, they are a recent and relatively new innovation. The first modern shopping mall did not occur until Northgate, in 1950, on the edge of Seattle. It had an open pedestrian mall lined with shops and an anchor department store. Northgate, like malls to follow, was near a highway and had some 4,000 parking places. The first enclosed shopping mall was not opened until 1956—Southdale Center outside Minneapolis, designed by the architect Victor Gruen. Not until the early 1970s, did the Rouse Company introduce the idea of the now ubiquitous food courts. J.C. Nichols’s Country Club Plaza shopping centers, like his homes, was state of the art for the 1920s. It was the first mall designed specifically for the automobile, with off-street parking. Following the ideas of the British garden cities as earlier proposed by Ebenezer Howard, Country Club Plaza was to be the town center, not merely a collection of stores. Nichola set the pattern for the luxury malls of today by lavishingly landscaping Country Club Plaza and providing fountains, flowers, and walks with benches. The whole complex was done in elaborate Spanish-Moorish-Hollywood style using Spanish plaster and red tile roofs. The style was immensely popular during the 1920s. Nichols’s Country Club District tightly controlled what sort of businesses would be allowed into the plaza and where they would be placed. Most buildings were two-story, with the walking level occupied by shops and the second floor largely by the professional offices of dentist, doctors, and lawyers. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

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From the first, Country Club Plaza was an economic and social success. It not only made a great deal of money, it also became an alternate to the downtown as a location for cultural as well as business activities. As such it was a harbinger of contemporary suburban malls. Country Club Plaza was designed from the first to provide an emotional, cultural, and socializing center for the community. It was to become the suburban version of the village center. Planners saw the separation of pedestrian from automotive and truck traffic as providing far more than convenience and efficiency. Landscaped grassy areas, winding walkways, and play areas for small children were all to contribute to better civic life. Shopping centers were also to encourage civic pride through physical design. Planners saw them contributing to the development of a more orderly, harmonious, and artistic environment—an environment that was being at least implicitly contrasted to the chaos, disorder, and confusion many planners saw in the central city. Planned shopping centers dovetailed with planned recreational facilities and planned neighbourhoods. Similarly, the advantage of the mall having its own free parking was recognized as providing mall retailers a significant edge. At the end of World War II, there were only eight shopping centers in all of North America. As of 2020, there are approximately 120 shopping malls spread across the United States of America. Back in 1970, here were only 30,000 shopping malls in the United States of America. Malls as great as they are, tend to put small locally owned stores out of business. In fact 87 percent of malls are strip malls. Economically, as a result, the mass market malls also are putting heavy pressure on the generally more expensive regional malls that have the overhead of higher levels of service and concern for ambience. Further squeezing the big malls are off-price shopping centers, discount warehouses, and online shopping. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

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Where earlier strip malls had followed the population, the new enclosed malls became magnets attracting people, housing, and commercial activity. The malls became a catalyst leading the development of a new suburban area. The fact of a comfortable middle-class suburb naming itself after a shopping mall is one of the small acts that signify a sea of change in attitudes toward suburbia. The defining characteristic of an area was a combination of the homes, the neighbourhood, and the size and quality of the shopping mall. Some malls like Huston’s Galleria, has an Olympic-sized skating rink, two hotels and nightclubs. In addition to its glitz and shopping, the mall has become a regional tourist attraction. It was the belief of philosophers of urban planning such as Victor Gruen that shopping centers would lead to the enhancement of social and civic life. Shopping malls were to be suburban agoras. They were to serve as new climate-controlled downtowns offering a full range of social, cultural, and even artistic activities. As expressed by Mr. Gruen, “By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in protected pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void. The idea that the malls would bring vibrancy and vitality to suburban life is now widely accepted. Malls have promoted high culture, and even have provided a sense of community and a place for lively amusements. Not every downtown has the potential to attract tourist, or even residents. However, high class suburban shopping malls do just that. Meeting the need of less affluent or poor city residents is not the purpose for which they were created. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

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It is a basic tenet of any successful mall that it must exude an image of security and safety. For a mall to be successful, it must give those within a feeling of comfort, and that means providing safety and security. This is provided by physically excluding activities or people that might prove disruptive or disturbing. The city downtown may be famous for producing a sense of surprise and excitement, of not knowing what is around the next corner. This is not the goal of the mall. Shopping malls studiously avoid and ban the unpredictable. What the downtown offers is excitement, what the mall seeks is clean family friendly fun and predictability. Mall publicity and advertisements may speak of excitement, but it is an excitement that is totally managed and predictable. All activities are controlled and programmed. The malls, for all their open courtyards, fountains, benches, and play spaces, are private property. As previously noted, they are governed not by public bodies, but by private boards. Malls are ruled by regulations rather than laws. Unpredictability in any form is banned from malls. If it might offend some shoppers, it will not be found at a regional mall. Walking through a mall one will not encounter flashers, loud music, threatening crows, or even a Jehovah’s Witness passing out The Watchtower. Malls are very Wonder Bread places—no politicians, no checking immigration status (all money is welcomed), no political parties, no street people, no dirt, no clutter, no art that in any way might disturb of offend, no live or recorded music that is not preapproved, no decorations that is not preapproved, and no charitable solicitations or sidewalk merchants of any sort that have no been preapproved. Volunteers cannot simply collect for cancer, heart, disease, or any relief. Most malls even ban the Salvation Army from ringing its bells and collecting food and clothing for the poor at Christmas time. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

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All the restrictions are not so much out of any sense of mean-spiritedness, but because mall patrons have been taught to expect predictability and no hassles. State courts generally have supported the malls’ contention that they can control, limit, or exclude activities within their confines. The major exception is California; there the state constitution grants extensive public-access rights within malls. The 1972 Untied States of America Supreme Court ruling of Lloyd Corp. v. Tanner held that banning political leaflets did no interfere with First Amendment free-speech rights. Currently, the issue is in flux; but most mall managements tend to go with the most conservative interpretations. Generally, managements are not opposed to charity, community, or even political activities so long as these activities do not cost them shoppers or profits. What the malls seek to portray is an image of a secure environment into which the problems of the outside World do not intrude. Malls attempt to radiate an aura of safety. As private entities, malls can ban those activities and persons that are thought to be disruptive, distracting, or dangerous. Mall consciously promote the idea that they are safe places. To that end strangers are excluded. There are no street people or bag ladies in the malls because those loitering or improperly dressed are excluded. Similarly, teenagers or even senior citizens who are unduly loud or abusive may find themselves directed to the exits and told not to return. One can even be asked to leave for not being suitably dressed. This can be done because the mall is private rather than public space. No one has a right to walk unhindered back and forth through a mall simply because he or she feels like walking. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

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Enforcing these regulations are the mall police. In terms of uniform, badges, weapons, and demeanor, the mall police look and act like a police force. However, they rarely are they police officers. Rather, they are private security guards done up to look like police officers. Some malls have as many as fifty-two security officers who wear policelike uniforms and have authority to make arrests. This blurring of the distinction between police and security personnel is deliberate. Security guards in most states lack formal police powers. This means that in most states guards cannot stop and search purse snatchers or shoplifters. Often they cannot go into stores, but they merely patrol common areas. Their only arrest power in most states is that of a citizen’s arrest. Basically, the security guards notify the real police and try to hold the suspect until they arrive. So if a security guard is bothering you, it is best to leave before the situation escalates to a problem and you find yourself being detained and arrested. The major function of the security guards is public relations. They try to look like the police officer on the beat, help find lost children, and try to deter crime by looking official. However, you never know when they may actually be an off duty or undercover police officer or FBI agent. Therefore, it is best to be polite and respectful, you never know who you are dealing with, and do not want to be caught in the system over a misunderstanding. Seven out of ten mal crimes are shoplifting, while another 24 percent are auto break-ins and thefts. To increase safety, malls are designed to avoid dark corners, and elevators are invariably glass-sided (and even if you do not see them, almost all elevators have cameras). In terms of personal safety, by far the most dangerous area in a shopping mall is he parking area of deck. For this reason, parking areas are well lit. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

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Large malls have highly visible official-looking security vehicles with revolving flashing lights on the roof cruising the parking areas. This is to deter crime, but even more to reassure customers that the “police” are on patrol. While car theft is the most common problem to affect a shopper, robberies, assaults, rapes, and even murders and suicides do occur. Managements tend to do everything possible to keep problems with crimes of violence away from the public notice. Unless major public violence occurs, there is likely to be no comment on the evening news or in the local paper. Malls and their stores are major advertisers. When a series of robberies and rapes occurred at the major mall nearest someone’s expensive home, no notice of the crimes ever appeared in the local newspaper or on local news shows. Nor were warning posters placed on mall entrance doors. The image of safety and freedom from aggressive strangers is though essential for a successful mall. Crime is bad for business and is something that happens in central cities. To acknowledge publicly that malls have violent crimes would do damage to the illusion that both mall operators and patrons seek to maintain. Malls, however, have begun to indirectly deal with the subject by publicizing that they have security forces. Some regional megamalls have become major tourist attractions. South Coast Plaza, in Orange County, California, south Los Angeles, is the country’s third-largest tourist attraction. That achievement is put into perspective when it is noted that the first and second attractions are Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

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The West Edmonton Mall is a goliath of shopping mall. It is the size of 115 football fields, and have parking for 20,000 cars. This mall has 800 shops, 110 restaurants, 19 movie theaters, and a Caesar’s Palace Bingo Parlor. It also has the World’s largest indoor amusement park with 24 rides and two 13-story-high roller coasters. It boasts a 5-acre lagoon with the World’s largest wave machine, and 22 water slides. If you would prefer other amusements, there is an 18-hole miniature golf course, an NHL-size ice-skating rink, and the opportunity to cruise the bottom of the 2-foot-deep lake in one of 25-person submarines. Reston, Virginia, is one of American’s first planned new towns. Reston Town Center is not the typical suburban shopping center. Rather, it is trying to be a real downtown, with a grid street system, two 11-story office towers, streets with wide brick sidewalks, a 514-room hotel, some forty or so retail stores, eight restaurants, and a movie theater. Also, Reston’s downtown is not only new and clean, it is remarkable affluent. Reston was not designed for poor inner-city residents. Unlike real cities, there are no big stores or discount stores offering cheap goods. There are no panhandlers or street people. Reston is one of Virginia’s more affluent communities, and the Town Center reflects the interests and incomes of its residents; it has a clearly upscale image. Reston Town Center, in this respect, may have the combination of characteristics most Americans seeks in a city center. It has more real life and vitality than a mall, but more security, safety, and parking than the old downtowns. We do not yet know whether Reston Town Center will become a prototype for the new century or an interesting, but one-of-a-kind experiment. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

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Ancient sun, eternally young, giver of life and source of energy, in coal and oil, in plant and wind and tide, in spiritual light and human embrace, you kindle the Heavens, you shine within us (for we are suns with hearts afire—we light the World as you light the sky and find clouds within whose shadows are dark); we give thanks for your rays, and clouds your rays draw up, for the sky route your travel faithfully as we traverse this globe, for our journeys of Earth which draw us together, for our journeys od dream which sustain us when apar. Ancient of Days, you rule the nations, our birth and death: our journeys you have wrought. Loam we become for your fertile spirit. Your cosmic light penetrates our depths; in your majesty we are bound to one another. We gather this morning as did people of old with joys and woes, varied gifts and diverse needs. We offer you these in thanksgiving for life and share them through your generations on Earth. Save now this nation, once firm as a rampart and clear as the sun; she is exiled, a wandering one. Likened of yore to a palm-tree, today she is borne to the stake, today she is slain for Thy sake. Scattered amid her oppressors, she flyeth to Thee from their stroke, she bends to the love of Thy yoke. One to proclaim Thou art One, crushed by the far and the near, she awaits, she is learning Thy fear. Giving the cheek to the smiters, Thy burden of sorrow she bears, tossed in the storm of the years. Moses delivered her once;–the sanctified sheep of his fold were Jacob’s assembly of old, marked by Thy name:–O save! They are falling, they grasp thee, they crave. They are calling, beseeching Thee, “Save!” One loses one’s ego in the calm serenity of the Overself, yet at the same time it is, mysteriously, still with one. With this displacement of ego, one enters into the very presence of divinity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Cresleigh Homes

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The outside looks cozy, but the interior will exceed all your expectations! The thoughtful layout of this single story home allows maximum space with ultimate convenience. We know you’ll love our Residence 3 model as much as we do!

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Residence Three is the largest of the single story homes offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. At 2,827 square feet you’ll be hard pressed to a contemporary floorplan that offers this much space. There are four bedrooms, two and one half bathrooms, and a three car garage. Utilize the den as your own private study or convert into an optional fifth bedroom if needed. The Dining Room and Kitchen are well situated to make entertaining a breeze.

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The location of the Owner’s Suite makes it feel like a separate wing from the rest of the home allowing for maximum privacy and retreat. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-three/

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When the Dead are Raised, it is a Miracle of Reversal!

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When you are driving, your behaviour at intersections is controlled by the red or green light. In a similar fashion, many of the stimuli we encounter each day act like stop or go signals that guide behaviour. To state the idea more formally, stimuli that consistently precede a rewarded response tend to influence when and where the response will occur. This effect is called stimulus control. A discriminative stimulus that most drivers are familiar with is a police car on the freeway. This stimulus is a clear signal that a specific set of reinforcement contingencies applies. As you have probably observed, the presence of a police car brings about rapid reductions in driving speed, lane changes, tailgating, and in Los Angeles, California, gun battles. Another familiar example is the beep on telephone answering machines. The beep is a signal that speaking will pay off (your message will be recorded). Most of us are well conditioned to “wait for the beep” before talking. One cannot express the principle more adequately than through the sentence of the Gospels “And the truth shall make you free,” reports John 8.32. Indeed, the idea that the truth saves and heals is an old insight which the great Masters of Living have proclaimed—nobody perhaps with such radicalism and clarity as Jesus Christ. If one does not want to remain in a state of craving which necessarily causing suffer, illusion (ignorance) is, together with hate and greed, one of the evils of which humans must rid themselves. The greedy person cannot be a free person and cannot be a happy human. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

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Greed humans are slaves of things which rule them. The process of waking up from illusions is the condition of freedom and of liberation from suffering which greed necessarily produces. Disillusion (Ent-tauschung) is a condition for leading a life which comes closet to the fully development of humans, to the model of human nature. The human being who is carried away by irrational drives (“passive affects”) is necessarily one who has inadequate idea about oneself and the World—that is to say, one who lives with illusions. Those who are guided by reason are the ones who have ceased to be seduced by their senses and follow the two “active affects,” reason and courage. Those who have faith in Jesus Christ are those whom truth is the condition for salvation. The works of Christ was not primarily that of showing a picture of how the good society would look, but was relentless gospel of showing humans how to build a good society. One must love God in order to change circumstances which require sin. Truth refers not only to what one believes to be the truth, but the way to the truth les in insight into one’s own mental structure and thereby in “de-repression.” We are all so blinded and upset by self-love that everyone imagines one has a just right to exalt oneself, and to undervalue all others in comparison to self. If God has bestowed on us any excellent gift, we imagine it to be our own achievement, and we swell and even burst with pride. It is widely believed that most of us suffer the “I am not OK—you are OK” problem of low self-esteem, the problem that the comedian Groucho Marx had in mind when he declared, “I would not want to belong to any club that would accept me as a member.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

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The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers asserted this low self-image problem when objecting to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s idea that original sin is self-love, pretension, and pride. No, said Dr. Rogers: people’s problems arise because “they despise themselves, regard themselves as worthless and unlovable.” A half century after the Niebuhr-Rogers exchange, the self-image issues remains alive. Ironically, many Christian preachers and writers are echoing the teachings of humanistic psychology by telling us that the fundamental human problem is low self-esteem. Meanwhile, research psychologists have been amassing new findings concerning the pervasiveness of pride. Indeed, it is the older theologians such as Niebuhr, not the humanistic psychologists and their Christian popularizers, who seem best to have anticipated a phenomenon uncovered by recent research. As the writer William Saroyan put it, “Every human is a good human in a bad World—as one oneself knows.” Researchers debate the sources of this self-serving bias phenomenon but agree that various streams of data merge to confirm its pervasiveness. Consider: Accepting more responsibility for success than failure, for good deeds than bad. Time and again, experimenters have found that people readily accept credit when told they have succeeded (attributing the success to their ability and effort), yet they attribute failure to external factors such as bad luck or the problem’s inherent “impossibility.” These self-serving attributions have been observed not only in laboratory situations, but also with athletes (after victory or defeat), students (after high or low exam grades), drivers (after accidents), and married people (among whom conflict often derives from perceiving oneself as contributing more and benefitting less than is fair). The self-concept research Anthony Greenwald summarizes: “People experience life through a self-centered filter.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

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Favourable biased self-ratings: Can we all be better than average? In virtually any area that is both subjective and socially desirable, most people see themselves as beer than average. Most businesspeople see themselves as more ethical than the average business person. Most community residents see themselves as less prejudiced than their neigbhours. Most people see themselves as more intelligent and as healthier than most other person. When the College Board asked high school seniors to compare themselves with others their own ages, 60 percent reported themselves better than average in athletic ability, and only 6 percent below average. In leadership ability, 70 percent rated themselves above average, 2 percent below average. In ability to get along with others, zero percent of the 829,000 students who responded rated themselves below average, while 60 percent saw themselves in the top 10 percent and 25 percent put themselves in the top 1 percent. If Elizabeth Barrett Browning were still writing she would perhaps rhapsodize, “How do I love me? Let me count the ways.” The Barnum Effect. “There is a sucker born every minute,” said the showman P.T. Barnum. A number of experiments have given us a psychological version of the maxim. The procedure is simple: people are shown statements such as those in horoscope books (“You have a strong need for other people to like you and for them to admire you…While you have some personality weaknesses, you are generally able to compensate for them….At times you are extroverted, affable, sociable, while at other times you are introverted, wary, and reserved”). If told that the description is designed specifically for them on the basis of their psychological tests or astrological data, people usually say the description is remarkably accurate, especially when it is favourable. Negative assessments are judged less valid than flattering ones. “The Arch-Flatterer,” noted Plutarch, “is a man’s self.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

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A turn at last, my Long-winded if Lofty-minded Friend. I go lost somewhere in Your rhetoric. Now tell me if I have You right. Roll Your thunderous judgments over me, O Lord! Shiver my timbers with fear and trembling! Scarify my soul! I stand astounded, as the words of Job come tumbling into my mind. “The Heavens are no clean in Your sight” (15.15). Bu “if You found depravity among the Angels” (4.18) and You did not spare them, what will become of me? “They have fallen like the stars from the Heavens,” wrote John in Revelations (6.13). I have read all those passages in Second Peer (2.4), Job (4.18), Revelation (6.13), Psalm (78.25), and Luke (15.16). In them the Angels, some of the best and brightest who lauded You to the highest, fell to the lowest. And so it is, then that some of the Notables of our land who used to receive the Bread of Angels have fallen afoul of You, O Lord. Now they delight in the swill of he swell-fed, if forbidden, pig. If that is what happened to them, what do I, a simple man of dust, a collector of garbage, have to look forward to? No sanctity, O Lord, if You withdraw Your hand. No wisdom, O Lord, if you stop governing the Universe. No fortitude, O Lord, if You stop conserving. No chastity, O Lord, if You do not protect it. No self-control, O Lord, if Your sacred vigilance is absent; the Psalmist knew that the Lord guarded the city, not the sentinels (127.1). “Leave us behind, O Lord, and we will be swamped and die”—the Disciples shouted that to You when the storm rose, or so Matthew report (8.25). Stay with us, and we rise to he surface and live. We are up and down, but we are confirmed through You. Hot, we grow cool. Cold, we grow warm. Yes, You are our fuel, our fervour, forever. Here are a few somethings about nothings; that is to say, a few thoughts of my own. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

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Toad I must be, O Lord, and toad I must remain. Why? Because I toed the mark and failed. Of course, I could have toadied up to You, Lord God of all amphibians, but even in this I failed. Think it nothing when something good is associated with my name! O Lord, I cannot sound the depths of Your profoundest judgments, as the Psalmist called them (36.6). Lured by the deep, I dove. All I could see was nothing, and worse than nothing, and worse than nothing. My God, You are the Inconsiderable Consideration, the Impassable Archipelago! In traversing Your vastness, I leave not a trace or wake! What can I do to prevent my pride from being discovered? Where can I discover the confidence I thought I had? Your judgments have sopped up all this idiotic gloriation of mine, leaving not a stain behind. What does all the Flesh in the World amount to in Your sigh, O Lord? That is the sort of question the Great Paul asked the First Corinthians (1.29). Not a great deal, I should think. As the Prophet Isaiah asked it, “Can the pot glory more than the potter who made it?” (29.16). I think not, but what precisely does this mean? I think I can give some examples of the pot and the potter from my own monastic experience. A Devout wants to be one’s own chief praiser and appraiser, but why, when one’s heart has already been verified by God? A devout is toasted by the whole World for all of one’s wonderful qualities, but why, when one has already been credentialed by Truth herself? A Devout is moved to tears by a choir of voices chanting one’s praises, but why, when one is already confirmed one’s hope in God? These silly Devouts who speak such nonsense, take a close look at them; they are nothing to write home about. Their verbiage fails even as their voices fade. However, “the truth of the Lord,” as the Psalmist has sung, “remains in tune for ever and ever” (117.2). #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

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Whether one thinks that one has strayed by chance into this starry World or believes that God’s grace has fallen upon one, one feels its beauty and peace. The encounter with Overself may be hushed and gentle or thrilling and dramatic. However, it will certainly be absorbing. In that beautiful mood, one is wafted upward because one’s mind turns away from the Earth, is interests and desires which ordinarily hold one down. The glimpse is unquestionably a sort of spell put upon the mind encircling the self, benign and healing and protective. It imparts a feeling of well-being. How inadequate are constructed sentences to tell anyone the total wonder of a glimpse, of the I’s department and the Overself’s arrival! The peace descends, the cares are gone, the fears are shed, the avid desires enfeebled. The experience of liberation yields a peace which lifts one into a detachment from the World never felt before, untouched by sights, persons, incidents, which hitherto produced repulsions, irritations, or rage. Joy glows quietly on the face of one who is experiencing a glimpse. The experience will flood one’s whole day with sun. One will experience a profound sense of release, a joyous exaltation of feeling, and a lofty soaring of thought. It would not be wrong o use a word from gustatory experience and describe these moments as delicious. It is almost entirely an intense and internal experience. The glimpse carries either a quiet intellectual rapture with it or a seething emotional one. In such a benignant mood, it is easy to forgive one’s enemies their vile conduct or to look at faithless friend n a kindlier light. It lifts the egoistic out of their egoism for a while, the fearful out of their fears. When we turn inwards, we turn in the direction of complete composure. It is the first streak of sunrise on one’s inner life. The discovery of the soul’s truth carries with it an excitement which only those who spend their lives seeking it know. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

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The glimpses have various qualities—religious, aesthetic, perceptive, and so on. In such moments of intimacy with the Overself, as we let go of our pettiness, we feel enlarged. It gives one, for short while, an equanimity which one does not have at other times. One’s heart is filled with the sense of this Presence and, for the few or many minutes this lasts, one is a changed person. Some persons get their first glimpse by surprise, quite unexpectedly, and from then begins their quest. However, others get it during the onward course of their quest, while searching or waiting for it, and hopefully expectant of it. When the mind moves inward from everyday consciousness to mystical being, the benedictory change is both ennobling and sublime. During these short glimpses no anxiety and uncertainty can affect one. It is but a pause in the constant oscillation of life, a stilling of the ego’s pursuits. However, first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; the struggle of distress and fierce impatience ends; mute music soothes my breast—unuttered harmony that I could never dream till Earth was lost to me. Then dawns the invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals; my outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels—its wings are almost free, its home, its harbour found; measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound! In these hushed moments a happiness steals over one, a glory is felt all around him. This is one’s real being. One sought for it, prayed to it, and communed with it in the past as if it were something other than, and apart from, oneself. Now one knows that it was oneself, that there is no need for one to do any of these things. All one needs is to recognize what one is and to realize it at every moment. The miracles of Healing, to which we turn next, are now in a peculiar position. Humans are ready to admit that many of them happened, but are inclined to deny that they were miraculous. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

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The symptoms of very many diseases can be aped by hysteria, and hysteria can often be cured by “suggestion.” It could, no doubt, be argued that such suggestion is a spiritual power, and therefore (if you like) a supernatural power, and that all instances of “faith healing” are therefore miracles. However, in our terminology they would be miraculous only in the same sense in which every instance of human reason is miraculous: and what we are now looking for is miracles other than that. My own view is that it would be unreasonable to ask a person who has not yet embraced Christianity in its entirety to allow that all the healings mentioned in the Gospels were miracles—that is, that they go beyond the possibilities of human “suggestion.” It is for the doctors to decide as regards each particular case—supposing that the narratives are sufficiently detailed to allow even probable diagnosis. We have here a good example to what was said in the past. So far from belief in miracles depending upon ignorance of natural law, we are here finding for ourselves that ignorance of law makes miracle unascertainable. Without deciding in detail which of the healings must (apart from acceptance of the Christian faith) be regarded as miraculous, we can however indicate the kind of miracle involved. Its character can easily be obscured by the somewhat magical view which many people still take of ordinary and medical healing. There is a sense in which no doctor ever heals. The doctors themselves would be the first to admit this. The magic is not in the medicine but in the patient’s body—in the vis medicatrix naturae, the recuperative or self-corrective energy of Nature. What the treatment does is to simulate Natural functions or to remove what hinders them. We speak for convenience of the doctor, or the dressing, healing a cut. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

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However, in another sense every cut heals itself: no cut can be healed in a corpse. That same mysterious force which we call gravitational when it steers the planets and biochemical when it heals a live body, is the efficient cause of all recoveries. And that energy proceeds from God in the first instance. All who are cured are cured by Him, not merely in the sense that His providence provides them with medical assistance and wholesome environments, but also in the sense that their very tissues are repaired by the far-descended energy which following from Him, energizes the whole system of Nature. However, one He did it visibly to the sick in Palestine, a Man meeting with men. What in its general operations we refer to laws of Nature or once referred to Apollo or Aesculapius thus reveals itself. The Power that always was behind all healings puts on a face and hands. Hence, of course, the apparent chanciness of the miracles. It is idle to complain that He heals those whom He happens to meet, not those whom He does not. To be a man means to be in one place and not in another. The World which would now know Him as present everywhere was saved by His becoming local. Christ’s single miracle of Destruction, the withering of the fig-tree, has proved troublesome to some people, but we think its significance is plain enough. The miracle is an acted parable, a symbol of God’s sentence on all that is “fruitless” and specially, no doubt, on the official Judaism of that age. That is its moral significance. As a miracle, it again does in focus, repeats small and close, what God does constantly and throughout Nature. We have seen in the past how God, twisting Satan’s weapon out of his hand, had become, since the Fall, the God even of human death. However, much more, and perhaps ever since the creation, He has been the God of the death of organisms. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

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In both cases, though in somewhat different ways, He is the God of death because He is the God of Life: the God of human death because through it increase of life now comes—the God of merely organic death because death is part of the very mode by which organic life spreads itself out in Time and yet remains new. A forest a thousand years deep is still collectively alive because some trees are dying and others are growing up. His human face, turned with negation in its eyes upon that one fig-tree, did once what His unincarnate action does to all trees. No tree died that year in Palestine, or any year anywhere, except because God did—or rather ceased to do—something to it. All the Miracles which we have considered so far are Miracles of the Old Creation. In all of them we see the Divine Man focusing for us what the God of Nature has already done on a larger scale. In our next class, the Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic, we find some that are of the Old Creation and some that are of the New. When Christ stills the storm, He does what God has done before. God made Nature such that here would be both storms and calms: in that way all storms (except those that are still going on at this moment) have been stilled by God. If you have once accepted the Grand Miracle, it is unphilosophical to reject the stilling of the storm. There is really no difficulty about adapting the weather conditions of the rest of the World to this one miraculous calm. I myself can still a storm in a room by shutting the window. Nature must make the best she can of it. And to do her justice she makes no trouble at all. The whole system, far from being thrown out gear (which is what some nervous people seem to think a miracle would do) digests the new situation as easily as an elephant digest a drop of water. She is, said before, an accomplished hostess. However, when Christs walks on the water, we have a miracle of the New Creation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

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God had not made the Old Nature, the World before the Incarnation, of such a kind that water would support a human body. This miracle is the foretaste of a Nature that is sill in the future. The New Creation is just breaking in. For a moment, it looks as if it were going to spread. For a moment, two men are living in that new World. St. Peter also walks on the water—a pace of two: then his trust fails him and he sinks. He is back in Old Nature. That momentary glimpse was a snowdrop of a miracle. The snowdrops show that we have turned the corner of the year. Summer is coming. However, it is a long way off and the snowdrops do not last long. The Miracles of Reversal all belong to the New Creation. When the dead are raised, it is a Miracle of Reversal. Old Nature knows nothing of this process: it involves playing backward a film that we have always seen played forwards. The one or two instances of it in the Gospels are early flowers—what we call spring flowers, because hey are prophetic although they really bloom while it is still winter. And the Miracles of Perfecting Glory, the Transfiguration, the Resurrection, and the Ascension, are even more emphatically of the New Creation. These are the true spring, or even summer, of the World’s new year. The Captain, the forerunner, is already in May or June, though His followers on Earth are still living in the forests and east winds of Old Nature—for “spring comes slowly up this way.” None of the Miracles of the New Creation can be considered apart from the Resurrection and Ascension: and that will require another essay. The healing of disease was well identified with Jesus’ work, with Aesculapian Greek sanctuaries, with Egyptian exorcism, with many a mystic throughout the Orient, and even with a number in the modern World, Eastern and Western. How, then, with such a religious background, can it be fair to deny divine inspiration to the Man who performs healing, while allowing such inspiration to the Man who only preaches? #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

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Vedantic thought usually regards the siddhis—occult powers—as obstacles to attaining truth. Among them the healing of the body’s sicknesses and the mind’s disorders is included. That some persons are usually in being born with the gift of healing the sick is a historic fact. Why reject the talent or power as being unworthy of a true sage or of those who seek to become such a one? In what way is this form of serving humanity unethical, unsafe, inconsistent with the highest? Remember that Jesus started His work by an act of healing a sick person. The results of their use of healing powers cannot ordinarily be predicted, much less guaranteed, but must be left to the Higher Power. Spiritual healing is drawing much attention but the subject is involved in much confusion. Even the healers themselves hold contradictory theories about it. Some use prayer to get their cures; others deny that prayer is of any avail. Some practice mediation alone; others combine meditation with the laying-on of hands. Some deny that there is anything more than the power of suggestion behind the healings; others find in them evidence of God’s presence. Are there any spiritual laws which will scientifically explain the healings? Is the Hindu wisdom always wise? There is the warning of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras against the occult powers that might be acquired by yoga: they are to be shunned because they obstruct further advance towards the high plane. Healing is one of these listed powers. Must we accept such an attitude and reject the gift of healing, if it comes? Is good health so great an evil that disease is to be accepted dutifully? On this point a Westerner might rebel. In ancient and orthodox Hinduism, the profession of healer was regarded unfavourably, for the strange reason that it brought the healer and the sick together! #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

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Sarah Pardee Winchester was known in France as a poetess. Quite late in life she became aware of certain radiations and found herself capable of healing sick people by using these radiations. Out of these experiences with people, she wrote a booklet entitled La Survie du Tuberculosis (Victory over Tuberculosis) in 1897, but it is no longer in print and has never been translated and this booklet is now one of two of the most rare and sought-after pieces of all Winchester literature. Devoted to healing work until she gave it up, saying that is exhausted her too much, she passed away in her sleep 5 September 1922. What she regarded as her major contribution to the healing art was the discovery from this experience of hers that tuberculosis has its seat “in the pithy tissues of the lungs” no matter where the infection is. She could not find a publisher for this book in France, but it was published here in Switzerland and will not, it is said, be reprinted now that she has passed. In fact, she was her own publisher. At the time of her retirement, she explained that vital energy would pass from her to the patient. It is known that some of her cures were spectacular, and even in most cases where she failed to save the life of the patient, she brought about passing without suffering. The confusion of thought concerning spiritual healing is tremendous. William Wirt Winchester asserts that the practice of falling into spiritual trance aggravated the tuberculosis which finally killed him. Yet this is the very method and practice used by some healers to heal their patients, because, they believed, it releases divine energies. What the healer does is to release, stimulate, or add energy to the sufferer’s own natural recuperative forces. The difference between healers are differences of techniques, personal fitness, and spiritual degree. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

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The power to heal the sick is a latent gift deliberately brought out by development or spontaneously released by illumination. Spiritual healing is a gift which is innate in certain individuals and very difficult to acquire by others. It may, however, exist latently, and could show itself only after a certain degree of spiritual development has been attained. Bernard of Clairvaux cured hundreds of the blind, deaf, and paralyzed during the twelfth century simply by making the sign of the cross over the affected body part. Olcott in Ceylon, eight centuries later cured dozens of cases of scorpion bite and even snake bite by making the sign of the pentagram over the part. Does this not show that the healing power may lay in the healer oneself, even more than in one’s method? There are many puzzling cases of healers, like Saint Paul in ancient times, Saint Catherine of Siena in medieval ties, and Father Matthew of Ireland in modern times, who cured the ills of many people but did not or could not cure their own. This is a paradox that is hard to resolve. All healers lose their power after a time. This is to lead them to a higher level. Doctors who can keep us well, long-lived, and capable of functioning properly are more needed than those who cure our diseases. If words have any meaning at all, Christ’s words have meant that personal sacrifice is the cost of spiritual growth. For eighteen hundred years, humans of every kind—scholars, mystics, priests, laymen, ascetics, and saints—agreed on that. Then arose a new group of cults—faith-healers—which not only gave a new meaning to those words but a directly opposite meaning. Success and prosperity, they tried to use spiritual forces solely for their own personal purposes and material benefits, instead of trying to surrender to those forces and submit to higher purposes. The denied—contrary to the experience of all religious history—that material loss and personal failure could ever be the working of such purposes. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

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Healing exists on all these different levels, which means its power comes from difference sources. However, it is believed that all healers should know their limits, their limitations, and it is feared that many of them do not simply because they are carried away by their enthusiasm. Secondly, I believe that all healers would not only be none the worse for some knowledge of anatomy and physiology and the commoner maladies, but they should even attempt to acquire some of this knowledge. Otherwise many errors, many false or exaggerated claims, are made by the healers. We are not questioning their honesty; we believe most of them are honest. However, we are questioning their lack of knowledge and fuller knowledge. On the other hand, we criticize the medical profession for failing to enter into dialogue with the healers; for if they adopted a humbler attitude towards the unorthodox healers, they would learn much to their own profit and to the improvement of their professional help. Before the healing process can come into operation, the patient must be brought into a receptive state; otherwise one will unconsciously obstruct them. Faith is the first requisite. By working a muscle group against resistance, one will build up willpower as well as muscle power. Holding the spine properly allows the flow currents of this Spirit Energy to circulate properly. The benefit of a specific exercise is to be measured by the warmth, or kundalini, it creates—not by the time it takes. Those who have seldom or never done bodily exercises may find it hard to start or, if started, to finish the complete daily period. If they gave up before sufficient time had passed to feel the benefits of the work, it would be a pity. Merely to lie down reduces the heartbeats by no less than ten each minute, thus saving this ever-working organ some of its heavy labour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

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The simple exercise of stretching helps to counter the congestions, compressions, and adhesions which obstruct the flow of the vital force through the spina column with its sixty-two branching nerves and thus to regain energy. This truth of the need of spine-loosening movement is instinctively known by every dog and car, every lion and tiger, for they apply it immediately after awakening from sleep. The back, the legs, and even paws are bent and stretched and even rolled by them in this natural exercise. To make the spinal column flexible and serviceable for these purposes, it must be both loosened and stretched. The day we die, the wind comes down to take away our footprints. The wind makes dust to cover up the marks we left while walking. For otherwise, the things would seem as if we were still living. Therefore the wind is he who comes to blow away our footprints. I will make my supplication in this, my house of prayer. On the Fast Day I revealed my transgression. Thereon I besought Thee to save me. Hearken to the voice of my cry; arise and save me. Remember and have compassion, my Redeemer. Comfort me with Thy solaces, O living God. O Thou good God, heed my prayer. Hasten the coming of my redeemer and destroy my evil desires so that Thou condemn me not again. Hasten, O God of my salvation, to save me for eternity. Forgive the stain of my wickedness and pass by mine iniquities, and turn, I pray Thee, to save me. O my Rock, my righteous Redeemer, accept my supplication; grant me my deliverance. Almighty, my Redeemer, save me now. Shine forth to save, yea, save, I beseech Thee. One enters into a sate which is certainly not a disappearance of the ego, but rather a kind of divine fellowship of the ego with its source. There is still a center of consciousness in one, still a voice which can utter the words or hold that thought “I am I.” The ego is lost in an ocean of being, but the ego’s link with God, the Overself, still remains. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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With three bedrooms, two bathrooms, den, great room, and dining room, there is enough room for all members of the family to have their corner of the house. The two car garage boasts ample storage and a covered patio comes included in the home. The den can easily be transformed into a fourth bedroom if needed. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/residence-1/

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Egos are Breaking Like Eggshells Against the Walls!

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We all possess the God-given gift of moral agency—the right to make choices and the obligation to account for those choices. “That every human may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto one, that every human may be accountable for one’s own sins in the day of judgement,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.78. However, there are times when punishment may be necessary to manage the behaviour of an animal, child, or even another adult. If you feel that you must punish, here are some tips to keep in mind. If you can discourage misbehaviour in other ways, do not use punishment. Make liberal use of positive reinforcement, especially praise, to encourage good behaviour. Also, try extinction first: See what happens if you ignore a problem behaviour; or shift attention to a desirable activity and then reinforce it with praise. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is correct, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favour of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service. Apply punishment during, or immediately after, misbehaviour. Of course, immediate punishment is not always possible. With older children and adults, you can bridge the delay by clearly stating what act you are punishing. If you cannot punish an animal immediately, wait for the next instance of misbehaviour. The root of the word discipline is shared by the word disciple, suggesting to the mind the fact that conformity to the example and teachings of Jesus Christ is the ideal discipline that, couple with His grace, forms a virtuous and morally excellent person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

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Use the minimum punishment necessary to suppress misbehaviour. Often, a verbal rebuke or a scolding is enough. Avoid harsh physical punishment. (Never slap a child’s face, for instance.) Taking away privileges or other positive reinforcers (response cost) is usually best for older children and adults. Frequent punishment may lose its effectiveness, and harsh or excessive punishment has serious negative side effects. Jesus’s own moral discipline was rooted in His discipleship to the Father. To His disciples He explained, “My meat is to do the will of Him that sent me, and to finish His work,” reports John 4.34. By this same pattern, our moral discipline is rooted in loyalty and devotion to the Father and the Son. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that provides the moral certainty upon which moral discipline rests. Be consistent. Be very clear about what you regard as misbehaviour. Punish every time the misbehaviour occurs. Do not punish for something one day and ignore it the next. If you are usually willing to give a child three chances, do not change the rule and explode without warning after a first offense. The societies in which many of us live have for more than a generation failed to foster moral discipline. They have taught that truth is relative and that everyone decides for oneself what is right. Concepts such as sin and wrong have been condemned as “value judgments.” As the Lord describes I, “Every human walketh in one’s own way, and after the image of one’s own good,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 1.16. As a consequence, self-discipline has eroded and societies are left to try to maintain order and civility by compulsion. #RandolphHarrs 2 of 19

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The lack of internal control by individuals breeds external control by governments. In the World, we have been experiencing an extended and devastating economic recession. It was brought on by multiple causes, but one of the major causes was widespread dishonest and unethical conduct, particularly in the U.S. housing and financial markets. Reactions have focused on enacting more and stronger regulation. Perhaps that may dissuade some from unprincipled conduct, but others will simply get more creative in the circumvention. Therefore, expect anger from a punished person. Briefly acknowledge this anger, but be careful not to reinforce it. If you wrongfully punish someone or if you punished too severely, be willing to admit your mistake. There could never be enough rules so finely crafted as to anticipate and cover every situation, and even if there were, enforcement would be impossibly expensive and burdensome. This approach leads to diminished freedom for everyone. Punish with kindness and respect. Allow the punished person to retain self-respect. For instance, if possible, do not punish a person in front of others. A strong, trusting relationship tends to minimize behaviour problems. Ideally, others should want to behave well to get your praise, not because they fear punishment. In the end, it is only an internal moral compass in each individual that can effectively deal with the root causes as well as the symptoms of societal decay. Be sure to reinforce positive behaviours. Remember, it is much more effective to strengthen and encourage desirable behaviours than it is to punish unwanted behaviours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

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Societies will struggle in vain to establish the common good until sin is denounced as sin and moral principle takes its place in the pantheon of civic virtues. Some torment themselves in order to acclimate the savages of various countries to their lifestyle, they have not yet been able to win over a single one of them, not even by means of Christianity; for our missionaries sometimes turn them into Christians, but never into civilized human beings. Nothing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have against appropriating our mores and living in our way. If these poor savages are as unhappy as is alleged, by what inconceivable depravity of judgment do they constantly refuse to civilize themselves in imitation of us, or learn to live happily among us. Some have frequently tried to cultivate savages; people have been eager to display our luxury, our wealth, and all our most useful and curious arts. None of this has ever excited in them anything but a stupid admiration, without the least stirring of covetousness. Economy or Oeconomy, (Moral and Political) is a word that means house and law and originally signified merely the wise and legitimate government of the household for the common good of the entire family. The meaning of this term was later extended to the government of the large family which is the state. To distinguish these two usages, in the latter case it is called general or political economy, and in the former case it is called domestic or private economy. Even if there were as much similarity between the state and the family as many authors would have us believe, it would not follow as a consequence that the rules of conduct proper to one of those societies would be suitable to the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

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The family and the government differ too much in size to be capable of being administered in the same fashion. Moreover, there will always be an extreme difference between domestic government, where the father can see everything for himself, and civil government, where the leader sees hardly anything unless through someone else’s eyes. For things to become equal in this regard, the talents, force and all the faculties of the father would have to increase in proportion to the size of his family, that of an ordinary man, what the size of his empire is to that of the private individual’s patrimony. However, how could the government of the state be similar to that of the family, whose basis is so different? Wit the father being physically stronger than his children, paternal power is reasonably said to be established by nature for as long as his help is needed by them. In the large family all of whose members are naturally equal, political authority, purely arbitrary as far as its establishment is conceived, can be founded only upon conventions, and the magistrate can command others only by virtue of the laws. The duties of the father are dictated to him by natural feelings, and in a manner that seldom allows him to be disobedient. Leaders have no such similar rule and are not really bound to the people except in regard to what they have promised to do for them and which the people can rightfully demand they carry out. Another even more important difference is that, since everything children have they receive from their father, it is obvious that all property rights belong to or emanate from him. It is quite the contrary in the case of the large family, where the general administration is established merely to assure private property, which is antecedent to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

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The chief purpose of the entire household’s labours is to maintain and increase the father’s patrimony, so that he can someday disperse it among his children without reducing them to poverty. On the other hand, the wealth of the public treasure is merely a means—often very much misunderstood—of maintaining private individuals in peace and prosperity. In a word, the small family is destined to die off and to be dissolved someday into many other families; on the other hand, the large family was made to last forever in the same condition, whereas not only is it enough that that large family maintains itself, it is easily proved that any increase does it more harm than good. For several reasons derived from the nature of things, in the family it is the father who should command. First, the authority of the father and mother ought not be equal; on the contrary, there must be a single government and when there are differences of opinion there must be a single dominant voice which decides. Second, however slight we regard the limitations that are peculiar to a wife, since they always occasion a period of inactivity for her, this is a sufficient reason for excluding her from this primacy. For when the balance is perfectly equal, a straw is enough to tip the scales. Moreover, a husband should oversee his wife’s conduct, for it is important to him to be assured that the children he is forced to recognize and nurture belong to no one but himself. The wife, who has nothing like this to fear, does not have the same right over her husband. Third, children ought to obey their father—initially out of necessity, later out of gratitude. After having their needs met by him for half their lives, they ought to devote the other half to seeing his needs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

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Fourth, as far as domestic servants are concerned, they too owe him their services in exchange for the livelihood he provides them, unless they cancel their arrangement once it ceases to be to their advantage. I say nothing here of slavery, since it is contrary to nature and no right can authorize it. None of this is to be found in political society. Far from the leader’s having a natural interest in the happiness of private individuals, it is not uncommon for him to seek his own happiness in the misery of others. If the magistracy is hereditary, often it is a child that is in command of humans. If it is elective, a thousand insolvencies make themselves to be felt in the elections. In either case one loses all the advantages of paternity. Were you to have but one leader, you are at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you. Were you to have several, you must endure both their tyranny and their disagreements. In short, abuses are inevitable and their consequences devastating in every society where the public interest and the laws have no natural force, and are constantly attacked by the personal interest and passions of the ruler and the members. Although the functions of the father of a family and those of a chief magistrate ought to tend toward the same goal, their paths are so different, their duty and rights so unlike, that one cannot confound them without forming false ideas about the fundamental laws of society and without falling into errors that are fatal to the human race. In effect, though nature’s voice is the best advice a good father could listen to in the fulfillment of his duty, for the magistrate it is merely a false guide which works constantly to divert him from his duties and which sooner or later leads to his downfall or to that of the state, unless he is restrained by the most sublime virtue. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

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The only precaution necessary to the father of a family is that he protect himself from depravity and prevent his natural inclinations from becoming corrupt, whereas it is these very inclinations that corrupt the magistrate. To act properly, the former need only consult his heart; the latter becomes a traitor as soon as he listens to his. Even his own reason ought to be suspect to him, and the only rule he should follow is the public reason, which is the law. Thus nature has made a multitude of good fathers of families, but it doubtful that, since the beginning of the World, human wisdom has ever produced ten men capable of governing their peers. It follows from all I have just put forward that one has good reason to distinguish public from private economy and that, since the state has nothing in common with the family except the obligation their respective leaders bear to render each of the happy, the same rules of conduct could not be suitable to both. In discussing what is not occurring in the suburbs, it is necessary to occasionally take a glance back at the central city since comparisons between the two highlight the changes in later. As has been detailed previously, the downtowns of American urban areas came into their glory during the first half of the twentieth century as the retail trade and business locations of choice. Downtown was where all the major department stores were located. As of 1950, Chicago’s Loop contained not only the huge Marshal Field store but also, a block away, Carson, Pirie, Scott. In addition, there were other large department stores of Mandels, Sears, and The Fair. All of these department stores occupied multistoried buildings. Field alone occupied a fully city block, with an additional five-story Men’s Building annex across the street. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

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Additionally, the downtown was filled with scores of restaurants and coffee shops catering both to business people and housewives who dressed up to make an event out of shopping downtown. Certainly, if one were interested in serious shopping in Chicago—or New York, or Philadelphia, or Boston, or Washington, or Detroit, or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or Dallas, or Seattle, or San Francisco—one went downtown, usually by public transit. As we approach the turn of the century, the above description reads like something from another time and place. Across America, downtown and peripheral suburban areas have switched identities. The old pattern has been turned inside out. Concentrated and centralized cities have been supplanted by dispersed and polynucleated suburban malls and office parks. Downtowns that once were dominant in retail trade find themselves struggling not for dominance, but for survival. Numerous cities such as Baltimore, Detroit, Sacramento, and Omaha no longer even have a single downtown department store. The dispute as to the comparative economic strength of downtown or peripheral suburban locations as centers for the purchase of consumer goods is over. Downtowns lost the competition. Central business districts now account for less than half of all sales in personal and household items, and yearly this share decreases. Downtowns, with some exceptions, such as part of Manhattan and North Michigan Avenue in Chicago, are no longer prime locations for major new retailing activities. Some of us who love the old downtowns whish this were not so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

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Along with downtown Chambers of Commerce, some would like to see new retailers occupy the buildings abandoned by the large department stores. Unfortunately, this is not going to occur. Central-city festival marketplaces provide wonderful urban vitality and a means of attracting tourists, but they are not where someone goes to buy shoes, a business suit, or a DVD player. For the foreseeable future, large-scale retailing ventures will have suburban post offices. New office space is also most likely to be suburban. Deconcentration is the cotemporary reality. However, as growth has gone from city to outside the city, there is a belief that the general quality of suburban life is decreasing. While applauding increases in employment and greater shopping alternatives, suburbanites feel frustration over traffic congestion, environmental degradation, crime, and crowded schools. Often these problems are attributed to a too-rapid pace of community growth. The question of limiting, or even halting, growth is one that is being debated in high-growth areas, such as the west coast. The concern first arose in high growth areas, such as Orange Country, in Southern California; now, as Californians out-migrate to Oregon, Washington state, Texas, Nevada, Atlanta, Arizona, or New Mexico, the concern about too-rapid growth has become a political issue in these localities. Local concerns over rapid growth fly in the face of the long-standing American creed that bigger is better. City boosters, as a matter of course, bragged that their community was better than their neighbour’s because it was growing faster. Not to grow was somehow un-American. Now that is changing and there are increasing calls for growth controls. At one time, the governor of Hawaii stirred up considerable controversy when he called for Hawaii to slow its exploding population by banning in-migration. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

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Research indicates that suburban residents have strong concerns about current and future growth. Studying the response of citizens in Orange County, California, it was found that over half of the residents surveyed cited environmental reasons such as traffic congestion and environmental deterioration as reasons for limiting growth. Economic reasons, such as maintaining property values and avoiding government spending and taxes, were listed by approximately a third of the respondents. While there is documented widespread support for slow-growth or growth-limit policies, there is little public support for no-growth policies, except for in Malibu, California which eventually lost their request. Suburban residents desire local officials and policy makers to put limits on population and economic expansion rather than to halt development. Both no growth and unrestricted growth are opposed by most suburbanites. However, desiring controlled growth and accomplishing it are not the same things. Research indicates that municipal zoning and other techniques to control growth have only a modest effect. Organizations favouring growth limits, such as the Sierra Club, generally argue that uncontrolled growth will continue to destroy what remains our physical and cultural environment. Thus, the indiscriminate gobbling up of land by developers and industries has to be controlled. Opponents of such control, such as the National Association of Homebuilders, say that those already in an area have no right to infringe on what they see as the constitutional right to settle where one chooses. Other opponents, such as the National Association of the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP), are less concerned with the developers’ right to build and make profits than they are with a “pull-up-the-gangplank” mentality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

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The NACCP fears that environmental policies such as setting minimum lot sizes and requiring municipal water and sewage hookups rather than allowing wells and septic systems will increase prices and thus exclude the less affluent. Zoning regulations allegedly have a history of being used for enforcing exclusion. The legal question of whether communities can impose growth controls was settled for the time being by the case of Petaluma, California. Located roughly 35 miles north of San Francisco and on a new freeway, the community was only 35,000 people at the time and felt it was being overwhelmed. Growth in Petaluma had reached 18 percent a year. Schools were in double session, water and sewage systems were at the maximum, and the community feared it was being swallowed by an unending number of new subdivisions. The city established a plan to limit building to 500 units a year, and developers and builder sued. By refusing to heart the case, the Supreme Court in 1976 rejected the builders’ argument that growth limits unconstitutionally restrict people’s right to live where they choose. The Supreme Court let stand the Court of Appeals ruling that the traditional local community responsibility for the public welfare was sufficiently broad to allow Petaluma to preserve its character and open spaces. Petaluma, California now has a population of 59,776.  In practice the question of growth controls is moot for most suburban communities. Only a limited number of communities, almost all in environmentally attractive locations in the west and southwest, have tried to control growth. Many older suburban communities, with the exception of Old Land Park in Sacramento, California, are more likely to share the central-city problem of how to attract growth, rather than how to limit it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

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Much more common among suburbs than growth limits is the requiring of builders to offer “proffers.” These are fees to cover some of the cost to the municipality of providing local road, school, sewer, and water services. The argument is that new residences should be assessed some of the costs associated with servicing them, and that the cost of providing services for newcomers should not be borne solely by existing taxpayers. Furthermore, it is impossible to discuss suburban issues without some discussion of crime. Obviously, one of the more common explanations one hears for the movement to the suburbs or the unwillingness to move back to the city is crime. The built-in assumption is that suburbs are relatively free of crime while cities clearly are not. Neither of these assumptions is fully accurate. Some city neighbourhoods have low crime, while some suburbs do not. However, overall suburban crime rates are only 28 percent of city rates. The popular perception also is accurate insofar as central-city crimes rates are rising faster than suburban rates. Major U.S. Central Cities are seeing crime rate increase by 40 percent from the previous year. By companions, the suburban rate was a far lower, which was an increase of 1.2 percent. No one knows for sure why urban violent crime rates accelerated so rapidly. However, the pandemic, depressed economic conditions for the poor, and shrinking job opportunities likely play a factor. Still others have suggested the increasing use of drugs, more use of more lethal weapons, family breakdown, and racial discrimination as reasons for the increase. Whatever the reason, the popular belief that cities, or at least some parts of cities, are increasingly dangerous places is, unfortunately, accurate. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

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Suburban crime rates are substantially lower than in cities, and it much less likely to be violent crime. The most frequently reported suburban crime is bicycle theft. This is a problem if your new expensive Diamondback Sync’R 29 Carbon Mountain Bike Black, XL that is stolen, but it is not equivalent to being mugged at gunpoint. By comparison, the ten richest suburbs have burglary rates only 33 percent those of the ten poorest suburbs. Affluent residential suburbs are able to restrict unwanted activities and limit undesirable and unemployed populations. Higher crime rates are also found in those suburbs that have facilities that attract criminals. An ever-decreasing minority of suburbanites actually commutes into the central city for employment or other purposes. City dwellers are increasingly likely to commute to suburbs for employment, shopping, or entertainment. Representatives who suddenly find themselves answerable to suburban voters have a tendency to move politically from being urban liberals toward being more suburban law-and-order candidates. Some think this will benefit the Republicans, but Deromcrats seeking election in the new districts have shown an ability to adjust their rhetoric to their new constituencies. Downtowns have been changing their economic function and their future is uncertain because of the pandemic and the increase of electronic cottages and business parks. However, looking at the new skyline does not suggest the image of immediate economic decline. People still head downtown for employment, but one cannot deny the clerical jobs, finance, legal services, advertising, management, medical centers, educational institutions, and government services are relocating to the suburbs. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

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During the Great Depression of the 1930’s millions of people were thrown out of work. As factory doors clanged shut against them, many plunged into extremes of despair and guilt, their egos shattered by the pink layoff slip. Eventually unemployment came to be seen in a more sensible light—not as the result of individual laziness or moral failure but of giant forces outside the individual’s control. The maldistribution of wealth, myopic investment, runaway speculation, stupid trade policies, inept government—these, not the personal weakness of laid-off workers, caused unemployment. Feelings of guilt were, in most cases, naively inappropriate. Today, once more, egos are breaking like eggshells against the walls. Now, however, the guilt is associated with the fracture of the family and the pandemic, rather than the economy. As millions of people clamber out of strewn wreckage of their marriages, break out of government-imposed house detainment they, too, suffer agonis of self-blame. And once more, much of the guilt is misplaced. When a tiny minority is involved, the crack-up of their families may reflect individual failures. However, when divorce, separation, pandemic, and other forms of familial disaster overtake millions at once in many countries, it is absurd to think the causes are purely personal. The fracture of the family today is, in fact, part of the general crisis of the age of information—the crack-up of all the institutions spawned by the Third Wave. It is part of the ground-clearing for the new socio-sphere. And it is this traumatic process, reflected in our induvial lives, that is altering the family system beyond recognition. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

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Today we are told repeatedly that “the family” is falling apar or that “the family” is our Number One Problem. It is clear that the national government should have a pro-family policy. There can be no more urgent priority. Substitute preachers, prime minister, and the pious rhetoric comes out very much the same. When they speak of “the family,” however, they typically do not mean the family in all is luxuriant variety of possible forms, but one particular type of family: the Second Wave family. What they usually have in mind is a husband-breadwinner, a wife-housekeeper, and a number of small children. While many other family types exist, it was this particular family form—he nuclear family—that Second Wave civilization idealized, made dominant, and spread around the World. This type of family became the standard, socially approved model because its structure perfectly fitted the needs of a mass-production society with widely shared values and life-styles, hierarchical, bureaucratic power, and a clear separation of home life from work life in the marketplace. Today, when the authorities urge us to “restore” the family it is this Second Wave nuclear family they usually have in mind. By thinking so narrowly they not only misdiagnose the entire problem, they reveal a childish naivete about what steps would actually be required to restore the nuclear family to its former importance. Thus the authorities frantically blame the family crisis on everything from “smut peddlers” to rock music. Some tells us that opposing abortion or wiping out sex education or resisting feminism will glue the family back together again. Or they urge courses in “family education.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

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The chief United States government statistician on family matters wants “more effective training” to teach people how to marry more wisely, or else a “scientifically tested and appealing system for selecting a marriage partner.” What we need, say others, are more marriage counselors or even more public relations to give the family a better image! Blind to the ways in which historical waves of change influence us, they come up with well-intentioned, often inane proposals that utterly miss the target. Some persons have wonderful healing gifts, but they will need to keep the ego out of their use of these gifts if their quest is not to be obstructed. Those who are born with healing skills, probably brough over from former births, function on different levels. The commonest is that which radiates life-force and energizes the cells of the sick person. This kind of healer must first put oneself into a passive mood and then, when one feels the vibratory force of the life-force active within one, let it pass, with or without touching the patient, into the latter. The vibrations of the lifeforce are universal; they are not the healer’s own personal property. One simply possesses a skill in letting oneself be used as a channel, and it is usually concentrated in one’s hands. A healer like Saswitha, who says he is merely drawing the therapeutic power from his patient and redirecting it or returning in back to the patient, forgets that if this is so the patient oneself gets it from the cosmic forces. It is not one’s own personal property. Jesus healed the sick, cured the diseased. Why decry the feat (when others do the same) as “merely” using an occult power, and as a deviation from the highest path of attainment, becoming an obstacle to it? For this is criticism by Advaitic Vedantins. This criticism is unfair. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

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If it is right to cure one by physical means—medicine, for example—then it is right to cure one by mental means, and drawing on still deeper powers is in the same line of progression. The Advaitins grant that a physician may attain the highest truth. Is a physician like Paracelsus, using both physical and mental remedies, plus one’s own spiritual power, and therefore capable of helping more people more effectively, to be denied this possibility? The professional in other lines can often give a reasonable assurance of the efficacy of one’s own work, but the genuine spiritual healer cannot. For not only is one’s own gift involved but also both the patient’s self-made destiny and one’s evolutionary need. Apollonius tells us that Pythagoras regarded healing as “the most divine art.” Why should anyone reject the views of the Greek sage, not to speak of Jesus’ own confirmation by His works? Why should the Indian sages regard healing as a merely occult art, hence as to practice to be avoided? Why should it be right for a spiritual master to minister to diseased minds but wrong to minister to diseased bodies? To label one as white magic and the others as black magic, or to neglect and ignore the flesh in the interest of the whole-time devotion to the spirit, is unfair. Too many Indian, and a few Western, gurus and cults reject the development and use of healing power. It is, they argue, an obstruction in the spiritual path because it keeps its practitioner captive to the ego, which may even become stronger through conceit. There is the historic case of Ramakrishma. He went to his prayer shrine in his temple three times to request a healing for the throat cancer which troubled him, but each time failed to utter words. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

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The merit of argument based on increased egotism and vanity, the danger of being sicktracked from seeking the highest goal, is admitted. However, is this enough ground to ban spiritual healing completely and always? Must it be denied to all people at all times, universally, because some healers may be obstructed spiritually by its practice? The answer of common sense agreed with the example of Jesus. Blessed be the Wind! Without wind, most of the Earth would be uninhabitable. The tropics would grow so unbearably hot that nothing could live here, and the rest of the planet would freeze. Moisture, if any existed would be confined to the oceans, and all but the fringe of the great continents would be desert. There would be no erosion, no soil, and for any community that managed to evolve despite these rigors, no relief from suffocation by their own waste products. However, with the wind, Earth comes truly alive. Winds provide the circulatory and nervous systems of the planet, sharing out energy and information, distributing both warmth and awareness, making something out of nothing. All wind’s properties are borrowed. Our knowledge of it comes at secondhand, but it comes strongly. And this combination of a force that cannot be apprehended, but nevertheless has an undeniable existence, was our first experience of the spiritual. A crack in the cosmos that widened to let the tide of consciousness flow through. We are the fruits of the wind—and have been seeded, irrigated, and cultivated by its craft. Save us, we beseech Thee! For Thy sake, our God, do Thou save us. For Thy sake, our Creator, O save us. For Thy sake, our Redeemer, O save us. For Thy sake, O Thou who seekest us, save us, we beseech Thee. During these wonderful glimpses ordinary existence seems suspended. One finds a new joy deep within oneself, a new and higher meaning deep within life. If we are going to make in through this pandemic, we are going to need more than vaccine; we also need empathy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Cresleigh Homes

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That face you make when you picture all the possibilities for the gorgeous built-in in the primary suite! 😍😍😍😍

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And just out of the frame, there’s that free-standing soaking tub! Wonders never cease at Mills Station Residence 4. 😇

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Residence Four at Mills Station boasts 2,692 square feet in the largest home in the community. The open concept design includes four bedrooms, three and one half bathrooms and a two car garage plus workshop. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-4/

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It Appears that the Powers of Redeemed Man Will be Almost Unlimited!

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In a century where people take pride in fine sorts of knowledge, there are no to be found two closely united Humans—rich, one in money, the other in genius, both loving glory and aspiring for immortality—one of whom sacrifices twenty thousand crowns of his goods and the other ten years of one’s life for a famous voyage around the World, in order to study, not always rocks and plants, but, for once, men and more, and who, after so many centuries used to measure and examine the house, would finally be of a mind to know its inhabitants. Spankings, reprimands, fines, jail sentences, firings, failing grades, and the like are commonly used to control behaviour. Clearly, the story of learning is unfinished without a return to the topic of punishment. Recall that punishment lowers the probability that a response will occur again. To be most effective, punishment must be given contingently (only after an undesired response occurs). Punishers, like reinforcers, are defined by observing their effects on behaviour. A punisher is any consequence that reduces the frequency of a target behaviour. It is not always possible to know ahead of time what will act as a punisher for a particular person. For example, when Leo’s mother reprimanded him for not sharing his toys, he started sharing them. In this instance, the reprimand was a punisher. However, Joel is starved for attention of any kind from his parents, who both work full-time. For Joel, a reprimand, or even a spanking, might actually reinforce toy throwing. Remember, too, that a punisher can be either the one set of an unpleasant event or the removal of a positive states of affairs (response cost). Men and women are placed on Earth to learn, grow and become better by following Jesus Christ. In the Church, this process is described as “eternal progression.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

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Central to that process is freedom of choice, which shapes who we are. Inevitably, as we make choices, we also make mistakes. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere, repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgression that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. The term “discipline” is an important one, especially in this religious context. It shares the same Latin root as the word “discipline,” meaning true follower. Learning to discipline ourselves is what makes us better people. Any athlete, artist, scholar or musician would acknowledge that discipline is the key to improvement. And so it is with our spiritual progression as well. Christ Himself taught repeatedly that we need to be disciplined in our thoughts, words and deeds. Becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ requires self-discipline. The miracles of Chris can be classified in two ways. The first system yields the classes (1) Miracles of Fertility (2) Miracles of Healing (3) Miracles of Destruction (4) Miracles of Dominion over the Inorganic (5) Miracles of Reversal (6) Miracles of Perfecting or Glorification. The second system, which cuts across the first, yields two classes only: they are (1) Miracles of the Old Creation, and (2) Miracles of the New Creation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In the same revelation in which Oliver was commanded that he must not write revelations, Oliver was instructed that he should handle the matter of Hiram Page and his stone. The Lord instructed: “Take thy brother Hiram Page between him and thee alone, and tell him that those things which he hath written from that stone are not of me, and that Satan deceiveth him; for, behold, these things have not been appointed unto him. Neither shall anything be appointed unto any of this church contrary to the church covenants, for all things must be done in order and by common consent in the church, by the prayer of faith.” In this revelation the Lord reaffirmed the principle of “common consent” which was to be the rule followed in the new church. Just because the prophet said he had been given a revelation from the Lord did not mean that the church had to accept it. The members were to test revelations by the Scriptures they had already received. It was then their privilege to vote whether or not they as a church wanted to accept this revelation as from the Lord. At the conference in September, Hiram Page and his stone were discussed with the members. Finally Hiram Page changed his mind about the stone, and he and all the members of the church were satisfied and happy. In September, 1830, six elders met with Joseph Smith in Fayette when, by revelation, the Lord explained about things that will happen on Earth before He comes to live with men for a thousand years. These are Jesus’ words: “Listen to the voice of Jesus Christ who will gather His people even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, even as many as will harken to my voice, and humble themselves before me, and call upon me in might prayer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

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“Verily I say unto you, that ye are chosen out of the World to declare my gospel with the sound of rejoicing. Lift up your hearts and be glad, for I am in your midst, and am your advocate with the Father; and it is His good will to give you the kingdom. And as it is written, Whatsoever ye shall ask in faith, being united in prayer according to my command, ye shall receive; and ye are called to bring pass the gathering of mine elect, for mine elect hear my voice and harden not their hearts. They shall be gathered in unto one place, upon the face of this land, to prepare their hearts, and be prepared in all things, against the day when tribulation and desolation are sent forth upon the wicked. For the hour is nigh, and that which was spoken by mine apostles must be fulfilled. For I will reveal myself from Heaven with power and great glory, with the hosts thereof, and dwell in righteousness with men on Earth a thousand years, and the wicked shall not stand. Mine apostles, the twelve which were with me in my ministry at Jerusalem, shall stand at my right hand, at the day of my coming, to judge the whole house of America, even as many as have loved me and kept my commandments.” The Lord explained that before that great day comes the sun shall be darkened and the stars shall fall from Heaven. There shall be great signs in the Heavens and on Earth. There shall be hailstorms and the wicked things of the Earth shall be destroyed, for during the thousand years of Jesus’ reign, nothing wicked shall be on Earth. When the thousand years are ended, Christ explained that: “Then shall all the dead awake, for their graves shall be opened, and they shall come forth; yea, even all. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

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

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

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

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

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All of these observations on the varieties that a thousand causes can produce and have in fact produced in the human species cause me to wonder whether the various animals similar to men, taken without much scrutiny by travelers for beasts, either because of some differences they noticed in their outward structure or simply because these animals did not speak, would not in fact be veritable savage men, whose race, dispersed in the woods during olden times, had not had an occasion to develop any of its virtual faculties, had not acquired any degree of perfection, and was still found in the primitive state of nature. Let us give an example of what I mean. “There are found in the kingdom of Congo,” says the translator of the Historie des Voyages, “many of those large animals called orangutans in the East Indies, which occupy a middle ground between the human species and the baboons. Battel relates that in the forests of Mayomba, in the kingdom of Loango, one sees two kinds of monsters, the larger of which are called pongos and the others enjocos. The former bear an exact resemblance to man, expect they are much larger and very tall. With a human face, they have very deep-set eyes. Their hands, cheeks, and ears are without hair, except for their eyebrows, which are very long. Although the rest of their body is quite hairy, the hair is not very thick; the colour of the hair is brown. Finally, the only part that distinguishes them from men is their leg, which has no calf. They walk upright, grasping the hair of their neck with their hand. Their retreat is in the woods. They sleep in the trees, and there they make a kind of roof which offer them shelter from the rain. Their foods are fruits or wild nuts; they never eat flesh. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

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“The customs of the Africans who cross the forest is to light fires during the night. They note that in the morning, at their departure, the pongos take their place around the fire, and do not withdraw until it is out; because, for all their cleverness, they do not have enough sense to lay wood on the fire to keep it going. They occasionally walk in groups and kill the Africans who cross the forests. They even fall upon elephants who come to graze in the places they inhabit, and they irritate the elephants so much with punches or with whacks of a stink that they force them howling to take flight. Pongos are never taken alive, because they are so strong that ten men would not be enough to stop them. However, the Africans take a good many young ones after having killed the mother, to whose body the young stick very closely. When one of these animals dies, the others cover its body with a pile of branches or leaves. Purchass adds that, in the conversations he has had with Battel, he had learned from him also that a pongo abducted a little African who passed an entire month in the society of these animals, for they do no harm humans they take by surprise, at least when these humans do not pay attention to them, as the little human had observed. Battel had not descried the second species of monster.” Biological diversity is the variety of life on this Earth. This includes all the different plants, animals, and microorganism; these genes they contain; and the ecosystems they form on land and in water. Biological diversity is constantly changing. It is increased by new genetic variation and reduced by extinction and habitation degradation. Biodiversity refers to the variety of life and its processes, including the variety of living organisms, the genetic differences among them, and the communities and ecosystems in which they occur. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

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Scientists have identified about 1.9 million species alive today. They are divided into six kingdoms of life. Scientists are still discovering new species. Thus, hey do not know for sure how many species really exists today. Most estimate range from 5 to 30 million species. To save every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering. The most precise and specific measure of biodiversity is genetic diversity or genetic variation within a species. This measure of diversity looks at differences among individuals within a population, or at difference across different populations of the same species. The level just broader is species diversity, which best fits the literal translation of biodiversity: the number of different species in a particular ecosystem or on Earth. This type of diversity simply looks at an area and reports what can be found there. At the broadest most encompassing level, we have ecosystem diversity. Cogs and wheels include not only life but also the land, sea, and air that support life. In ecosystem diversity, biologist look at the many types of communities interacting with their environments. Although all three levels of diversity are important, the term biodiversity usually refers to species diversity. Biodiversity provides us with all of our food. It also provides for many medicines and industrial products, and it has great potential for developing new and improved products for the future. Perhaps most importantly, biological diversity provides and maintains a wide array of ecological “services.” These include provision of clean air and water, soil, food, and shelter. The quality—and the continuation—of our life and our economy is dependent on these “services.” O Great Spirit of the East, radiance of the rising Sun, Spirit of new beginnings, O Grandfather Fire, Great nuclear fire—of the Sun. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

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Power of life-energy, vital spark, power to see far, and to imagine with boldness. Power to purify our senses, our hearts and our minds. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. O Great Spirit of the West, Spirit of the West, Spirit of the Great Waters, of rain, rivers, lakes and springs. O Grandmother Ocean, deep matrix, womb of all life. Power to dissolve boundaries, to release holdings, power to taste and to feel, to cleanse and to heal, great blissful darkness of peace. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so hat your power may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the North, Invisible Spirit of the Air, and of the fresh, cool winds, O vast and boundless Grandfather Sky, your living breath animates all life. Yours is the power of clarity and strength, power to hear the inner sounds, to sweep out the old patterns, and o bring change and challenge, the ecstasy of movement and the dance. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, and be expressed by us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings on it. O Great Spirit of the South, Protector of the fruitful land, and of all green and growing things, the noble trees and grasses, Grandmother Earth, Soul of Nature. Great power of the receptive, of nurturance and endurance, power to grow and bring forth flowers of the field, fruits of the garden. We pray that we may be aligned with You, so that your powers may flow through us, for the good of this planet Earth, and all living beings upon it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

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Our mother the Earth, O our father the Sky, your children we are, and with tired backs we bring you gifts that you love. Then weave for us a garment of brightness; may the warp be the white light of morning, may the weft be the red light of evening, may the fringes be the falling rain, may the border be the standing rainbow. Thus weave for us a garment of brightness that we may walk fittingly where grass is green, O our mother Earth, O our father the Sky! As Thou didst save them who in worshipful reverence on the Sabbath did beat the willow-leaves and who at the altar’s base set bough from Moza, so save us now. As Thou didst save them who praised Thee with slender, long and lofty willow-branches, who, as they cheerfully departed, chanted, “Beauty is thine, O altar,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them whose thanks and hope remained constant, “We are all His and our eyes are upon Him,” so save us now. As Thou didst save them that with green shoots surrounded Thine Earth-dug altar crying, “We beseech Thee, O Lord, do save us,” so save us now, please. As Thou didst save the host of Thy zealous priests who ministered on the day of rest with double offering and sacrifice, so save us now. As Thou didst save Thy Levites who assembled on the sacred dias, sang, “A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day,” so save us now. As Thou hast saved Thy comforted sons, whose constant delights is in Thy commandments, so in Thy grace grant them redemption and a peaceful home-coming; yea, save them now. Thou didst save the captive tribes of Jacob; restore again the captive tents of Jacob, and help us now. O Eternal, we beseech Thee, save us now. Save Thy people, and bless Thine inheritance; nourish and sustain them forever. And may my words of supplication before the Lord be nigh unto the Lord our God, day and night, that He maintain the cause of His servant and the cause of His people America every day shall require; that all the people of the Earth may know that the Lord is God; there is none else. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Residence Four is the largest home offered in Cresleigh Havenwood. This two-story, 3,489 square foot home features four bedrooms, including one suite on the first floor, three and one half bathroom, and a true three-car garage. The covered porch provided a warm entry and the dining room is located right off the entry way. The Kitchen is connected through the Butler’s Pantry providing ample storage.

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