Home » TV (Page 9)
Category Archives: TV
It is Futile to Try to Take the Kingdom of Heaven by Violence!
Mental hygiene is just as important as keeping the rest of our body in good shape. Our mental health influences so much about how we move through life, how we view ourselves, and how we relate to others. That is why it is so important to discuss our mental health with professionals or trusted friends to find ways of cultivating a beneficial state of mind, and to be reminded that we are never alone even when we feel like no one understands us. Without question, family-of-origin relations and interactions have dominated the interpersonal research on schizophrenia. However, there is reason to believe that problematic interpersonal relationships extend beyond the realm of family relations for patients with schizophrenia. For example, among patients at a residential facility, interpersonal interactions were identified as the primary cause of symptom fluctuations in approximately sixty-six percent of the residents with schizophrenia. The most commonly identified interpersonal interactions were with other residents, and involved arguments, irritation, and concern about having personal property stolen by these others. Residents also indicated that arguments with and criticism from staff members led to worsening of their symptoms. This kind of relation friction is very prominent in the interpersonal landscape of people with schizophrenia. One particular area of interest for schizophrenia and interpersonal relationships more generally is social support. Patients with schizophrenia typically have smaller social networks, and report that they have fewer close friends, than healthy controls or even other psychiatric patients. Importantly, our research group detected a negative association between number of family members in the patients’ social networks and their prognosis, whereas a greater number of friends and acquaintances in these networks was associated with better outcomes. This finding indicates that the type of “social support” that may be offered by family members actually aggravates the course of the disorder. What is obviously beneficial to the patient with schizophrenia is social support from friends. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
However, social support from friends is sadly lacking in many cases. One possible reason for this lack of support may stem from the poor social skills that are often associated with schizophrenia. Patients with schizophrenia and poor social skills tend to have smaller social networks. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia may also inhibit the ability to secure social support from other. The impact of social support clearly extends beyond just psychiatric symptoms for people with schizophrenia. It may literally have an impact on their long-terms survival. Recently 133 records of patients with schizophrenia, who were admitted to a state hospital, were examined. Over a lengthy retrospective follow-up period, those patients with more social support available exhibited a lower expected mortality. Using survival analysis, it was demonstrated that a 1-point increase in social support (expressed on a 5-point scale) was associated with a 25 percent hazard reduction over the follow-up period, which averaged 58 years. Clearly, when social support is available, it pays many dividends to people with schizophrenia—in terms of both psychiatric symptoms and longevity. Research on social support suggest that it is difficult for people with schizophrenia to reap the benefits offered by relationships with friends. In addition to problems with friendship, schizophrenia is associated with less closeness and more conflict with siblings. Individuals in the study expressed a considerable degree of grief and stress associated with their attempts to cope with their ill siblings. Further, there is evidence to indicate that, like people with depression, people with schizophrenia often elicit rejection from others. For instance, a large sample of students were asked to read vignettes describing a young mand with paranoid schizophrenia, personality disorder, or no mental health problem. The more mentally distressed the target person was judged to be, the more respondents found one to be socially unacceptable, and the more social distance from him they desired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
Similar findings are evident in a study of face-to-face interactions with patients with schizophrenia. In this case, the more strangely patients behaved during the interaction (as rated by observers), the more negatively their conversational partners responses to the. Some patients consistently behave in ways that lead them to be responded to more or less negatively. This interpersonal rejection effect associated with schizophrenia may explain the difficulty such people have in building and maintaining a social support network of friends. It is also linked to the sever social skills deficits these patients have. In addition to being embedded in disturbed and dissatisfying interpersonal relations, people with schizophrenia evidence serious communication problems of their own. An extensive line of research on social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia shows that the disorder is strongly associated with what are often fundamental failures in basic communication skills. Although these deficits are not ubiquitous with this family of disorders—for example, those with the paranoid subtype may be more functional—in many cases the exceptionally peculiar and disorganized style of relating to other people makes communication extremely difficult and challenging. The research on social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia has examined the expression or encoding aspects, as well as the reception of decoding aspects, of communication. Within each of these area, distinct deficits are sometimes evident in subprocesses (speech production and use of non-verbal behaviour in the case of encoding skills; and recognition of facial expressions, social information, and recognition/process in the case of decoding skills). Patients with schizophrenia have impairments in social skills that are more pronounced than those of either healthy or psychiatric controls. The social behavior of patients with schizophrenia, in social settings, tends to be less appropriate than that of either nonpsychiatric controls, or psychiatric controls, including patients with mood disorders and schizoaffective disorder. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
Impairment in social skills are not just secondary to the symptoms of schizophrenia, and they are significantly associated with more general social functioning. Further evidence of poor encoding social skills associated with schizophrenia is evident in a diverse range of studies. For example, based on clinical ratings of such social skills as acceptance of contact from others, initiation of contact with others, effective communication, engaging in activities, participating in groups, forming friendships, and asking for help, patients with schizophrenia scored significantly lower on all dimensions, compared to patients with bipolar disorder or major depression. Similar findings based on clinical ratings indicate that in domains such as language development, socialization, and responsibility, patients with schizophrenia were rated more poorly than those with intellectual disabilities, and were about the same range as patients with organic brain impairment. When using self-report instruments to assess social skills, people with schizophrenia rated themselves as less competent in their ability to initiate interactions, manage conflict, and provide emotional support to others. These social skills deficits were particularly associated with negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Effective verbal communication skills are essential for conveying information, as well as for establishing and negotiating interpersonal relationships. Deficits in these skills are almost immediately evident upon interacting with an individual with schizophrenia. A frequent theme in the research on speech production and schizophrenia is the frequency of communication failures. These include such phenomena as vague or confused references, missing information in references, and structural unclarities. In conversation, people with schizophrenia will exhibit numerous communication failures. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
The communication failures makes their discourse very difficult to decode, and their train of thought almost impossible to follow. This type of speech clarity (or unclarity) is strongly related to social functioning among patients with schizophrenia. It is impossible to overlook the striking parallel between the findings on communication failures among people with schizophrenia and the findings on Communication Deviance (CD) in their family members. Another speech problem associated with schizophrenia is diminished or inhibited speech production, also known as poverty of speech. This is speech that is inappropriately laconic and unrestricted. For example, when asked, “What was your family like when you were growing up?”, a person with schizophrenia may answer, “OK, I guess.” Such insufficiently elaborate responses require the conversational partner to probe continually for further information in order to get a sufficient answer. And when people with schizophrenia do speak, they tend to have poor enunciation and inflection. Such inhibited speech production is not specific to schizophrenia; it is also evident in depression. However, it tends to be more chronic for people with schizophrenia, whereas it improves dramatically as symptoms remit in depression. The effective use of nonverbal behaviour adds considerable richness to vocal communication, conveying attitudes, emotions, and information. People with schizophrenia regularly exhibit impairments in their use of nonverbal communication behaviours. For example, patients with schizophrenia make less eye contact with others during social interactions, although this may be limited to certain types of interactions that are of a personal nature. When watching emotional films, patients with schizophrenia were found to be less facially animated than nonpatient controls. They may also be impaired in the use of paralanguage (exempli gratia, tone of voice, speech rate, inflection) to convey emotion. In family interactions, patients with schizophrenia use fewer gestures and lean forward less toward their partners than psychiatric controls do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Research on the encoding aspects of social skills shows that people with schizophrenia perform very poorly. Both their verbal and their nonverbal behaviours suggest disengagement, confusion, and existence in reality that is difficult to express, much less share with others. Sadly, the extent of social skills deficits associated with schizophrenia does not stop there. Aside from encoding or behavioural production skills, decoding skills are also vital to effective interpersonal communication. These skills are often referred to as social and emotional sensitivity or nonverbal sensitivity. Such skills call on one’s ability to perceive and read subtle cues in the discourse and nonverbal behaviour of other people at a rapid pace. Obviously, these are cognitively demanding skills that are preferred over a lifetime of human interactions. People with schizophrenia experience a multitude of decoding problems in interpersonal contexts. These interpersonal decoding skills problems are undoubtedly related to a more general problem that reveals itself equally in poor performance in decoding noninterpersonal phenomena. By definition, inherent in its diagnostic criteria, schizophrenia involves many serious perceptual problems that are often manifest in hallucinations and disorganized cognition and affect. They make for ineffective social perception that undoubtedly contributes to deteriorated interpersonal experiences for people with schizophrenia. The real enemies of humankind today—as in the recent past—are doctrines which have issued from the womb of hate and greed, suspicion and violence, and grown only to spread hate and greed, suspicion and violence. For the inevitable harm of such thinking is as self-destructive as it is socially destructive. If they could penetrate, by some mystical insight, the awful horrors and repulsive episodes which mar modern history, they would find something unimaginably grand, beautiful, and wise behind it all, unseen and undreamt by the human agents responsible for this misery. It is unjustified escapism. Postwar sensualism is as much a form of escapism as postwar ashramism. Folly and evil play the most powerful parts on the contemporary World stage. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
If we look at the large panorama of the twenty-first century history, with its tortures and devastations, its epidemics and destructions, its famines and depopulations, above all, its menace of horrors yet to come, we can see how trivial a thing in fate’s eyes is personal life, how unimportant in them is personal emotion. What does fate, God, Nature, care about the little histories, the little loves, the little griefs of pullulating humans, who must appear in those same eyes as hardly more noteworthy than pullulating ants! There are millions—nay, billions—of these men and women who are so like each other in their basic natures and desires, that it does not make any difference to the planetary Mind or the protoplasmic Force whether some of them die or survive, mate of frustrate, are ecstatically happy or dully miserable, stay perfectly whole or limp hideously maimed. The fact is that the World finds itself today very nearly spiritually bankrupt. Snobbishness is only misplaced reverence. Any good that is misplaced easily becomes an evil. The older nations were permeated with this evil far too much. The World approaches insane chaos and convulsion at most, perilous conditions at least. The fault lies not only with the criminal but also with the society in which created the conditions which tempted one to enter criminality. There is such insecurity and instability, so much demoralization and so much discontent. Are human life and human destiny ruled by mere chance or by iron law? If by chance, then our race is wholly at the mercy of evil humans, but if by law, then we may hope to see the pattern of ultimate good eventually show itself in its history as these humans and all humans are steered back to righteous courses by suffering and intuition, by revelation and reflection. The fact that human character as a whole seems not to have improved in our time does not mean that it will fail to improve in the future. Human virtue is only in its infancy and will one day attain its maturity. Human goodness in essence is indestructible because the divine soul in humans is indestructible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
There is in the very midst of humanity today, albeit hidden and awaiting its hour of manifestation, that which is the very opposite of what has already manifested itself though the evil channels. There is divine pity as against barbarous cruelty, sublime wisdom as against materialistic ignorance, altruistic service as against aggressive selfishness, and exalted reverence, altruistic service as against hard atheism. There is the recall to a forgotten God. There is redemptive grace. There is a hand outstretched in mercy to the worst sinner, and in consolation to the worst sufferer. Those who are mystically sensitive feel its presence even now, however intermittently. Too many people hold, whether consciously or unconsciously, the materialistic belief that they are here on Earth to satisfy their material desires only, and that they have no higher responsibility. This is no time for smooth words that hide the true state of affairs, no times for shallow optimism that screens the precipice along whose edge we are walking. Humanity passed through the five-year agony of life-and-death conflict against the enemy attempts at World domination because it earlier hugged the delusion either that the danger did not exist or that it was very slight even if it did exist. It cannot afford to repeat that error. The peril in which it now stands from materialism—whether avowed, open, or disguised, supported by out-of-date science, or molded from out-of-date religion—is just as grave in its own way because of its terrifying spiritual and physical consequences. The materialistic view of humans, which would regard one’s life-functioning as a set of physical processes only, which would condemn one to an absolute lack of spiritual awareness, must die or humans themselves will die with it. Materialism leads to a faulty interpretation of historic events and one-sided interpretation of personal ones. Most of the modern civilizations which are based on materialism and take no account of the spiritual nature of humans are building towers of Babel which, when they have reached a certain height, will topple down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The greater the height, the larger the number of broken pieces. The creativity of these civilizations is illusory; they seem to be productive, but they are really destructive, for since they do not conform to the World-Idea the karma they are making must inevitably bring all this about. The gods of quite virtue and spiritual wisdom have had fewer votaries than at most other parallel periods of our history, while the grinning demons of brazen pleasure and materialistic pursuits have been far busier. Folly holds the field. Despite all the scientific backwardness and primitive character attributed to them, there was always a place in most of the civilization of antiquity—and there still is in the Old World—for the self-actualized or the prophet. In the New World there does not seem to be one for one today—on the contrary, one is too often met with unjust suspicious and hopeless misunderstandings and so can do nothing else than crawl into one’s shell. This accusing fact that our society has no place for one, sets no importance on one and perceives no value in one, is of itself enough to damn it for having strayed so far from its higher purposes. There is something seriously wrong with a civilization which thinks that the effort to come into Overself-consciousness is an abnormal and even an insane one. It is a stupid and narrow outlook which equates the desire for material progress with the pursuit of materialism. We have passed out the centuries belief in fossilized creeds only to pass into the centuries of superstitious belief in credalized fossils—such as the materialistic conception of Man, the crude notion that the inferiority of all Eastern knowledge. Whether we take the industrialized machine-ridden civilization of Europe or that of the United States of America, in the end they are setting up the same goals—the creation of slavery to technology which can only end in psychosis and physical illness. When a people is concerned only with material things, and when their desires are wholly confined to them, it is proper to call them materialists. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
Just as nature has set limits to the status of a well-formed human, beyond which there are but giants or dwarfs, so too, with regard to the best constitution of a state, there are limits to the size it can have, so as not to be too large to be capable of being well governed, nor too small to be capable of preserving itself on its own. In every body politic there is a maximum force that it cannot exceed, and which has often fallen short by increasing in size. The more the social bond extends the looser it becomes, and in general a small state is proportionately stronger than a large one. A thousand reasons prove this maxim. First, administration becomes more difficult over great distances, just as a weight becomes heavier at the end of a longer lever. It also becomes more onerous as the number of administrative levels multiplies, because first each city has its own administrative which the populace pays for; each district has its own, again paid for by the people; next each province has one and then the great governments, the satrapies and vice royalties, requiring a greater cost the high you go, and always at the expense of the unfortunate people. Finally, there is the supreme administration which weights down on everyone. All these surcharges continually exhaust the subjects. Far from being governed by these different orders, they are worse governed than if there were but one administration over them. Meanwhile, hardly any resources remain for meeting emergencies; and when recourse must be made to them, the state is always on the verge of its ruin. This is not all. Not only does the government have less vigour and quickness in enforcing the observance of the laws, preventing nuisances, correcting abuses and foreseeing the seditious undertakings that can occur in distant places, but also the populace has less affection for its leaders when it never sees them, for the homeland, which, to its eyes, is like the World, and for its fellow citizens, the majority of whom are foreigners to it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
The same laws cannot be suitable to so many diverse provinces which have different customs, live in contrasting climates, and which are incapable of enduring the same form of government. Different laws create only trouble and confusion among the peoples who live under the same rulers and are in continuous communication. They intermingle and intermarry, and, being under the sway of other customs, never know whether their patrimony is actually their own. Talents are hidden; virtues are unknown; vices are unpunished in this multitude of humans who are unknow to one another which the seat of supreme administration brings together in one place. The leaders, overwhelmed with work, see nothing for themselves; clerks govern the state. Finally, the measures that need to be taken to maintain the general authority, which so many distant officials want to avoid or harass, absorb all the public attention. Nothing more remains for the people’s happiness, and there barely remains enough for its defense in time of need. And thus a body which is too big for its constitution collapses and perished, crushed by its own weight. On the other hand, the state ought to provide itself with a firm foundation to give it solidity, to resist the shocks it is bound to experience, as well as the efforts it will have to make to sustain itself. For all the peoples have a kind of centrifugal force, by which they continually act one against the other and tend to expand at the expense of their neighbours, like Descartes’ vortices. Thus the weak risk being soon swallowed up; scarcely any people can preserve itself except by putting itself in a kind of equilibrium with all, which nearly equalizes the pressure on all sides. It is clear from this that there are reasons for expanding and reasons for contracting, and it is not the least of the political theorist’s talents to find, between these and other reason, the proportion most advantageous to the preservation of the state. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
In general, it can be said that the former reasons, being merely external and relative, should be subordinated to the latter reasons, which are internal and absolute. A strong, healthy constitution is the first thing one needs to look for, and one should count more on the vigour born of a good government than on the resources furnished by a large territory. Moreover, there have been states so constituted that the necessity for conquests entered into their very constitution, and that, to maintain themselves, they were forced to expand endlessly. Perhaps they congratulated themselves greatly on account of this happy necessity, which nevertheless showed them, together with the limit of their size, the inevitable moment of their fall. In Britain, a Manchester housewife named Katherine Fisher, after suffering for years from a desperate fear of leaving her own home, founded an organization for others with similar phobias. Today that organization, The Phobics Society, has many branches and is one of thousands of new groups cropping up in many of the high-technology nations to help people deal directly with them own problems—psychological, medical, social, or sexual. In Detroit, Michigan USA, some 50 “bereavement groups” have sprung up to assist people suffering from grief after the loss of a relative or friend. In Australia an organization called GROW brings together former mental patients and “nervous persons.” GROW now has chapters in Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Alaska, New Zealand, Ireland, Trinidad/Tobago. In America, PFLAG has over 400 chapters across the country, and boasts of more than 200,000 members to help those with homosexual children. In Britain, Depressives Associated has some 60 chapters. From Addicts Anonymous and the Black Lung Association to Parents Without Partners and Widow-to-Widow, new groups are forming everywhere. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Of course, there is nothing new about people in trouble getting together to talk out their problems and learn from one another. Nonetheless, historians can find little precedent for the wildfire speed with which the self-help movement is spreading today. Human Services Research Institute is a team of more than 50 dedicated professionals, which provides research, support, and guidance to clients looking to develop more efficient and responsive service systems. They work across all sectors and program area in health and human services, addressing the needs of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; people experiencing behavioural health disorders; children, youth, and families; seniors and people with physical disabilities; people experiencing housing instability or homelessness; and states and communities looking to promote population health. In the United States of America alone there are now over 500,000 such groupings with new ones forming daily. Many are short-lived, but for each one that disappears several seem to take its place. These organizations vary widely. Some share the new suspicion of specialists and attempt to work without them. They rely entirely on what might be termed “cross-counseling”—people swapping advice based on their own life experience, as distinct from receiving traditional counseling from the professionals. Some see themselves as providing a support system for people in trouble. Other play a political role, lobbying for changes in legislation or tax regulations. Still others have a quasi-religious character. Some are international communities whose members not only meet but actually live together. Such groups are now forming regional, even transnational linkages. To the extent the professional psychologists, social workers, or doctors are involved at all, they increasingly undergo a role change, shifting from the role of impersonal expert who is assumed to know best to that of listener, teacher, and guide who works with the patient or client. Existing voluntary or nonprofit groups—originally struggling to see how they fit in with a movement based on the principle of helping oneself. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The self-help movement is thus restructuring the socio-sphere. Smokers, stutterers, suicide-prone people, gambler, victims of throat disease, parents of twins, overeaters, and other such groupings now form a dense network of organization that mesh with the emerging Third Wave family and corporate structures. However, whatever their significance for social organization, they represent a basic shift from passive consumer to active prosumer, and they thus hold economic meaning as well. Though ultimately dependent on the market and still intertwined with it, they are transferring activity from Sector B of the economy to Sector A, from the exchange sector to the presumption sector. Nor is this burgeoning movement the only such force: Some of the richest and largest corporations in the World are also—for their own technological and economic reasons—accelerating the rise of the prosumer. Prayer is a legal right. Under this new covenant contract, sealed by the Lord Jesus Christ in His own blood, you have the legal right as a born-again believer to enter the throne room of God. You can stand in His presence without fear, without a sense of inferiority, without a sense of guilt, because of what Jesus did. It is your legal right to come boldly before the throne of grace to request Heavenly intervention in this Earth on your behalf. Prayer is your legal right, but you should come by the rules of spiritual law that govern prayer. Even though you do not, the law will still work—the law that says, one shall have whatsoever one saith. Or the law that says, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them. These laws still work regardless of our ignorance of the Word. Prayer is the legal right to ask God to supernaturally intervene in your behalf. The power of binding and loosing is not in Heaven. It is on Earth. You are the one who has authority to bind the forces of evil. You are the one who has the power to loose the ability of God in this Earth through the prayer of faith. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
It is your legal right to use the prayer of faith to put you over in life. Wrong words in prayer will hold you in bondage. They will loose the ability of the enemy against you. Right words in prayer will release the ability of God. Prayer is to line ourselves up with the Word of God and set ourselves in a position to give God liberty to move on our behalf. Sometimes our prayers have bound God. If you rightly divide the Word of God in prayer, you will loose God’s ability. It will cause you to stand in a new realm of faith. You will come to the point that you will not have to pray all night. You can pray, knowing that God hears you. Then you will be silent to the Lord. Try to bring as much of your mind into your prayer as possible. When tired, rest. Repeat the rhythm of prayer five times. Such mental concentration is one of the secrets of champion professional strong humans. The faithful practice of these mind-concentrated mental exercises of prayer must lead in time to better bodily self-control. Prayer evokes the greatest power to resolve situations and to assist one in making one’s dreams com true, and it brings about the greatest results. However, one may practise prayer until Doomsday, mutter the hundred and eight different mystic spells, sit in all the sixty-four postures of yoga of body control, hold one’s breath for a whole hour or vary its rhythms in every conceivable manner, but the Overself will remain stubbornly remote unless one frankly faces and successfully fights out one’s struggle against one’s own ego in one’s own heart. No physical contortion, exercise, or manipulation can ever take its place. An isolated prayer is always nice. However, consider three minutes every day, or more. Prayer seems very effective when it is done regularly and is habit forming. Help teach your children, instead of complaining, try to pray to God and ask for the goodness that you want. It is futile to try to take the Kingdom of Heaven by violence. It cannot be successful. This desire to enter the Kingdom in a hurry is pardonable. Yet if it were fulfilled, the fulfillment would be a premature attainment and consequently lacking in fullness, falling short in wholeness, and uncertain of steadiness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
All the different stages of development are needed in experience and can be missed only to our loss. Although timelessness is the quest’s end, the journey itself must take place in the measured pace of time to prepare us properly for its end. It may be that this is because we may not take hold of spiritual possessions which we have not rightfully earned by personal labours and to which we have no honest legal title. It may be that a spiritual treasure cannot become our own in advance of the requisite efforts to develop adequate fitness and understanding for such vast responsibility. “My son, give attention to my words; incline your ear to my sayings. Do not let them depart from your eyes; keep them in the midst of your heart; for they are life to those who find them, and health to all their flesh,” reports Proverbs 4.20-22. Some stories bear repeating over and over because they build our faith. For instance. God’s people often retold the Exodus story, partly because God instructed them to do so, but in my mind, I can also imagine them telling the story of Moses and the deliverance from Egyptian slavery for the sheer joy they experienced in passing on the event to the next generation. In some ways, I feel the same way when I tell about my father’s miraculous healing. The doctor said he had days to live. So he went home and pored over his Bible and found about one hundred favorite passages of Scriptures concerning healing. His circumstances began to change. Not overnight, but little by little, he began to feel better. He got his appetite back and started gaining weight. Slowly but surely, his strength returned. Maybe you are facing a “hopeless” situation. Do not give up. God is a miracle-working God. He knows what you are going through, and He will not let you down. Start speaking words of faith today, and watch how God causes your circumstances to change. Ecstasy is not a permanent mark of the mystical experience, but only a temporary mark which accompanies its first discovery. It is the beginners who are so excited by mystical ecstasies, not the proficient. The process of re-adjusting the personality to a future filled with wonderful promise and stamped with tremendous importance naturally moves the emotional nature towards an extreme delight. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to regard the mystic’s ecstasy as something that was merely emotional only. Behind it there is the all-important contribution of the Overself’s grace, love, and peace. When the emotional excitement of the discovery eventually subsided, these will then show themselves more plainly as being its really significant elements. Life can never again be just as ordinary, just as commonplace as before, nor just as if one had never passed through those vital moments of divine uplift. The white-hot point of their inspiration has faded, but it can never be forgotten. It will, nay it must, show itself powerfully in one’s directive purposes and in the quality of one’s living. One will want to keep this awakened consciousness at all times. This aspiration will instantaneously or eventually bring one to tread the Quest. In the intellectual deductions which one may make after the experience, and when one is viewing it analytically, one may find corroboration of one’s true beliefs or contradiction of one’s false ones. However, the ego having closed in upon one again, this may happen only partially, or only slightly, depending on its strength. Every glimpse of the Infinite helps one to let go of the finite, to detach oneself from one’s possessions and passions. Here is goodness and beauty which Worldly objects and Worldly creatures do not possess. The human who has once glimpsed them can never again become completely satisfied with the World’s offerings, for this reason, but will again and again be haunted by, and attracted to, the vision of this higher possibility for humans. Blaming and attacking are a more aggressive form of manipulation used in relationships by Critical Christians. Because of the many times such persons have been hurt, they fixate on being angry and punitive, believing that consistently blaming and attacking others will keep them from ever being hurt again. Being hurt is the Critical Christian’s greatest fear. So, paradoxically, one becomes the aggressor in hurting others first to keep from being hurt. This perpetuates a vicious cycle. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
While being in good contact with the polarities of anger and strength, the Critical Christian is out of touch with the complementary dimensions of love and weakness. In fact, one is stuck on the anger polarity and cannot allow into awareness feelings of tenderness or humility because they threaten the rigid pattern of always being in control and being right. When anything happens that the Critical Christian does not like, one compulsively seeks to find fault with others, God, or the World. Critical Christians enjoy bullying others into believing that their way is the only way. A closely associated strategy is judging others—constantly pointing out what they should be or say or do and where they have gone wrong. Because the Critical Christin is basically angry at the World, one usually communicates with others in a rather brusque way. However, the same dynamic of attacking and blaming may be carried on with a smile and an artificial appearance of being a nice person. Sometimes the Critical Christian just complains and whines constantly about not living this or that. As a child, the critical person could well have received the kind of harsh, judgmental treatment one now dishes out to others. Much psychological research shows that children learn many of their basic styles of relating by modeling themselves on the way that their parents or other authority figures relate to them. For instance, there is a high probability that children who have been physically or psychologically abused by parents will in turn abuse their own children, unless specific therapeutic intervention gives them new alternatives that they never had a chance to learn. Chances are the critical person experienced real fear, helplessness, and torment in childhood. This could have been inflicted by insecure parents, jealous brothers or sisters, exploitative relatives, or bullying peers. However, at some point, the pain reached such a crescendo that the person reversed roles—becoming the persecutor rather than the victim—and spent the rest of one’s life taking out the frustration, hostility, and pain on others. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
When people living out a punitive style of relating become Christians, there is a high probability that they will unconsciously contaminate their understanding of God and other people. The contamination is a result of the old hurts and the hostility that they generated within. The irony, then, is that Critical Christians rationalize such attitudes and behaviour by believing that God is the one who is angry, harsh, and judgmental of everyone. This supposedly excuses them for their own hostile behaviour. This type of individual might even believe that he or she is an emissary of God, sent to dispense God’s wrath on others. Once, therefore, feels quite smug in laying heavy demands upon others and becoming a hard taskmaster in telling others how to be holy and live up to God’s supposed expectations. A noticeable pattern for the Critical Christian is the preoccupation with ritual, rule, and regulation. In the zeal to serve God, one becomes guilty of destroying the spirit of love and gentleness that characterizes true Christian behaviour with a dogmatic and almost vicious concern with the letter of the law. Some Critical Christians can recognize that they are intolerant and impatient with anyone who sees things differently from them. They often feel that they have all the answers about God, life, and other people’s behaviour. When they become aware of how many people who have felt hurt, and misunderstood by their brash approach to life, the understand they have judged others too harshly. As these individuals grow, they develop a more gentle lifestyle that enables one to relate genuinely to people who are quite different from them. Father, it is Your Word that I rely upon to bring healing and health to my life and to those from whom I am praying. I am not interested in spiritual tricks or formulas; I only want Your will to be done. May my words reflect Your words and Your will in the situations I am facing. I will dare to speak faith-filled words. Faith comes from the Word, not prayer. I once head someone say, “I prayed all night about a certain situation, just stayed up and prayed all night.” Well if they had prayed in faith, they would have gone to sleep. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Pray in faith, then rest in the Lord. When you start praying in faith, your words will be few, but they will be effective. (However, keep in mind if your system is already perfected, do not change it.) Sometimes we pray just trying to muster up some faith. That is not scriptural. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God, not by praying. Go to the Word of God and hear the Word until faith comes; do not be too quick to pray. Sometimes we start talking before we know what to say. Hear the Word…hear the Word…hear the Word. It might take a week or a month, but faith will come. Then go to God with the prayer of faith and thank Him. You will not have to stay there long. You can get more from God in two minutes, believing Him, than you can praying all night in unbelief. However, keep in mind, long conversations with God can be like therapy. A little patience and humility in adversity will please God more than a lot of consolation and devotion in prosperity. Why do you become depressed when a small insult is sent your way? If it has been a bigger one, a real calumny, say, you still should not have let it bother you. Let it pass. It is not the first time or the last time, just the present time, an they will keep coming, no matter how long you live. Verily, you will do virilely most days, that is to say, until sometime prickly gets in your way. You are very good at giving advice on vice to others, how to battle the Enemy, that sort of thing. However, when tribulation suddenly comes a-knocking, you quickly lose your water. Pay some attention to how fragile you are, especially in the small things of life. They are for your salvation, all these dreadful little things that happen to you. Put the bad stuff out of your heart, as best as you know how. And if it goes get to you, do not let it depress you or entangle you for long. As for consolation, if you are not getting any, then at the least bear up patiently. Also, if you accidentally overhear an insulting remark and feel your gorge rise, reprimand yourself and do not let a wisecrack escape your mouth, lest the tots and tykes be scandalized. If commotion arises, quickly muffle your drums, and from that, the internal pain will be suitably and smoothly hummed with grace. Up to this point God has lived, prepared to help us, and he is prepared to help us more. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
However, we must first have faith in God, then invoke God directly, and address God nicely. Keep your heard on straight! Cinch up your cincture! There are worse battles ahead. However, do not fuss and fume if you have to skirmish with tribulation, or worse, come under heavy fire from temptation. Why? Well, God should have thought it obvious by now. You are homo sapiens, not Sapientia herself! You are fleshy, not feathery; human, not Angel. Just saying in the same old place as far as virtue’s concerned is not really a virtue in the spiritual life. The First Angel as well as the First Man found that out. And now they are out of Heaven, out of Paradise. God is the One who raises up those who are down and out about their own welfare. However, those who know their own infirmity, these God will carry to His divinity. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. In me be the windswept truth of shorepine, fragrance of balsam and spruce, the grace of hemlock. In me the truth of douglas fir, straight, tall, strong-trucked land hero of fireproof bark. Sheltering tree of life, cedar’s truth be mine, cypress truth, juniper aroma, strength of yew. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. In me be the truth of streamlover willow soil-giving alder hazel of sweet nuts, wisdom-branching oak. In me the joy of crabapple, greatmaple, vinemaple, cleansing cascara and lovely dogwood. And the gracious truth of the copper branches arbutus, bright with colour and fragrance, be with me on the Earth. May all I say and all I think be in harmony with thee, God within me, God beyond me, maker of the trees. This Feast of the Law all your gladness display, today all your homages render. What profit can lead one so pleasant a way, what jewels can vie with its splendour? Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. My God I will praise in a jubilant lay, my hope in Him never surrender. His glory proclaim where His chosen sons pray, my Rock all my trust shall engender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. My heart of Thy goodness shall carol alway, Thy praises I ever will render; while breath is, my lips all Thy wonders shall say, Thy truth and Thy kindness so tender. Then exult in the Law on its festival day, the Law is our Light and Defender. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Cresleigh Homes
All we’re missing are the placecards! Since we moved to our home at Brighton Station (the residence 3 model) we’ve been anxious to host as many family gatherings as possible.
When you’ve got an open floorplan, large eat-in island, and a fab outdoor space, there are so many options! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
A Cresleigh Home, a place on Earth supremely blest, a dearer, sweeter home than all the rest.
Witches, Warlock, and Ghost in the Mansion of Mrs. Winchester!
Some people call themselves witches, and believe that they are able to contact and utilize powers from the invisible realm. However, there are many questions about witchcraft. Is it merely a game some people play? Is it beneficial to humanity? Or is it evil and dangerous? Universities all over the World are offering courses in occultism, and teams of scientists are investigating reports of mysterious magical phenomena all over the globe. They are baffled by some of the amazing incidents they encounter, and admit that present scientific knowledge cannot account for them. The Word of God may not provide a specific explanation for every problem one may encounter as one studies Satan, Satanism, and witchcraft, but it sheds much light on these subjects and offers practical guidelines by which God’s children can avoid dangers inherent in occultism. An unexpected and amazing development of this enlightened age is the resurgence of interest in Satan and an increase in occultic activity. A few years ago, most people assumed that the devil was dead, in the same manner that some theologians recently have affirmed the death of God. It is now becoming increasingly apparent that these reports were premature. Satan is very much alive, and is actively involved in today’s World. Though many scientists and philosophers still scoff at the idea of a personal devil, highly educated people all over the World meet regularly to worships Satan. Some groups, having dedicated themselves to the service of the devil, have committed brutal sacrificial slayings, while others engage in vile acts of immorality. Witchcraft, seances, and fortunetelling, for many years limited to areas of ignorance and superstition, are now discussed in highly respected magazines. Newspapers carry horoscopes, and multitudes consult them seriously every day. Prominent people have received a great deal of publicity by reporting the reception of personal messages from the spirits of the dead. The late Bishop Pike, for example, published a widely-read book telling of seances in which he purportedly talked with his dead son who had committed suicide. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Others, claiming the ability to foretell the future, also have become the objects of widespread interest, and have name Jeane Dixon comes to mind. She reportedly communicated with Mrs. Winchester who wanted to continue the restoration of her mansion. Mrs. Dixon is considered a prophetess by many people, and top leaders in government industry consult her for information about the future. In Europe today, more people are making a livelihood through the practice of occultism than the total number engaged in the Christian ministry. Belief in the existence of an unseen spiritual realm to be entered at death, and which has an influence upon human life, has captivated the minds of multitudes. The millions involved with occultism are unaware of the real nature of these mysterious and dangerous areas of investigation, and refuse to turn to the one source of truth regarding the kingdom of darkness. The Bible, the holy Word of God, reveals the true nature of the supernatural. It teaches that two real spiritual Worlds exist, one good and the other evil. It tells us that God is a Spirit (John 4.24), and that a great number of angels called “ministering spirits” (Hebrews 1.14) worship Him in Heaven and carry out His assignments upon Earth. The other invisible kingdom is evil, and is under the direction of Satan, who controls an organized host of wicked spirit beings. They are a formidable foe arrayed against God and His people, and the apostle Paul declared, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this World, against spiritual wickedness in high places,” reports Ephesians 6.12. All that can be known about the devil’s origin, fall, and present activity is to be found in the Bible. Although it does not specifically answer every question we may ask, it tells us the important facts about him and his kingdom. He was once a glorious, sinless creature, but he rebelled against God, was cast out of Heaven to Earth, and now leads his great army of spirit beings in a futile attempt to defeat God and destroy His people. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The devil was created an angelic being of great beauty and splendor and at one time had great favour with God. Ezekiel describes him in his sinless state as follows, “Son of man, take up a lamentation upon the king of Tyre, and say unto him, Thus saith the Lord God: Thou sealest up the sum, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty. Thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day thou wast created. Thou art the anointed cherub that covereth, and I have seen thee so; that wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee,” Ezekiel 28.12-15. Although the prophet was addressing these words primarily to an Earthly ruler, the king of Tyre, it is apparent that the full meaning of this prophecy is not exhausted by its reference to a flesh-and-blood monarch. The ultimate subject of Ezekiel’s words was Satan, the real instigator of the king’s pride and cruelty. Many Bible students reject this interpretation of Ezekiel’s dirge. They consider this viewpoint to be untenable and imaginative, and prefer to consider the prophet’s description to be a highly figurative portrayal of the king of Tyre. Some even say this lamentation incorporates a well-known Tyrian myth about a primeval being who lived in the “Garden of God” until he was expulsed for pride and rebellion. It is unlikely, however, that the inspired prophet would incorporate a myth into his message of judgment. Then, too, many prophetic pronouncements contained a double perspective. Isaiah, for example, after giving a stern warning of impending disaster, told Ahaz that the Lord would give a sign that the message he had spoken was true. “Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; behold, the virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. Butter and honey shall he eat, and choose the good. For before the child shall know to refuse the evil, and choose the good, the land that thou abhorrest shall be forsaken by both her kings,” reports Isaiah 7.14-16. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fourteenth verse is a definite reference to Christ, the virgin-born Son of God, but verses fifteen and sixteen point to Maher-shalal-hash-baz, the infant son of Isaiah whose birth and early years are described in the following chapter. Before the lad was three years old, Pekah and Rezin, king of Israel and Syria, had been executed as the prophet had predicted. Since this type of double reference is common in the prophetic Scriptures, it should not be thought strange that Ezekiel, in pronouncing judgment upon the king of Tyre, should also be alluding to Satan, who motivated the Earthly monarch to his sinful pride and cruelty. The prophet declared that in his original state Satan was a creature of great wisdom and beauty. He portrays the devil as having been in Eden, the garden of God, and describes him as having been lavishly adorned with jewels at that time. The translation in our King James Version also speaks of the “timbrels” and “flutes” prepared by him on the day he was created, and some Bible students have inferred from this that he had great musical ability and was given charge of the Heavenly choirs which sang their praises to God. The Hebrew words, however, are difficult to translate, and most students are convinced that the words rendered “timbrels” and “flutes” more likely refer to the gold settings and engravings of his ornamental attire. “Every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz, and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, and the jasper, the sapphire, the emerald, and the carbuncle, and gold; the workmanship of thy timbrels and of thy flutes was prepared in thee in the day that thou wast created,” reports Ezekiel 28.13. This exalted creature is also declared to be “the anointed cherub that covereth,” reports Ezekiel 28.14, which indicates that God appointed him to have a place of special prominence in connection with his throne. The remainder of the verse, “thou wast upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire,” indicates that before his sin, he was in the immediate presence of God’s glorious holiness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In fact, Satan may have been the most exalted of all the angels, and the memory of this former glory could have been the reason Michael did not dare “bring against him a railing accusation,” (Jude 9). Dr. Eric Sauer suggests the possibility that even before God created man, He committed to Lucifer a position of authority in relation to the Earth and its surrounding planets. For this reason, Satan is called the “god of this World” in the New Testament. In England and Scotland during the mediaeval and later periods of its existence, witchcraft was an offence against the laws of God and man; in Celtic Ireland dealing with the unseen were not regarded with such abhorrence, and indeed had the sanction of custom and antiquity. Consequently, when the Anglo-Normans came over, they found that the native Celts had no predisposition towards accepting the view of the witch as an emissary of Satan and an enemy of the Church, though they fully believed in supernatural influences of both good and evil, and credited their Bards and Druids with the possession of powers beyond the ordinary. The persecution of witches did not cease in the countries where that the growth and spread of witchcraft made headway—far from it; on the contrary it was kept up with unabated vigour. Infallibility was transferred from the Church to the Bible; the Roman Catholic persecuted the witch because Supreme Pontiffs had stigmatized her as a heretic and an associate of Satan, while the Protestant acted similarly because Holy Writ contained the grim command, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” The evil that was wrought by such amongst an unenlightened and superstitious people can be well imagined; unbelievers would be converted, while the credulous would be rendered more secure in their credulity. In the 16th century, during the rule of the Commonwealth Parliament thirty thousand witches were put to death in England. Even as late as 1690 torture was judicially applied to extract evidence, for in that year a Jacobite gentleman was questioned by the boots. However, Scotland, even at its worst, fades into insignificance before certain parts of the Continent, where torture was used to an extent and degree that can only be termed hellish; the appalling ingenuity displayed in the various methods of applying the “question extraordinary” seems the work of demons rather than of Christian, and makes one blush for humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Nonetheless, the punishment of death by fire for witchcraft or sorcery was not employed to any extend in Ireland. We have one undoubted instance, and a general hint of some others as a sequel to this. How the two witches were put to death in 1578 we are told, but probably it was by hanging. Subsequent to the passing of the Act of 1586, the method of execution would have been that for felony. On the Continent the stake was in continual request. In 1514, three hundred persons were burnt alive for this crime at Como. Between 1615 and 1635, more than six thousand sorcerers were burnt in the diocese of Strasburg, while, if we can credit the figures of Bartholomew de Spina, in Lombardy a thousand sorcerers a year were put to death for the space of twenty-five years. The total number of person executed in various ways for this crime has, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, been variously estimated at from one hundred thousand to several millions; if the latter figure be too high undoubtedly the former is too low. In the persecution of those who practised magical arts, no rank or class in society was spared; the noble equally with the peasant was liable to torture and death. This was especially true of the earlier stages of the movement when sorcery rather than witchcraft was the crime committed. For there is a general distinction between the two, though in many instances they are confounded. Sorcery was, so to speak, more of an aristocratic pursuit; the sorcerer was the master of the Devil (until his allotted time expired), and compelled him to do his bidding: the witch generally belonged to the lower classes, embodied in her art many practices which lay on the borderland between good and evil, and was rather the slave of Satan, who almost invariably proved to be a most faithless and unreliable employer. Anybody might become a victim of the witch epidemic; noblemen, scholars, monks, nuns, titled ladies, bishops, clergy—none were immune from accusation and condemnation. Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the cryptic emblems of our old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practised at reception by all secret societies, there are found indications of a doctrine which is everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
According to alchemists, the souls of the dead can be pinned into homunculi. A homunculi is a very small human being or humanoid creature; a supposed microscopic but fully formed human being which a fetus was formerly believed to develop. Much that passed current in the west as White (id est permissible) Magic was only a disguised goeticism, and many of the resplendent angels invoked with divine rites reveal their cloven hoofs. It is not too much to say that a large majority of past psychological experiments were conducted to establish communication with demons, and that for unlawful purposes. The pentagram is a symbol of faith, a symbol of the five elements Spirit, Air, Earth, Water, and Fire (one for each point), and the circle (the Universe) contains and connects them all. The Golden Ratio is the number 1.61803399, represented by the Greek letter Phi, and considered truly unique in its mathematical properties, prevalence throughout nature, and its ability to achieve a perfect aesthetic composition. It is integral to the pentagram. Shorter and longer sections of each line exist in golden ratio. If you look at God’s fingers and the general position of the bodies in Michelangelo’s fresco, you will see pentagrams. After Mrs. Winchesters mysterious disappearance in 1922, the mansion of emptied of her belongings. It took six trucks working around the clock for six weeks to move all of her furniture out. Many people say not only was it a lot of stuff, but the movers would get lost in the mansion. Nonetheless, some things were left behind. From time to time the mansion was rented out. A young couple Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor rented the place, but the story of what happened is very fascinating. No one ever thought that Ethel Taylor would marry Oliver Hall; but he thought differently, and things which Oliver Hall intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went Yale. She laughed and refused him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The Next time Oliver came home, he asked her again. However, she laughed, tosses her luscious blonde locks, and refused again. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more then ever. Oliver was not the only man who wanted to marry her, but his attempts were like an elephant, at whose clumsy feats were considerably amusing. Ethel was the belle of the Santa Clara Valley, and every one was in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like masher collars or Inverness capes. Therefore everyone was very annoyed as surprised when Oliver Hall walked into the Bank of Italy Building and invited everyone to his wedding. “Your wedding?” “You do not mean it?” “Who is the happy fair? When is it to be?” Oliver Hall filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said—“I am sorry to deprive you fellow of your only joke—but Miss Taylor and I just let the Winchester mansion and are to married at the estate in April. “You do not mean it?” “He has got the mitten again, and its turned his head.” “No,” he said, rising “I see it is true. Lend me a pistol someone—or a first class fare to other end of Nowhere. Hall has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it a mesmerism, or a love-potion, Oliver?” “Neither, sir, but a gift you will never have—perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this World. It is so glorious to know of a surety that now we can think, feel, speak, act—above all, love one another—haunted by no counteracting spell, responsible to no living creature for our life and our love.” There was something in his voice that silenced everyone, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further. The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Taylor, she blushed and smiled, and dimpled, for all the World as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. They had been laughing very heartily, cherishing the mirth, as it were like those who caress a lovely bird that had been frightened out of its natural home and grown wild and rare in its visits, only tapping at the lattice for a minute, and then gone. Women are strange creatures. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
In Santa Clara everyone who was anyone was asked to the wedding at Llanada Villa. Many people were truly more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself. The coming marriage was much canvasses at afternoon tea-tables, and at the Bank of Italy over the saddler’s, and the question was always asked: “Does she care for him?” The best man used to ask that question in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in April, the pause between the acts, when the house was half-darkened, and the laughter died away made him never ask that question again. “How cold is it,” said John, the best man, shivering. Oliver shivered too; but not with cold, it was more like the involuntary sensation at which people say, “Someone is walking over my grave.” He said so, jestingly. “Hush, Oliver,” whispered John, and again the draught of cold air seemed to blow right between them. The next week, John was coming home from the Bank of Italy through the churchyard. Their church was on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one’s footsteps are noiseless. He made no sound as he vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded his way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that he heard Oliver Hall’s voice, and saw his face. Ethel was siting on a low flat gravestone with the full splendour of the western sun upon her mignonne face. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of her love of Oliver; it was transfigured to a beauty John should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face. Many people said she was like a reincarnation of Mrs. Winchester. Oliver lay at Ethel’s feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden April evening. “This spring is cold for you, my love. I half wish we had taken courage, and sailed once more for Hispaniola. My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the if you wanted.” John coughed at once to indicate his presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened. “Oh, no—oh, no! No mor of the sea. Llanada Villa is perfect for me,” she said, with another and stronger shoulder. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“Ethel,” he said at last, rousing himself, with a half-smile, “I think I must have grown remarkably attractive. Look! half the glasses opposite are lifted to our box. It cannot be to gaze at me, you know. Do you remember telling me I was the ugliest fella you ever saw?” “Oh, Oliver!” Yet it was quite true—she had thought him so, in far back, strange, awful times, when she, a girl of sixteen, had her mind wholly filled with one idea!—one insane, exquisite dream; when she brought her innocent child’s garlands, and sat him down under one spreading magnificent tree, which trees of the Victorian garden at Llanada Villa, until she felt its dews dropping death upon her youth, and her whole soul withering under its venomous shade. “Oh, Oliver!” She cried once more, looking fondly on his beloved face, where no unearthly beauty dazzled, no unnatural calm repelled; where all was simple, noble, manly, true. “My dearly beloved, I thank Heaven for that dear ‘ugliness’ of yours. Above all, though blood runs strong, they say , I thank Heaven that I see you no likeness to—” Oliver knew what name she meant, though for a whole year past—since God’s mercy made it to them only a name—they had ceased to utter it, and let it die wholly out of the visible World. The wedding was to be early in April. Two days before, John had to run up town on business. The train was late, of course, for they were on the South-Eastern, and as he stood grumbling with his watch in his hand, who should he see but Oliver Hall and Ethel Taylor. They were walking up and down the unfrequent end of the platform, that he obtrusively passed the pair with his Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. He did this with as good an air of not seeing them as he could assume. John prided himself on his discretion, but if Oliver were traveling alone he wanted his company. He had it. “Hullo, old man,” came his cheery voice as he swung his bad into John’s carriage; “here is luck; I was expecting a dull journey!” “Where are you off to?” John asked, discretion still bidding him turn his eyes away, though he saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
“To old San Francisco,” he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart. He stood—clasping her hand secretly and hard; then he grew quitter; until, as the drop-scene fell, the same cold air swept past them. It was as if someone fresh from the sharp sea-wind had entered the box. “Oh, I wish you would not go, Oliver,” she was saying in a low, earnest voice. “I feel certain something will happen.” “Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?” “Do not go,” she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent anyone’s Gladstone on to the platform and one after it. However, Oliver Hall was made differently; he rarely changed his opinion, never his resolutions. He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door. “I must go, Ethel, The old boy’s have been awfully good to me, and now he is dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for—” the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting rain. “You are sure to come?” she spoke as the train moved. “Nothing shall keep me,” he answered; and they steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept his silence for a minute. When he spoke it was to explain to John that his godfather, whose heir he was, lay dying in Le Petit Trianon, some fifty miles away, and had sent for Oliver, and Oliver felt bound to go. “I shall be surely back tomorrow,” he said, “or, if not, the day after, in heaps of time. Thank Heaven, one has not to get up in the middle of the night to get married nowdays!” “And supposed Mr. Koshland dies?” “Alive or dead I mean to get married on Thursday!” Oliver answered, as he unfolded Oakland Tribune. At the Third and Townsend Depot they said their “goodbye,” and he got out and John saw him ride off; John went to Berkeley, where he stayed the night. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
When John got home the next afternoon, a very wet one, by the way, his sister greeted him with—“Where is Oliver Hall?” “Goodness knows,” he answered testily. Every man, since Cain, has resented that kind of question. “I thought you might have heard from him,” she went on, “as you are to give him away tomorrow.” “Is he not back,” I asked, for I had confidently expected to find him at Llanada Villa. “No, John,”—his sister Alexis always had a way of jumping to conclusions, expecially such conclusion as were least favourable to her fellow-creatures—“he has not returned, and, what is more, you may depend upon it he will not. You mark my words, there will be no wedding tomorrow.” His sister Alexis has the power of annoying him which no other human being possess. “You mark my words,” John retorted with asperity, “you had better give up making such a thundering idiot of yourself. There will be more wedding tomorrow than ever, you will take first part in.” A prophecy which, by the way, came true. However, though, John could snarl confidently to his sister, he did not feel so comfortable when, late that night, standing on the door step of the Winchester mansion, heard the Oliver had not returned home. Filled with German superstitions, the young man grew almost pale, but kept a courteous calmness. There was nothing too ghastly or terrible for his own imagination to conjure up. John went home gloomily through the rain. Next morning brought a brilliant blue sky, gold sun, and all such softness of air and beauty of cloud as to make up a perfect day. However, he woke with a vague feeling of having gone to bed anxious, and of being rather averse to facing that anxiety in the light of full wakefulness. However, with his shaving-water came a note from Oliver which relieved his mind and sent him to the Winchester mansion with a light heart. Ethel was in the garden. He saw her blue gown through the hollyhocks as the mansion’s gates swung behind him. So he did not go up to the mansion, but turned aside down the turfed path. “He has written to you too,” she said, without preliminary greeting, when John reached her side. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
“Yes, I am to meet him at the station at three, and come straight back to the mansion.” Her face looked pale, but there was brightness in her eyes, and a tender quiver about the mouth that spoke of renewed happiness. “Mrs. Koshland begged him so to stay another night that he had not the heart to refuse,” she went. “He is so kind, but I wish he had not stayed.” John was at the station at half-past two. He felt rather annoyed with Oliver. It seemed a sort of slight to the beautiful young lady who loved him, that he should come as it were out of breath, and with the dust of travel upon him to take her hand, which some of them would have given the best years of their lives to take. However, when the three o’clock train glided in, and glided out again having brought no passengers to their little station, John was more than annoyed. There was no other train for thirty-five minutes; he calculated that, with much hurry, he might just get back to the mansion in time for the ceremony; but, oh, what a fool to miss that first train! What other man could have done it? That thirty-five minutes seemed like a year, as he wandered round the station reading the advertisements and the time-tables, and the company’s bye-laws, and getting more and more angry with Oliver Hall. This confidence in his own power of getting everything he wanted the minute he wanted it was leading him too far. John hated waiting. After no sight of Oliver, he flung himself into the carriage that he had brough for him. “Drive to the mansion!” he said, as someone shut the door. “Mr. Hall has not come by this train.” Anxiety now replaced anger. What had become of the man? Could he have been suddenly taken will? John had never known Oliver to have an illness in his life. And even so, he might have telegraphed. Some awful accident must have happened. Maybe his corpse was picked up off a wreck, and committed to the deep—in the Gulf of Mexico. The thought that he had played her false never—no, not for a moment, entered John’s head. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yes, something terrible had happened to Oliver, and on John lay the task of telling his bride. John almost wished the carriage would upset and break his head so that someone else might tell her, not Joh, who—but that is nothing to do with the story. It was five minutes to four as they drew up to the gate of the Winchester mansion. A double row of eager onlooker lined the path of the palm avenue. John sprang from the carriage and passed up between them. The estate’s gardener had a good front place near the door. He stopped. “Are they waiting still, Thomas?” he asked, simply to gain time, for of course he knew they were by the waiting crowd’s attentive attitude. “Waiting, sir? No, sir, why it must be over by now.” “Over! Then Mr. Hall has come?” ‘To the minute, sir; must have missed you somehow, and I say, sir,” lowering his voice, “I never see Mr. Oliver the bit so afore, but my opinion is he has been drinking pretty free. His clothes was all dusty and his face a sheet. I tell you I did not like the looks of him, with never a look or a word for none of us; him that was always such a gentleman!” I had never heard Thomas make so long a speech. The crowd in at mansion wee talking in whispers and getting ready rice and slippers to throw at the bride and bridegroom. The ringers were ready with their hands on the ropes to rung out the merry peal as the bride and bridegroom should come out. A murmur from the Winchester mansion announced them; out they came, Thomas was right. Oliver Hall did not look himself. There was dust on his coat, his hair was disarranged. He seemed to have been in some row, for there was a black mark above his eyebrow. He was deathly pale. However, his pallor was not greater than that of the bride, who might have been carved in ivory—dress, veil, orange blossoms and all. As they passed out the ringers stooped—there were six of them—and then, on the ears expecting the gay wedding peal, came the slow tolling of the Winchester Bell. A thrill of horror at so foolish a jest from the ringers passed through all the guests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, the ringers themselves dropped the ropes and fled like rabbits down the belfry stairs. The bride shuddered, and grey shadows came about her mouth, but the bridegroom led her on down the path where the people stood with the handfuls of rice; but the handfuls were never thrown, and the wedding-bells never rang. In vain the ringers were urged to remedy their mistake: the protested with many whispered expletives that they would see themselves further first. In a hush like the hush in the chamber of death the bridal pair passed into their carriage and its door slammed behind them. Then the tongues were loosed. A babel of anger, wonder, conjecture from the guests and spectators. “If I had seen his condition, sir,” said old Seymour to me as we drove off, “I would have stretched him on the floor of the mansion, sir, by Heaven I would, before I would have let him marry my daughter!” Then he put his head out of the window. “Drive like fury,” he cried to the coachman; “do not spare the horses.” He was obeyed. They passed the bride’s carriage. John forbore to look at it, and old Seymour turned his head away and swore. They reached reception hall before it. They stood in the hall doorway, in the blazing afternoon sun, and in about half a minute, they heard the wheels crunching the gravel. When the carriage stopped in the front of the steps old Seymour and John ran down. “Great Heaven, the carriage is empty! And yet—” he had the door open in a minute, and this is what he saw—No sign of Oliver Hall; and of Ethel, his wife only a huddled heap of white satin lying half on the floor of the carriage and half on the seat. “I drove straight here, sir,” said the coachman, as the bride’s father lifted her out; “and I will swear no one got out of the carriage.” We drove back to the Winchester mansion, and carried her back into the house in her bridal dress, and drew back her veil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Her face. No one would ever forget. White, white and drawn with agony and horror, bearing such a look of terror as no one has never seen except in dreams. And her hair, her radiant blonde hair, it was white like snow. As John and her father stood, both half mad with horror and mystery of it, a body came up the avenue—a telegraph boy. They brought the orange envelop to John. He tore it open. “Mr. Hall was thrown from his horse on his way to the station at half-past one. Killed on the spot!” And he was married to Ethel Taylor in the Winchester Mansion at half-past three, in the presence of fifty guests. “I shall be married, dead or alive!” What had passed in that carriage on the drive to the reception hall? No one knows—no one will ever know. Oh, Ethel! Oh, my dear!” Before a week was over they laid her beside her husband in the Oak Hill Memorial Park on the northern most hill in the San Juan Bautista Hills of South San Jose. Thus was accomplished Oliver Hall’s wedding. Whether or not one believes in superstitions about spirits, it is hard to dismiss the unusual events that have taken place at this estate. Just like the original construction, restoration and maintenance work at Winchester Mystery House is never complete. The actual amount of materials requires is staggering. For example, it takes over 20,000 gallons of pain to cover the exterior—and by the time the workers have finished, they have to start all over again! Continuous work is being done on the massive structure, with carpenters, painters, and gardeners toiling away just like they did during Mrs. Winchester’s day. The sons, grandsons, and great grandson of Mrs. Winchester’s original employees have been some of these workmen! The restoration work is very demanding. Although you can still find spots where the cracked plaster has not been fixed after the 1906 Earthquake, almost everything will eventually be restored. This has been left like this on purpose, like a frozen moment in time, to show people how Mrs. Winchester lived there. An ongoing search continues for fine examples of the period furnishings, similar to what Mrs. Winchester herself would have used. Her original furnishings were auctioned off after her death and never have been recovered. The job of overseeing the restoration is a painstaking one. The historical accuracy of every project is researched and approved by the Restoration Board of Directors. Winchester Mystery House receives no funds from any government agency; the continuous restoration and maintenance programs are funded entirely from tour, café, and gift shop revenues. Since 1973, millions of dollars have been invested to ensure that this unique landmark will be preserved as the premier showcase of the Santa Clara Valley’s gracious past. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
The Witches Cap 🧙🏼♀️- named for it’s conical resemblance of a witches hat. Many famous mediums claim this room was “important” to Sarah Winchester, although we do not know what it was used for. How did you feel when you experienced the Witches Cap for the first time? winchestermysteryhouse.com
Is There Someone Who Teases You and Makes Fun of You?
Through the social compact we have given existence and life to the body politic. It is now a matter of giving it movement and will through legislation. For the primitive act whereby this body is formed and united still makes no determination regarding what it should do to preserve itself. Whatever is good and in conformity with order is such by the nature of things and independently of human conventions. All justice comes from God; He alone is its source. However, if we knew how to receive it from so exalted a source, we would have no need for government or laws. Undoubtedly there is a universal justice emanating from reason alone; but this justice, to be admitted among us, ought to be reciprocal. Considering things from a human standpoint, the lack of a natural sanction causes the laws of justice to be without teeth among humans. They do nothing but good to the wicked and evil to the just, when the latter observes them in one’s dealings with everyone while no one observes them in their dealings with one. There must therefore be conventions and laws to unite rights and duties and to refer justice back to its object. In the state of nature where everything is commonly held, I owe nothing to those to whom I have promised nothing. I recognize as belonging to someone else only what is not useful to me. It is not this way in the civil state where all rights are fixed by law. However, what then is a law? So long as we continue to be satisfied with attaching only metaphysical ideas to this word, we will continue to reason without coming to any understanding. And when they have declared what a law of nature is, they will not thereby have a better grasp of what a law of the state is. I have already stated that there is no general will concerning a particular object. In effect, this particular object is either within or outside of the state. If it is outside of the state, a will that is foreign to it is not general in relation to it. And if this object is within the state, that object is part of it; in that case, a relationship is formed between the whole and its parts which makes two separate beings, one of which is the part, and the other is the whole less that same part. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
However, the whole less a part is not the whole, and so long as this relationship obtains, there is no longer a whole, but rather two unequal parts. Whence it follows that the will of one is not more general in relation to the other. However, when the entire populace enacts a statute concerning the entire populace, it considers only itself, and if in that case a relationship is formed, it is between the entire object seen from one perspective and the entire object seen from another, without any division of the whole. Then the subject matter about which a statute is enacted is general like the will that enacts it. It is this act I call a law. When I say that the object of the laws is always general, I have in mind that the law considers subjects as a body and actions in the abstract, never a human as an individual or a particular action. Thus the law can perfectly well enact a statute to the effect that there be privileges, but it cannot bestow them by name on anyone. The law can create several classes of citizens, and even stipulate the qualification that determine membership in these classes, but it cannot name specific persons to be admitted to them. It can establish a royal government and a hereditary line of succession, but it cannot elect a king or name a royal family. In a word, any function that relates to an individual does not belong to the legislative power. One this view, it is immediately obvious that it is no longer necessary to ask who is to make the laws, since they are the acts of the general will; not whether the prince is above the laws, since one is a member of the state; nor whether the law can be unjust, since no one is unjust to oneself; not how one is both free and subject to the laws, since they are merely the record of our own wills. Moreover, it is apparent that since the law combines the universality of the will and that of the object, what a human, whoever one may be, decrees on one’s own authority is not a law. What even the sovereign decrees concerning a particular object is no closer to being a law; rather, it is a decree. Nor is it an act of sovereignty but of magistracy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
I therefore call every state ruled by laws a republic, regardless of the form its administration may take. For only then does the public interest govern, and only then is the “public thing” [in Latin: res publica] something real. Every legitimate government is republican. (By this word I do not have in mind merely an aristocracy or a democracy, but in general every government guided by the general will, which is to the law. To be legitimate, the government need not be made indistinguishable from the sovereign, but it must be its minister. Then the monarchy itself is a republic.) I will explain later on what government is. Strictly speaking, laws are merely the conditions of civil association. The populace that is subjected to the laws ought to be their author. The regulating of the conditions of society belongs to no one but those who are in association with one another. However, how will they regulate these conditions? Will it be by common accord, by a sudden inspiration? Does the body politic have an organ for making known its will? Who will give it necessary foresight to formulate acts and to promulgate them in advance, or how will it announce them in time of need? How will a blind multitude, which often does not know what it wants (since it rarely knows what is good for it), carry out on its own an enterprise as great and as difficult as a system of legislation? By itself the populace always wants the good, but by itself it does not always see it. Then general will is always right, but the judgment that guides it is not always enlightened. It must be made to see objects as they are, and sometimes as they ought to appear to it. The good path it seeks must be pointed out to it. It must be made safe from the seduction of private wills. It must be given a sense of time and place. It must weigh present, tangible advantages against the danger of distant, hidden evils. Private individuals see the good they reject. The public wills the good that it does not see. Everyone is equally in need of guides. The former must be obligated to conform their will to their reason; the latter must learn to know what it wants. Then public enlightenment results in the union of the understanding and the will in the social body; hence the full cooperation of the parts, and finally the greatest force of the whole. Whence there arises the necessity of having a legislator. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
Earlier we saw that when all the Second Wave principles were put to work in a single organization the result was a classical industrial bureaucracy: a giant, hierarchical, permanent, top-down, mechanistic organization, well designed for making repetitive products or repetitive decisions in a comparatively stable industrial environment. Now, however, as we shift to the new principles and begin to apply them together, we are necessarily led to wholly new kinds of organizations for the future. These Third Wave organizations have flatter hierarchies. They are less top-heavy. They consist of small components linked together in temporary configurations. Each of these components has its own relationships with the outside World, its own foreign policy, so to speak, which it maintains without having to go through the center. These organization operate more and more around the clock. However, they are different from bureaucracies in another fundamental respect. They are what might be called “dual” or “poly” organizations, capable of assuming two or more distinct structural shapes as conditions warrant—rather like some plastic of the future that will change shape when heat or cold is applied but spring back into a basic form when the temperature is in its normal range. One might imagine an army that is democratic and participatory in peace time but highly centralized and authoritarian during war, having been organized, in the first place, to be capable of both. We might use the analogy of a football team whose members are not merely capable of rearranging themselves in T formation and numerous other arrangements for different plays but who, at the sound of a whistle, are equally capable of reassembling themselves as a soccer, baseball, or basketball squad, depending upon the game being played. Such organizational players need to be trained for instant adaptation, and they must feel comfortable in a wider repertoire of available organizational structures and roles. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
We need managers who can operate as capably in an open-door, free-flow style as in a hierarchical mode, who can work in an organization structured like an Egyptian pyramid as well as in one that looks like a Calder mobile, with a few thin managerial strands holding a complex set of nearly autonomous modules that move in response to the gentlest breeze. We do not yet have a vocabulary for describing these organizations of the future. Terms like matrix or ad hoc are inadequate. Various theorists have suggested different words. Advertising man Lester Wunderman has said, “Ensemble groups, acting as intellectual commandos, will begin to replace the hierarchical structure.” Tony Judge, one of our most brilliant organization theorists, has written extensively about the “network” character of these emerging organizations of the future, pointing out, among other things, that “the network is not ‘coordinated’ by anybody; the participating bodies coordinate themselves so that one may speak of ‘autocoordination.’” Elsewhere he has described them in terms of Buckminster Fuller’s “tensegrity” principles. However, whatever terms we use, something revolutionary is happening. We are participating not merely in the birth of new organizational forms but in the birth of a new civilization. A new code book is taking form—a set of Third Wave principles, fresh ground-rules for social survival. It is hardly any wonder that parents—still mainly tied to the industrial-era code book—find themselves in conflict with children who, aware of the growing irrelevance of the old rules, are uncertain, if not blindly ignorant, of the new ones. They and we alike are caught between a dying Second Wave order and the Third Wave civilization of today. The principal interpersonal theories of depression emphasizes the role of interpersonal rejection in maintain the disorder. This interpersonal phenomenon is evidently not specific to depression, as people with social anxiety disorder are also likely to experience interpersonal rejection. Of course, it is possible that in at least some cases, the relationship between anxiety and rejection is secondary to the relationship between depression and rejection. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Notwithstanding this possibility, the anxiety-rejection relationship appears robust. Evidence for this rejection effect comes from a variety of populations and interpersonal contexts. For example, a group of socially anxious male high school student who interacted with female confederates received less desirable ratings as potential dates by those confederates. Friends and family members of socially anxious people view them as less likeable and more difficult to talk to, in comparison to their nonanxious peers. Socially anxious high school students in one study indicated that they received less support and less acceptance from their classmates. However, there was no relationship in this study between social anxiety and support from parents or teachers, indicating that this rejection effect is most evident from peers. Younger children with social anxiety also experience interpersonal rejection. For example, 7- to 14-year-olds were observed interacting with peers, and also observed was the quality (positive, negative, or neutral) of peer responses to interaction with the target child. Children with social anxiety disorder received fewer positive responses from their peers during the observed interaction than nonanxious children did. Another sample of children aged 6-11 with social anxiety disorder indicated that they did not feel socially accepted and that they had more negative interactions with peers (exempli gratia, being teased, made fun of, having enemies) than nonannxious controls did. Children with anxiety disorders tend to be disliked by their peers. In a study of over 1,000 children aged 6-11, students were classified as “cooperative,” “friendly-dominant,” “hostile-dominant,” or “submissive,” based on peer nominations. As might be expected, social anxiety was highest among the submissive group. When students were asked who they “liked most,” those in the submissive group (id est, socially anxious) ranked last out of the four, and were tied for first with the hostile-dominant group for peers’ rating of whom they “liked least.” Evidence from family studies, shows that even parents may act rejecting toward children with social phobia. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Children and adults with social anxiety disorder are typically non-threatening, and, if anything, more likely than nonanxious individuals to try to appease others. Why then should they be the recipients of the interpersonal rejection? It has been hypothesized that this effect is due to perceived dissimilarity. In this study, participants engaged in a conversation with a confederate, who, along with peers observed, rated the similarity of the target person to the confederate and indicated their acceptance or rejection of the target. The relationship between the target’s social anxiety and interpersonal rejection from others was mediated by perception of the target’s similarity. It was concluded that “we reject socially anxious individuals because we perceive them as different than ourselves and that we use how uncomnfortable they appear and any unwillingness on their part to reciprocate our confidence as information about exactly how different they are. Interpersonal rejection plays a crucial, and perhaps etiological, role in social anxiety disorder. Children with poor social skills are likely to experience interpersonal rejection. These rejection experiences lead to pessimistic expectations for social interactions, which in turn generate affective and psychological anxiety responses to social interactions. Anxious children are assumed to avoid such interactions because of these responses, and this avoidance reduces their opportunities for learning and enhancing social skills, thus returning them to the start of the cycle. If any stage of the model is present (id est, poor social skill, interpersonal rejection, negative expectations, anxiety reactions, avoidance), social phobia can develop. As such, one could characterize this as a cascade model: Once any stage in the cycle is initiated in force, subsequent stages are inevitable. Then apparent consequences of problematic social skills, expectations for negative social outcomes, and interpersonal rejection are a lack of close relationships and a turbulent interpersonal environment for the socially anxious person. This pattern begins very early in life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Socially anxious children in primary school indicate that they have more negative interactions with peers (exempli gratia, “Is there someone who teases you and makes fun of you?”) than nonanxious children do. Similarly, adolescents who experience social anxiety report less frequent contact and intimacy with friends, compared to their less anxious peers. A sample of socially anxious high school students who were interviewed about their friendships indicated that they received less support from their classmates, that they had fewer friends, and that their friendships were less intimate than those of nonanxious classmates. The pattern of troubled personal relationships that begins in childhood continues into adulthood. Adolescents and young adults (aged 14-24 years) with social anxiety disorder exhibit impairment in social and leisure activities, in addition to problems with household and work relations. University students with social anxiety report fewer interactions with members of the opposite gender, and great dissatisfaction with their performance in those interactions, than their nonanxious counterparts do. When college students were asked to keep a diary of their social interactions, those who classified as high in social anxiety rated the quality of these interactions (exempli gratia, “difficult,” “guarded,” “many communication breakdowns,” “a great deal of misunderstanding”) more negatively than students who were low in social anxiety did. Another sample of college students with social anxiety indicated that they engaged in pleasures of the flesh less frequently than students low in anxiety, and that when they did they rated it as less enjoyable. Socially anxious college students evaluate themselves as generally nonassertive and socially avoidant. As they continue into early and middle adulthood, people with social phobia report a great deal of difficulty establishing and maintaining romantic relationship, and perhaps as a result less likely to marry than their nonanxious counterparts. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Among those who do not marry, social dysfunction is particularly evident. An unfortunate reality of social anxiety and social phobia is a lack of satisfying interpersonal relationships and interactions. The relationships that are available are often judged, at least by the socially anxious person, to be of low quality and intimacy. Like problems with social skills, these relationship problems may maintain, if not worse, feelings of anxiety. At the same time, social anxiety itself (especially when it reaches the point of social phobia) undoubtedly had the potential to spoil opportunities for relationship development. “I can do everything with the help of Christ who gives me the strength I need,” reports Philippians 4.13. We draw to our lives that which we constantly think about. If we dwell on the negative, we will attract the negative people, experiences, and attitudes. If we dwell on our fears, we will draw in more fear. You set the direction of your life with your thoughts. “Seek, inquire for, and require the Lord while He may be found [claiming Him by necessity and by right]; call upon Him while He is near,” reports Isaiah 55.6. God’s grace is such a precious commodity. Therefore, do not allow it to be watered down or thinned out with extraneous things or terennal consolations. The choice is up to you. You do not have to entertain every thought that comes to mind. The first thing you need to do is ascertain where that thought is coming from. Is that thought from God, is it your own thought, or is it a destructive thought from the enemy? If a thought is negative, it is most likely from the enemy. If a thought is discouraging, or destructive, brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief; if the thought makes you feel weak, inadequate, or insecure, that thought is not from God. If you hope to keep receiving God’s grace on a regular basis, one of the things you have to do is ditch all impediment to grace. Look for a secret garden of your own. Spend some time there. Alone, preferably. Leave your friends at the path, leave your books at the gate, and God will be there waiting in this fine Chatsworthy place. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
We can pray to God, and He will give us a few snippets on how to keep one’s spirit penitential and one’s conscious pure. The Bible says, “We should cast down every wrong imagination and take into captivity every wrong thought,” reports Corinthians 10.5. That simply means: Do not dwell on it. Get rid of it immediately. Reject it, and choose to think on something optimistic. If you make the mistake of dwelling on the enemy’s lies, you allow the negative seed to take root. And the more you think about it, the more it is going to grow, creating an enemy stronghold in your mind from which attacks can be launched. Night and day, the enemy will pummel your mind with notions such as: You are never going to be successful. Nobody in your county has ever amounted to much. You are not smart enough. Your parents do not trust you with their money. Your mayor was always depressed and evil. Your governor could not keep a job. Even your local news reporters are always having a mental health crisis and are pathological liars! You were just born in the wrong city and state. Therefore, you must realize that God is in control and He is the only source of authority that matters. God is not limited by geographical location, time, or space. He is not limited by your education, your social standing, your economic standing, your income source, nor your race. The only thing that limits God is your lack of faith. There is no such thing as the wrong side of the pond with God. If you will put your trust in Him, God will make your life significant. God longs to make something great out of your life. He will take a nobody and shape that person into an extraordinarily successful individual. However, you must cooperate with God’s plan; you must start thinking of yourself as the champion God made you to be. The enemy attacks your mind saying that you do not have what it takes; God says you do have what it takes to be successful. Whom are you going to believe? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The enemy attacks your mind saying that you do not have what it takes; God say you have what it takes to be whatever you want in life. The enemy says you are not able to become extraordinarily successful; God declares you can do all things through Christ. The enemy says you will never get out of debt; God has proclaimed that you will have abundance and financial success, you will lend and not borrow. The enemy says you are never going to get well; God says He will restore your health. The enemy says you will never amount to anything; God says He will make you a great success and your life will be significant. The enemy says your problems are too big, there is no hope; God says He will solve those problems. Not only that, but God will turn those problems into blessing. Therefore, develop a habit of believing what God says about you; start agreeing with Godly thoughts. God’s thoughts will build you up and encourage you. They will give you the strength you need to persevere. God’s thoughts will give you a spirit of success. How can you discover God’s thoughts? Easy, just start reding and meditating on His Word, allowing its truths to become the operating system for your life. Father, I choose to think in patterns that will be pleasing to You. Please help me, I pray, to recognize those areas where the enemy is trying to make inroads into my mind. Please help me to cast down every evil thought and imagination, and to replace those negative ideas with input from Your Word. As for the rest of the World, do not give it a thought. Do God first; do all the rest later, if there is any time left over. That is to say, you will not be able to wait on God and at the same time tickle your own Tranitories. As for your friends and acquaintances, tell them you are going on holiday. However, if you are going on holiday with God, then leave behind all your usual baggage. So prayed Blessed Apostle Peter in his First Letter, that those faithful to Christ should describe themselves as “strangers and wayfarers” (2.11). When you are about to die, will you have enough faith in your wallet to let go of those final affections of the World? #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Will your sallow and indeed shallow flesh ever let your soul escape to the Freedom Beyond? Sentiments similar to those in First Corinthians (2.14). If you truly wish to be spiritual, you have to renounce everything near and far and take care of no one more than yourself. If you have perfectly conquered yourself, then you will be able to subjugate the rest of the World more easily. The perfect victory? To triumph over oneself. If you yourself in check—that is to say, if your sensuality obeys your reason, and your reason obeys God in all things—then you can truly claim victory over yourself and have yourself proclaimed lord of the World. If you are determined to scale this crest, then you should follow the advice of John the Baptist, as it is recorded in Matthew (3.10); that is to say, you have to begin by picking up the ax and putting it swiftly, virilely, to the roots, uprooting and destroying all the wildly successful plants that are destroying you. Self-love is the radical vice, the root that needs to be eradicated at all costs. Evil once conquered and captured must be led in triumph through the streets! After that, there will be a period of peace and tranquillity. Only a few take seriously this business of dying to self, and even they have had only partial success. Some, caught up in the wonderfulness of themselves, remain entangled in their own desires and cannot rise above themselves in spirit. Others, on the other hand, who freely desire to walk with Me in the Garden have to leave all their clingings—that is to say, their diddly depravities and fickle affections, their creature comforts and private stashes—at the gate. Sometimes we pray for things we do not need and are not good for us. I heard of a man in World War II who prayed for God to move him from one concentration camp to another. It was just a few miles away and he prayed and God answered his prayer. He was very happy but it was short lived. In a few weeks the Allied forces came into the camp he left and liberated all the prisoners. He stayed two more years in the other camp. He used his faith and his prayer was answered, but it prolonged the problem. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
First of all, you need to determine what is the will of God. When you know God’s will, you know that God is going to hear you. The Word says if God hears you, you will get what you ask. First John 5.14-15 is simply saying that if you get an audience with your Father, you will get your prayer answered. When I was growing up, I knew if I could get to my dad, I could get him to drop me off at school is his brand-new Maserati Ghibli. However, sometimes my mother would say, “No, do not bother him now. He is asleep.” So I could not get an audience with him. I knew if I could get an audience with him, I would get what I wanted. The Word tells us how to get an audience with our Heavenly Father. Sometimes we think the Lord must have heard us because we have goose bumps running up and down our back. That has nothing to do with it. You may get some feeling (and that is all right), but do not base your faith on feelings. What if you do not get any feeling at all? That is right, too. That does not change the Word of God. “Let one ask in faith, nothing wavering. For one that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that human think that one shall receive any thing of the Lord. A double minded human is unstable in all one’s ways,” reports James 1.6-8. You receive because you believe God and act on His Word. Goose bumps will never produce an answer to prayer—faith will! The actualizing person is relatively free to experience and express personal fears. Such a person is able to live from within along the polar axes of one’s being. Few people remain in the actualizing process all the time. More common is the tendency to be actualizing part of the time and manipulative part of the time. However, if the person remains unaware of manipulative tendences, they may grow like weeds and eventually overtake the garden of the personality. Unfortunately, most people learn to relate at the manipulative level. This comes about when experiences that bring pain and fear result in a tendency to live a more controlled and calculating way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Since the open and direct experience of feelings makes one vulnerable in bearing one’s heart to others, the manipulative person closes up and becomes less straightforward in order to avoid any possibility of being hurt or frightened again. One relates to others primarily in mechanical and unfeeling ways, thus becoming less authentic, less spontaneous, and less creative than the actualizing person. Manipulative behaviour is stereotypic and compulsive, lacking novelty and choice. That is why it becomes a boring and tedious way to live and often leads to depression. Manipulation is a way of using others to get what you consciously or unconsciously want from one. However, the person who exploits people as though they were things loses the capacity to enjoy intimacy and love in relationships. In contrast to the actualizing person, the manipulator invests more energy in fortifying the ego boundary and less in living rhythmically and responsively. Even the body becomes tighter and less sensitive. It is as though in pursuit of security, the manipulative person retreats into a walled city and tries to hide there. Next some the character level, in which the person literally becomes a “character”—that is, someone who reacts in the same narrow, limited way to almost any input from outside. This level of functioning is even more emotionally constricting. The fear is greater than that of the manipulator, and the person is more thoroughly stuck in rigid behaviour patterns. There is a real inability to learn from new situations or from life. Rather, the person reacts in the same stiff, repetitious way day after day, year after year. This is the level of most neurotic behaviour. The games the manipulative pattern now reflect a rather grim, frozen stance against a hostile and threatening World. The walls of the self become still more thick and rigid. This level could be described as further withdrawal into a central fortress within the city walks. Finally comes the psychotic level, the desperate “Custer’s last stand” against a World that is experienced as overwhelming. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Everything is subordinated to the task of psychological survival in the “Custer’s last stand” crisis mode of existence. Fear has completely filled the center of the personality. There is no room for love, hope, joy, wisdom, or peace. The muscles remain chronically tensed or flaccid, depending upon the specific form the psychosis takes. The behaviour of the psychotic is bizarre and extreme. The person may hallucinate, repeat certain phrases incessantly, or sit in one position for days on end. Meaning and emotional connectedness to others have almost completely disappeared, so the psychotic must construct an entirely new reality based on fantasies or unconscious drives. At the chronic psychotic level, life is restricted to the tiny dungeon deep in the recesses of the walled city. During the acute stage, or “psychotic break” with reality, the individual can no longer sustain the heavy investment of energy required to keep defenses going. Therefore, the walls begin to collapse and the self is lost in chaos, apathy, terror, or rage. Much human suffering makes sense when viewed as distorted attempts to survive in a World that has been painful, frightening, and poisonous to the individual. Fear, the central mechanism that sustains the defensive stance, occupies the center of the personality. In the deterioration process, the person makes the terrible journey downward from fulfillment to fragmentation, from purpose to chaos, from humanness to robot-likeness—from the image of God to the pale of nothingness. Manipulative behaviour, character disorders, and psychoses represent progressively more involved systems whereby one tries desperately to win in a World that is perceived as a fearful battleground rather than a place for love and intimacy. This is when a person begins to suffer the misery of “shut-upness.” Thus in shutting oneself off from the unfolding adventure of a God-directed Universe, one begins gradually to lose touch with the deepest meaning of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
For anyone caught up in the downward spiral of deterioration, the biblical principle “love casts out fear” is like a lighthouse in a stormy cove. It means that we are no longer lost. Life can get pretty tough, but we can find our way home. The monstrous cruelty and baleful influences which have shown their detestable faces in World history from time to time, are reminders of how far humans have yet to go in fulfilment of the World-Idea. In large regions of the Earth it seems as though moral darkness has enveloped humankind. Although a fair appraisal requires us to examine how far this swing of the pendulum against established religion represents rebellion against its superstition and imposture and how far it represents a real loss of conscience and deterioration of character, there is still enough residue of evil to instigate apprehension as to the future course and results of this situation. Anyone who has travelled this wide Earth knows that there are greedy humans who are like ferocious tigers, and smooth-tongued women who are as dangerous as devouring serpents. The evil of such people lies not so much in the character which they reveal as in the character which they hide. It is the suave dissembler who reproduces the word of goodness without its heart and who cynically divorces creed from conduct that we must fear, rather than the human who has “scoundrel” stamped all over one’s face and actions. We are not apt to be on our guard against a silky voice, saintly manner, and smiling lips, but when these things hide a devil’s heart of dark intentions, we are in peril of being undone. It is true that the respectable often hides the rotten. Whether they call it evil and sin with the Christians, or ignorance and immaturity with the Hindus, or insufficiency of the good with the Platonic thinker, or weakness and failure, or the blindness of materialism, the presence of deplorable or horrible or criminal tendences need not be denied. They are in the World, but then, other better nobler and purer tendencies are also there. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
The manifest relation really existing in God is really the same as His essence and only differs in its mode of intelligibility; as in relation is meant that regard to its opposite which is not expressed in the name of essence. Thus it is clear that in God relation and essence do not differ from each other, but are one and the same. If we can gain the power to enter the Presence, it will work silently upon the reform and reshaping of our character. Every such entry will carry the work forward, or consolidate what has already been done. One begins to look on the World afresh, as if for the first time. However, it is the beauties, the harmonies, the inner meanings, and the higher purposes that one now sees. One becomes more attentive to the attractiveness of Nature, observes her colourings and forms with new delight. If the glimpse ends, its memory does not and will always be preserved. Those who forget have only let changes in character or circumstance push it down out of sight for a period. For a time thrill of having had the glimpse inspires one. However, it soon fades and then one becomes dependent upon one’s simple memory of it. Even after one sinks back to one’s former state, the mystic who has had a flash, a glimpse, a revelation, or a vision of something beyond it can never be exactly the same as one was before. The light cannot fall upon one without leaving some little effect behind at the least, or some tremendous change at the most. One of the purposes of the glimpse is to make the human aspire that one shall be made worthy of its coming again. In the first contribution of memory is an unconscious one, intuitively reminding humans of what one really is but seems to have lost, the second is a conscious one. it is to keep up one’s interest in the establishment of the higher awareness and to stop one from forgetting the pursuit of this goal. That is, it is to keep one on the Quest. These experiences if taken aright will lead one not to spiritual pride but to spiritual humbleness. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Because one has been once illumined, the darkness can never again be total darkness. One will know that the possibility of light flashing across it always exists. No one can know in advance how long it will stay with one. It is here out of nowhere and nowhen, and then gone away the next hour. The visitation may or may not be repeated but because it is nothing that one has achieved, the repetition is outside one’s reach to control. Thus begins a lifelong haunting by what becomes one’s dearest wish—to repeat, and especially to continue in, this magical transformation. We must keep a proper proportion in our minds between these different branches of self-preparation and purification. A human whose spine is straight but whose conduct is crooked is doing worse than a human whose conduct is straight but whose spine is crooked. May the wind blow sweetness, the rivers flow sweetness, the herbs grow sweetness, for the People of Truth! Sweet be the night, sweet the dawn, sweet be the Earth’s fragrance, sweet be our Heaven! May the tree afford us sweetness, the sun shine sweetness, our cows yield sweetness—milk in plenty! We beseech Thee, O Lord, save us. We beseech Thee, O Lord, do Thou cause us to prosper. O Lord, answer us in the day that we call. God of all souls save us. Thou who searchest hearts, do Thou cause us to prosper. O Lord, answer us in the day that we call. God of all souls save us. Thou who searchest hearts, do Thou cause us to prosper. Thou mighty Redeemer, answer us in the day that we call. Thou who utter righteousness, save us. Thou who art clad in glory, do Thou cause us to prosper. Everlasting and gracious God, answer us in the day that we call. Thou who art pure and upright, save us. Thou who pitiest the needy, do Thou cause us to prosper. O good and bountiful Lord, answer us in the day that we call. Thou who knowest our thoughts, save us. Mighty and resplendent God, do Thou cause us to prosper. Thou who are clothed in righteousness, answer us in the day that we call. King of the Universe, save us. Source of light and majesty, do Thou cause us to prosper. Thou who supportest the falling, answer us in the day that we call. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
How could you use the pretty, glass door pantry at the Meadows Residence 2 model? It’s perfect for storage and display of all that pretty holiday tableware!
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.
Finding new ways to celebrate is one of our favorite things, and living in a spacious, thoughtfully designed home helps us get the most of each and every holiday! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/residence-2/
The Suburbs Were Discovered by Accident One Day in the Early 1940s!
The general will is always right and always tends toward the public utility. However, it does not follow that the deliberations of the people always have the same rectitude. We always want what is good for us, but we do not always see what it is. The populace is never corrupted, but it is often tricked, and only then does it appear to want what is bad. There is often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will. The latter considers only the general interests, whereas the former considers private interest and is merely the sum of private wills. However, remove from these same wills the pluses and minuses that can each other out; each interest has different principles, and the accord of two private interests is formed in opposition to that of a third, and the accord of all the interests are found in opposition to that of each. If there were no different interests, the common interest, which would never encounter any obstacle, would be scarcely felt. Everything would proceed on its own and politics would cease being an art. What remains as the sum of the difference is the general will. If, when a sufficiently informed populace deliberates, the citizens were to have no communication among themselves, the general will would always result from the large number of small differences, and the deliberation would always be good. However, when intrigues and partial associations come into being at the expense of the large association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in relation to its members and particular in relation to the state. It can be said, then, that there are no longer as many voters as there are humans, but merely as many as there are associations. The differences become less numerous and yield a result that is less general. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Finally, when one of these associations is so large that it dominates all the others, the result is no longer a general will, and the opinion that dominates is merely a private opinion. For the general will to be well articulated, it is therefore important that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen make up one’s own mind. It is true that some divisions are harmful to the republic while others are helpful to it. Those that are accompanied by sects and partisan factions are harmful. Since, therefore, a ruler of a republic cannot prevent enmities from arising within it, one at least to prevent them from becoming sects. Such was the unique and sublime institution of the great Lycurgus. If there are partial societies, their number must be multiplied and inequality among them prevented, as was done by Solon, Numa, and Servius. These precautions are the only effective way of brining it about that the general will is always enlightened and that the populace is not tricked. Having seen how swiftly we are moving away from industrial style synchronization and standardization, it should surprise no one that we are also rewriting other sections of social code. While all societies need some measure of both centralization and decentralization, Second Wave civilization was heavily biased toward the former and against the latter. The Great Standardizers who helped build industrialism marched hand in hand with the Great Centralizers, from Hamilton and Lenin down to Roosevelt. Today a sharp swing in the opposite direction is evident. New political parties, new management techniques, and new philosophies are springing up that explicitly attack the centralist premises of the Second Wave. Decentralization has become a hot political issue from California to Kiev. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
In Sweden a coalition of largely decentralist small parties drove the centralist Social Democrats from power after 44 years in office. Struggles over decentralization and regionalism have shaken France in recent years, while across the Channel and to the north the Scottish Nationalists now include a wing committed to “radical economic decentralization.” Similar political movements can be identified elsewhere in Western Europe, while in New Zealand a still-small Values Party has sprouted, demanding “an expansion of the functions and autonomy of local and regional government with a consequent reduction in the functions and size of central government.” In the United States of America, too, decentralism has picked up support and supplies at least some of the fuel for the tax revolt that is, for good or for ill, surging across the country. On the municipal level, too, decentralism gains force, with local politicos demanding “neighbourhood power.” Activists, neighbourhood-based groups are proliferating, from ROBBED (Residents Organized for Better and Beautiful Environmental Development) in San Antonio, or CBBB (Citizens to Bring Broadway Back) in Cleveland and the People’s Firehouse in Brooklyn. Many see the central government in Washington as the source of local ills rather than the potential cure. According to Monsignor Geno Baroni, himself a former neighbourhood and civil rights activists and once the Assistant Secretary for Neighbourhoods in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, such small, decentralized groups reflect the breakdown of machine politics and the inability of big government to cope with the wide diversity of local conditions and people. Say The New York Times, neighbourhood activists are winning “victories in Washington and across the country.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The decentralist philosophy is being spread, moreover, in schools of architecture and planning, from Berkeley to Yale in the United States of America to the Architectural Association in London, where students are, among other things, exploring new technologies for environmental controls, solar heating, or urban agriculture with the aim of making communities partially self-sufficient in the future. The impact of these young planners and architects will be increasingly felt in the years to come as they move into responsible positions. More important, however, the term “decentralization” has also become a buzzword in management, and large companies are racing to break their departments down into smaller, more autonomous “profit centers.” A typical case was the reorganization of Esmark, Inc., a huge company with operations in the food, chemical, oil, and insurance industries. In the past, Esmark had an unwieldy business. The only way it could develop coordinated effort was to divide it into bite-size bitts. The result: an Esmark cut into 1,000 different “profit centers,” each one largely responsible for its own operation. The net effect was to lift the routine decision-making from the chairman’s shoulders. Decentralization is evident everywhere but in Esmark’s financial controls. What is important is not Esmark—which has probably reorganized itself more than once since—but the general tendency it illustrates. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of companies are also in the process of continual reorganization, decentralizing, sometimes overshooting and swinging back, but gradually, over time, reducing centralized control over their day-to-day operations. At an even deeper level, large organizations are changing the authority patterns that underpinned centralism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The typical Second Wave firm or government agency was organized around the principle of “one human, one boss.” While an employee or an executive might have many subordinates, one would never report to more than one single superior. This principle meant that the channels of command all went to the center. Today it is fascinating to watch that system crack under its own weight in the advanced industries, in the services, the professions, and many government agencies. The fact is, growing multitudes of us today have more than a single boss. Big organizations are increasingly honeycombed by temporary units like task forces, interdepartmental committees, and project teams. This phenomenon is called “ad-hocracy.” Since then, many large companies have moved to incorporate these transient units into a radically new formal structure called “matrix organization.” Instead of centralized control, matrix organization employs what is known as a “multiple command system.” Under this arrangement, each employee is attached to a department and reports to a superior in customary fashion. However, one is also assigned to one or more teams for jobs that cannot be done by a single department. Thus a typical project team may have people from manufacturing, from research, sales, engineering, finances, and from other departments as well. The members of this team all report to the project leader as well as to a “regular” boss. The result is that vast numbers of people today report to one boss for purely administrative purposes and another (or a succession of others) for practical get-the-work-done purposes. This system lets employees give attention to more than one task at a time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The new system speeds up the flow of information and avoids their looking at problems through the narrow slit of a single department. It helps the organization respond to different, quickly changing circumstances. However, it also actively subverts centralized control. Spreading from such early users as General Electric in the United States of America and Skandia Insurance in Sweden, the matrix-style organization is now found in everything from hospitals and accounting firms to the U.S. Congress (where all sorts of new, semiformal “clearinghouses” and “caucuses” are springing up across committee lines). Matrix, in the words of Professor S.M. Davis of Boston University and P. R. Lawrence of Harvard, “is not just another minor management techniques or a passing fad, it represents a sharp break; matrix represents a new species of business organization.” And this new species is inherently less centralized than the old one-boss system that characterized the Second Wave era. Most important, we are also radically decentralizing the economy as a whole. Witness the rising power of small regional banks in the United State of America as against that of the handful of traditional “money market” gains. (As industry becomes more geographically dispersed, firms that previously had to rely on “money center” banks have increasingly turned to the regionals. The future of U.S. banking no longer lies with money market banks.) And as with the banking system, so too with the economy itself. The Second Wave gave rise to the first truly national markets and the very concept of a national economy. Along with these came the development of national tools for economic management—central planning in the socialist nations, central banks and national monetary and fiscal policies in the capitalist sector. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Today both these sets of tools are failing—to the mystification of the Second Wave economists and politicians who try to manage the system. Although the fact is only dimly appreciated as yet, national economies are swiftly breaking down into regional and sectoral parts—subnational economics with distinctive and differing problems of their own. Regions, whether the Sun Belt in the United States of America, the Mezzogiorno in Italy, or Kansai in Japan, instead of growing more alike as they did during the industrial era, are beginning to diverge from one another in terms of energy requirements, resources, occupational mix, educational levels, culture, and other key factors. Moreover, many of these subnational economies have now reached the scale of national economies only a couple of generations ago. Failure to recognize this accounts in good measure for the bankruptcy of government efforts to stabilize the economy. Every attempt to offset inflation or unemployment through nationwide tax rebates or hikes, or through monetary or credit manipulation, or through other uniform, undifferentiated policies, merely aggravates the disease. Those who attempt to manage Third Wave economics with such centralized Second Wave tools are like a doctor who arrives at a hospital one morning and blindly prescribes the same shot of Adrenalin for all patients—regardless of whether they have a broken leg, a ruptured spleen, a brain tumor, or an ingrown toenail. Only disaggregated, increasingly decentralized economic management can work in the new economy, for it, too, is becoming progressively decentralized at the very moment it seems most global and uniform. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
All these anti-centralist tendencies—in politics, in corporate of government organizations, and in the economy itself (reinforced by parallel developments in the media, in the distribution of computer power, in energy systems, and in many other fields)—are creating a wholly new society and making yesterday’s rules obsolete. Although a precise behavioural profile of social anxiety has yet to be developed, it is evident that this problem interferes with the skilled use of many nonverbal behaviours. For example, people with social anxiety gaze less, particularly while talking, and talk less than people who are socially secure. Gaze and talk duration are clear behaviour markers of social skill. In addition, social anxiety has been associated with poor vocal tone. What is particularly noteworthy is that investigators found that the nonverbal skills deficits (exempli gratia, gaze, vocal tone, speech duration) were most pronounced among those with social anxiety, and were not attributable to those with social anxiety, and were not attributable to anxiety in more in general. Socially anxious individuals also interact with others at a greater distance. One function of nonverbal skills that appears to be particularly disrupted among socially anxious individuals is conversational turn taking. People use nonverbal behaviours to manage and negotiate conversation. The effective use of certain nonverbal behaviours that are critical to the turn-taking function, such as gesture and pausing, appear to be impaired by the increase cognitive load of socially anxious persons in conversational settings. Research evidence from studies of planning, discussion of unfamiliar topics, and responding to difficult questions indicates that increased cognitive load can interfere with effective use of nonverbal turn-taking behaviours. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This same phenomenon may also be responsible for disrupting the timing, not just the duration, of nonverbal behaviours that serve the turn-taking function. People often think of interruption as a breakdown of turn taking. At the same time, interruptions are a definite sign of enthusiasm and involvement in a conversation. It is therefore understandable that socially anxious people are less likely than socially secure individuals to interrupt their conversation partners. Another nonverbal skill that is impaired by social anxiety is deception. Although this may not be the most prosocial nonverbal function, it is generally considered to require considerable skill in the management of nonverbal behaviours. In one study, socially anxious people were less successful than socially secure individuals at deceiving others. Socially anxious subjects in this study exhibited a deceptive nonverbal demeanor that made them appear to be dishonest, regardless of whether or not they really were. A recent meta-analysis identified various themes of functions of the nonverbal behaviours of people with social anxiety. Some behaviours, such as speech dysfluencies and self-manipulative gestures, are characteristic of increased social arousal and are very prevalent among socially anxious individuals. Diminished verbal output, and inhibited initiation of conversation are behaviours that signify diminished behavioural involvement, which is also characteristic of socially anxious persons. Each of these nonverbal profiles is consistent with poor or problematic social skills. Social skills deficits associated with social anxiety may also extend into the domain of verbal behaviours. In a unique study of social anxiety and verbal behaviour, it was demonstrated that socially anxious people tend to make more “safe” utterances such as questions, acknowledgments, and confirmation, and to avoid more “risky” utterances such as those expressing objective information. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The functional values of “safe” utterances is that they allow the socially anxious person to be responsive while simultaneously making few bids for the floor during conversation. Consistent with this explanation, social anxiety has also been found to influence people’s willingness to self-disclose to others. Socially anxious subjects in this study were less likely than nonanxious control to engage in risky self-disclosures, such as mentioning gender-role-inconsistent information about the self to same-gender conversational partner. In meta-analysis, social anxiety has been found to be positively associated with cautious self-deceptions, expressions of similarity, conformity, and innocuous sociability, which is behaviour that indicates interest and agreement without getting actively involved in the interaction. This is accomplished though communication behaviours such as asking questions, using back-channel responses (exempli gratia, “uh-huh,” “I see,” “hmm” while the partner is talking), and not interrupting. “We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. It is not honouring to God to go around with a nagging, negative feeling, always thinking that something is wrong. You may not even know why you do it, but you tend to think that things are never going to work out well for you. It is almost as though you have a cloud of doom and gloom following you around. That attitude will keep you from believing for the good things of God. The Bible teaches us to “cast down every negative thought and every wrong imagination,” reports 2 Corinthians 10.5. Yet it is so easy to slip into assuming the worst. Maybe you get the pain in your side, and the first thought that comes to your mind is that you are dying. Before long, your imagination is running wild, and you are seeing yourself in all sorts of negative scenarios. If you believe it and see it in your imagination long enough, many times those negative things will come to pass. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
You cannot allow fear have its way with you. “Fix your thoughts on what is true and honourable and right. Think about things that are pure and lovely and admirable. Think about things that are excellent and worthy of praise,” reports Philippians. Rather than thinking bad thoughts, focus on the fact that God has promised He will give Hid angels charge over your family. Say something such as “Thank you, Father, that Your angels are protecting my family members. Thank you that my children are safe and sound in the palm of Your hand.” It is all too easy to give in to fear and allow your imagination to run wild. Always remember: God honours faith; the enemy attacks with fear. Cast your thoughts on seeing good things happening in your life. Develop the habit of staying optimistic in your thoughts and conversations. Live in faith, not in fear. Make a decision today that you will no longer give in to negatives worries and fears, but instead you will think on things that are pure and wholesome and of good report. If you will do your part, God will keep you in perfect peace. Now for another witness let us go to Mark 11, verses 23 and 24. Here Jesus is teaching the greatest faith principle the World has ever known. It will absolutely transform your life. Whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea and shall not doubt in one’s heart, but shall believe that those things which one saith shall come to pass; one shall have what one believed. One did not say that one would have what one hoped for. One said one would have whatsoever one saith. Then He connects that verse of scripture to the next one by saying it will also work in prayer. Verse 23 is not a prayer scripture. It is the faith principle. It is spiritual law. Just as the law of gravity will work, so will this law work when it is applied correctly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Verse 24 is the prayer scripture. Therefore it will work in prayer. Therefore I say unto you, What things so ever ye DESIRE…Notice the words ye desire. It does not say what God desires, does it? No. Now let us put it in our language. He said, “Whatever you desire when you pray, you believe that you receive, and you shall have it.” Someone has said, “Oh. but if it is not God’s will, you cannot have it. So go ahead and pray for it; and if it is God’s will, you will receive. If it is not, you will not receive it anyway.” I beg your pardon! The Bible says you will. People are deceived in this area. Israel wanted a king. It was not God’s will for them to have one, but they received a king. That is why it is so very important that you learn God’s will before you pray. It would be better for you to spend a week reading and searching the Word of God before you ever form your prayer, than to just pray and assume it is God’s will. In Ecclesiastes, the 5th chapter, verses 1 and 2, we find this admonition: When you go into the house of the Lord, let your words be few. Then in Psalm 37, verse 7, we read, Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him. The Hebrew translation says, “to be silent to the Lord.” Sometimes we do too much praying or we pray the wrong way at the wrong time. For instance, a man, as he was being robbed, cried out, “Oh God, do not let them find that $100 bill I hid in my shoe.” Now that is unwise! He told the thief what he needed to know. Sometimes we have given Satan valuable information while praying. We should learn when to be silent and when to pray. If it is not in line with the Word of God, or if it is not done accurately, prayer will get you into more trouble than you know how to handle. The effectiveness of prayer is governed by spiritual law. Sometimes people say that prayer could not hurt anyone. That is like saying, “Electricity cooks my food and washes my clothes and no one could get hurt by electricity.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Well, as long as you use it wisely and obey the laws that govern that power, it will work for you. However, if you violate the laws that govern that force, the same force that washes your clothes and cooks your food can also destroy. Prayer is designed to work for you, not against you. The Word of God was designed to work for you; but when you cross up the rules, it is like trying to play baseball with football rules. It does not work. Sometimes we use the wrong rules in prayer. There are different kinds of prayer and there are different rules for each kind. There is the prayer of dedication, the prayer of thanksgiving and praise, the prayer of intercession, the prayer of petition. We are talking about the prayer of petition. Do not get the rules for the prayer of dedication and worship mixed up with the prayer of petition. When you do, you get the thing shorted out and it will not work. Rightly divide the Word of Truth; search out these rules and apply them correctly. Then your prayers will move Heaven and Earth in your behalf. In fact, we read in the Word of God in Philippians 2.9-10, John 16.23, and Mark 16.17-18, that Jesus has been highly exalted and has given a name above every name and He has given that name to us to control the force of evil. The authority of this Earth has been given to man. We have authority in prayer and move the forces of Heaven in our behalf. We have authority in prayer by the words of our mouths to bind evil forces—the power of darkness—and render them harmless and ineffective against us. We do not need more power; we just need to apply the spiritual laws that God has given us. Jesus said, What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them (Mark 11.24). Did not say anything about God’s will, did He? This is one verse of scripture that would contradict the interpretation of 1 John 5.14, “if it is God’s will.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
My Lord, I wish to know what has to be known. To love what has to be loved. To praise what tickles You the most. To appreciate what You think precious. To vituperate what soils the eyes. To put less reliance on visible and audible evidence when it comes to forming a judgment; that is what the Lord in Isaiah did (11.3). To inquire always, first and foremost, into the pleasure of the Divine Will. Often human senses fail when it comes to making a sound judgment. There fail too lovers of the present age when they allow what they see to cloud their judgment. Thinking something does not make it so. For example, is a person to be thought better just because one’s peers have decided one is so? I do not think so. That is how one liar deceives another liar, by praising one to the skies! And so on with the vain, the blind, the infirm. All of which is another way of saying, cheap praises is never a bargain for those who buy it. In the end, “the only thing that matters is how a person looks to the eyes of the Lord; that is it, nothing more.” That is the humble way Holy Father Francis from Assis put it. My dear friend, you just do not have the staying power when it comes to upping your desire for the virtuous life. I might say the same thing when it comes to moving up a grade in contemplation. While you are attempting both, you have to, because of the Original Corruption, descends to the Lower Depths, carrying, however unwillingly and tediously, the burden of life among the Corruptibles. Therefore, while you are still in the flesh, you have to weep about the burden of the flesh. So weep this! You do not have the strength to continue your spiritual pursuits. However, if you want to preserve, hie yourself to the nearest humble acts and find recreation in doing good deeds. Do continue to expect God’s Adventual and Supernal Visitation. It is going to happen! As for your feeling of exile and alienation, patiently endure until God visit you again and free you from all these anxieties. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
That is when God will make you forget your labours and enjoy your quiet. God will extend before you a vista, that is to say, a meadow of fragrant Scriptures in which to graze. You will run, with expanded heart and lung, the straight and narrow way of God’s Commandments, as God’s Psalmist has sung (119.32). And you will say, if the Letter to the Romans is any guide (8.18), “The passions of the present are not comparable with those of the future; that is to say, no glory now, but all glory then. Please forgive me, Father, for allowing fear and worry to dominate my thoughts. I am You child, and I know that Your power working in me is greater than what anyone or anything can do against me. I will trust in You today. When in the state of fear, we propose, one moves headlong into three progressively deteriorating levels. The actualizing level is one which one usually experiences as a child. However, when one leaves the actualizing mode, moved by the fears instilled by parents, teachers, and society, one’s life becomes more and more constricted. First, as one moved inward from the outer sphere, one enters levels of less mobility, greater rigidity, and more severe “shut-upness.” Second, as the pattern of fear becomes more and more severe, moving inwardly to each more and more severe, moving inwardly to each more tightly encased inner circle, the experiencing of the primary polarities of love/anger and strength/weakness becomes more and more constricted. And third, the center of the nonactualizing person is filled with fear, not love. The greater the fear the person experiences, the thicker the ego boundary becomes. For the actualizing person (the outermost circle) the ego boundary is open and permeable, thus enabling the person to be responsive to others and to the many elements of one’s life situation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Such a person can be emotionally moved by the feelings or experience of others, and can also react to others with the full intensity of one’s feelings, without cover-up. If one gets angry, one can show it honestly and directly without making a flowery or emotional scene. If one feels loving, one expresses it clearly. Or if one chooses not to express a particular feeling, one is still fully aware of it. Vitality is not diminished, as it is with the person who is fearfully constricting awareness of all feelings. The progressive levels in the process of deterioration we term manipulative style, character disorder, and psychosis. In each of these levels, the ego boundary becomes thicker and more rigid, as though the person were building a coat of armour or wall around the inner self. Some of these terms may be new to the reader, but we suggest that they are viable ways of looking at human behaviour that can enrich one’s understanding of self and others. Christianity is in accord with the claim of modern clinical psychology that not coming to terms with basic anxiety and fear blocks growth and breaks down relationships. Manipulative styles, character disorders, and psychoses are maladaptive survival mechanism based of fear. The advancing mystic has to undergo a very real temptation at certain points of one’s career—a temptation not unlike that of Jesus by Satan to great Worldly honours or that of Buddha by Mara to great sensual indulgence. It may come through crafty instigations of one’s enemies or through the innocent flatteries of one’s friends. One must beware especially of those whose excessive faith would exalt one to the role of a master, or perchance even glorify one as a new messiah! One must be on guard against being seduced by the attractions of power or the disguises of sensuality. One may have to suffer the hostility of unseen malignant force besetting the path at certain stages, especially at advanced stages. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
You force yourself into a Master’s presence and take the consequences of the immense forces around one playing on yourself. If you are weak in character anywhere the dark forces will use the disturbance by directing the forces engendered to that spot and may compass your ruin. It is so always. Pass the boundary that hedges in the occult realm, and quick forces, new ones, dreadful ones, must be met. Then if you are not strong you may become a wreck for that life. This is the danger. This is one reason why Masters do not appear and do not act directly very often, but nearly always by intermediate degrees. Those who are working for the survival of Truth in a truthless World thereby become targets for powerful forces of hatred, wrath, and falsehood. Whoever publicly bears a deeply spiritual message to humanity, has to suffer from evil’s opposition. These are warped minds who, fumbling on the lower levels of human existence, spit venom and spill hatred over the human who declares the existence of higher ones. These hostile manifestations invariably make their appearance after the teacher had made an appearance anywhere. Light must inevitably cast a shadow. Yet on the credit side they served a useful purpose. They help one and they help one’s probationers. They remind one that one must not stake a claim on any part of this Earth’s surface or in any human heart. They test the intuition and keenness of the probationers. When these have survived all the tests, one may accept them and begin their real inner work together; thereafter God Himself cannot prize them apart from their teacher, for then they know with whom they are dealing. The course of life brings encounters with those who are either inspired by, or symbolically represent, the adverse powers which at times beset it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Subconscious evil creeps out of its cage in moments of temptation. The neophyte who enters the portals becomes at once a victim of the malicious attention of Shaitans (demons) who plague one with a multitude of temptations and work on one’s mind. Rare is one who does not succumb. Tests can appear in very ordinary, quite prosaic situations. The things which hamper the student’s progress are varied, and although they may bring despondency and discouragement, impatience and rebellion, they need not and should not be permitted to bring the loss of all hope. Difficulties there must be, but they need not make us cowards. The times of swift progress are generally followed by times of slow moving; success alternates with failure as day with night. One must go on with the faith and trust that obstacles are not for all time, that fluctuations on the path are inevitable, and that one’s own inner divine possibilities are the best guarantee of ultimate attainment. The trials of the path, as indeed the trials of life itself, as inescapable. One should endure the tribulations with the inner conviction that a brighter World awaits one; hope and faith will lead one to it. Peace be to Earth and to airy space! Peace be to Heaven, peace to the waters, peace to the plant and peace to the trees! May all the powers grant me peace! By this invocation of peace may peace bring peace! With this peace the dreadful I now appease, with this peace the cruel I now appease. With this peace all evil I now appease. So that peace may prevail, happiness prevail! May everything for us be peaceful! Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, ruler of the Universe who hast sanctified us by Thy precepts and hast enjoined upon us the Counting of the Omer. This the eternal day of the Omer. You have been taught, and you know: the Lord is God; there is none else. He alone performeth wonderous things, for His lovingkindness endureth forever. There is none like unto Thee among the mighty, O Lord, and there are no works like unto Thine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
When your outdoor space is an extension of your home, it’s important that it’s light, bright, and cool. The ceiling fan, ample shade, and open concept porch of our Brighton Station Residence 4 model is ideal for all of us who never want summer to end!
Brighton Station at Cresleigh Ranch is Rancho Cordova’s newest home community! This charming neighborhood offers an array of home types with eye catching architecture styles such as Mid-Century Modern, California Modern, Prairie, and Contemporary Farmhouse.
Located off Douglas Road and Rancho Cordova Parkway, the residents of Cresleigh Ranch will enjoy, being just minutes from shopping, dining, and entertainment, and quick access to Highway 50 and Grant Line Road providing a direct route into Folsom. Residents here also benefit from no HOA fees, two community parks and the benefits of being a part of the highly-rated Elk Grove Unified School District.
Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes fully equipped with an All Ready connected home! This smart home package comes included with your home and features great tools including: video door bell and digital deadbolt for the front door, connect home hub so you can set scenes and routines to make life just a little easier. Two smart switches and USB outlets are also included, plus we’ll gift you a Google Home Hub and Google Mini to help connect everything together! https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/
Good Things Often Happen to Bad People!
We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the World we inherit. Loneliness is a discrepancy between a person’s desired and achieved relationships with other people. Depression and loneliness are two psychological problems that are strongly associated. There are a great number of interpersonal, as well as psychological, similarities between the two problems. Problems with social skills are equally evident among depressed persons and lonely individuals. Difficulties in establishing and maintaining rewarding and intimate relationships are also very prevalent in loneliness. Both depressed and lonely people have a difficult time making friends, communicate poorly with family members, and experience low social integration. As in the case of people with depression, there is reason to suspect the family relationships of people who are lonely. Children’s loneliness tends to be positively correlated with that of their parents, just as in depression. What the lonely person appears to long for are meaningful and intimate friendships. Relationships with family members, on the other hand, do little to prevent or ameliorate the experience of loneliness. In fact, the more social support students have from their family, the more lonely they are. Although the increased family support may have been a result of the students’ loneliness, it is clear that these types of relationships do little to help a lonely person’s situation. In fact, very close family relationships may set up people for future loneliness. Retrospective reports of early childhood experiences indicate that children who had an excessively close, warm, and nurturing relationship with at least one parent were significantly more lonely as elderly adults than a group of controls. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When it comes to producing lonely children, the effects of overinvolvement from parents can be as noxious as underinvolvement or neglect. This is due in part to the fact that parental overinvolvement can create a sense of narcissism in the child. It has also been suggested that extremely close parent-children build great expectations that other relationships chronically fail to meet, and that such relationships may displace the interactions that children would have with peers. Given the extent of problems with social skills, personal relationships, and family relationships in both depression and loneliness, the exceptionally high rate of comorbidity between these two problems is understandable. Why is it that these two pervasive problems should coexist with such regularity? Well, in addition to sharing common interpersonal and psychological antecedents, problems such as depression and loneliness are causally related to each other. From an interpersonal standpoint, there are several plausible versions of such relationships. Firs, people who are depressed often infect others with their negative mood and elicit interpersonal rejection. As this rejection accumulates and personal relationships become scarce, depressed persons would be expected to experience loneliness. If we look at these variables in reverse order, depression may be a more generalized reaction to prolonged loneliness. Momentary or state loneliness may be a painful experience that many can endure without global distress. However, as loneliness persists, people may become emotionally worn down, resulting in a major depressive episode. Human beings are inherently predisposed to find rewards in social relationships. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
For people who become chronically dissatisfied with the quality of such relationships, depression may be viewed as the inevitable consequence of this extinction of social rewards. Finally, depression and loneliness may each be associated with common interpersonal and psychological variables that contribute to each condition. One such interpersonal variable may be shyness. People who are characteristically shy, and lacking social support, are particularly vulnerable to developing depression. However, this relationship is partially mediated by the experience of loneliness, which is itself predicted by the interaction of shyness and low social support. Loneliness is conceptualized as a proximal contributor to depression, which indicates that its presence is a sign of impending depression. Presently, there is at least some support for the view of loneliness as a casual factor in depression. Ultimately, depression and loneliness may share a common causal origin, one of which may be shyness. Both depression and loneliness have clear links to problems with interpersonal communication and relationships. These include deficits in social skills, and problems with general personal as well as family relationships. Such problems, when sufficiently severe and chronic, surely have the potential to precipitate episodes of either state. However, interpersonal communication problems are certainly not the cause of all cases of depression or loneliness. Depression is one of the most common mental problems. Depression is highly comorbid with loneliness and has a very powerful relationship with disrupted communication behaviour and troubled interpersonal relationships. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Racism is a mental health issue because racism causes trauma. And trauma can lead to mental illnesses, which need to be taken seriously. Systemic racism (also called structural or institutional racism) is racism that exists across society within, and between institutions/organizations across society. It refers to the complex interactions of large scale societal systems, practices, ideologies, and programs that produce and perpetuate inequalities for marginalized groups. The key aspect of structural or systematic racism is that these marco-level mechanisms operate independent of the intentions and actions of individuals, so that even if individual racism is not present, the adverse conditions and inequalities for marginalized racial groups will continue to exists. Examples are housing discrimination, government surveillance, social segregation, racial profiling, predatory banking, access to healthcare, hiring/promotion practices, and mandatory minimum sentences. God loves all His children and makes salvation available to all. God created he many diverse races and ethnicities and esteems them all equally. As the Book of Mormon puts it, “all are alike unto God.” “Throw off your old evil nature and your former way of life, which is rotten through and through, full of lust and deception. Instead, there must be a spiritual renewal of your thoughts and attitudes,” report Ephesians 4.22-23. You may not realize it, but you can choose your thoughts. Nobody can make you dwell on something. One decides what one will entertain in one’s mind. One’s mind is similar to a giant computer in that one’s brain stores every thought one has ever had. When can one stare at the Sun without a parasol, that is to say, contemplate God’s clarity without blinking an eye? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
The fact that our brains are supercomputers is encouraging when one is trying to find one’s car keys, but it is not such good news when one considers the amount of smut, foul language, ungodly concepts, and other negative input with which we are inundated every day of our lives. Nevertheless, simply because a destructive thought is stored in one’s mental computer does no mean one has to pull it up and run it on the main screen of one’s mind. Only when one’s senses the desire of Eternal Beatitude rising in one’s soul is when we can fully understand the Word of God. Only when one thinks one’s soul is about to make the Grand Exit. To hasten that time, open your heart, spread wide your desire, and accept this holy inspiration. Return the fullest thanks to Supernal Goodness; she has dealt so decently with you, visited you so thoughtfully, grabbed hold of you so powerfully, before your own fat self fell to the Earth. Just do not think you had anything to do with any of this. You did not think it up, and you did not sweat it out! However, it had everything to do with Supernal Grace and Divine Kindness. However, if you make the mistake and start dwelling on the negative aspects of life, those thoughts will affect your emotions, your attitudes, and—if you continue to give it free rein in your mind—it will inevitably affect your actions. You will be much more prone to discouragement and depression, and if you continue pondering those negative thoughts, they hold the potential to sap the energy and strength right out of you. You will lose your motivation to move forward in a positive direction. The more we dwell on the enemy’s lies, the more garbage we willingly allow one to dump into out minds. It is also as though we have flung the door wide open and put up a sign that reads: “Trash goes here!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
What are you allowing your mind to dwell on? Are you constantly contemplating negative things? How you view life makes all the difference in the World—especially for you! It is unrealistic to ignore problems and live in denial, pretending that nothing bad ever happens to us. Bad things do sometimes happen to good people, just as good things often happen to bad people. Pretense is not the answer; nor is playing semantic games to make yourself sound more spiritual. If you are sick, it is okay to admit it; but keep your thoughts on your Saviour. If your body is tried, your spirit is weary, sometimes the most rational and spiritual thing to do is to get some res. However, focus your thoughts on the Saviour who has promised, “Those who wait on the LORD shall renew their strength,” reports Isaiah 40.31. Tough times come to all of us. Jesus Christ said, “In this life you will have trouble, but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the World,” reports John 16.33. He was saying that when troublesome times come, we can choose our attitudes. We can choose to believe that Jesus Christ is greater than our problems; we can choose the right thoughts. Today, if you will dwell on the promises of God’s Word, you will be filled with hope and grace. You will develop a successful and faithful attitude. Like bees to flowers, you will draw the sweetness of God. Many people want to wait until their situation improves before they have an attitude of gratitude. Unfortunately, that is not going to happen. One has the lexical order wrong. One must show an attitude of gratitude first, and then God will turn your situation around. As long as you harbour that poor, defeated foolish and ghoulish outlooks, one will continue to live in doom and gloom. “Strip off that old nature and put on the new man. Be constantly renewed in the spirit of your mind, having a fresh mental and spiritual attitude,” reports Ephesians 4.22-24. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
You cannot sit back passively and expect this new person to suddenly appear, much like a baby cannot sit there with a poopy diaper and expect it to magically become fresh and clean without any effort. The baby has to cry and scream until he gets a clean diaper. “As a person thinks in one’s heart, so one will become,” reports Proverbs 23.7. Wen one thinks thoughts of failure, one is destined to fail. You will be stuck in the poopy pamper. When one thinks thoughts of mediocrity, one is destined to live an average life. However, when one aligns one’s thoughts with God’s thoughts and one starts dwelling on the promises of His Word, when one constantly dwells on His success, favour, faith, power, and strength, nothing can hold one back. Make up your mind today to think optimistically, excellent thoughts, and one will be propelled toward greatness, inevitably bound for increase, promotion, and God’s supernatural blessings. As you stockpile your virtues and increase your holdings in humility, you will be preparing to battle for God, and eventually to buttle for God, as is the duty of a fervent servant soul. Flame glows, as you have no doubt noticed, but without smoke it does not ascend. So as the desires for Celestials on your part flame up, they do not smoke; that is to say, they are not free from the temptation of carnal affection. You do the right things for the honour of God—that is to say, pray desiringly to Him—but all is not right with you. Why? More soot than wisp. Is that not the case with your own desire? You have clouded your own mind into thinking that your desire was perfectly suitable. However, it was not. It was not white smoke rising; it was just black soot falling. How to put time to good effect. Do not go looking for delectables for yourself. Do find what is acceptable and honourific to God. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If you can make this midlife correction, then you will prefer God’s regulations to every desideratum of yours, whether in the past or the future, and follow it cheerfully. I know your desire, and many of the times God has heard you lusting for it in the night. You would like to be cavorting around the playing fields of the Lord with the children of God; Paul would have it that way, that is what he wrote to the Romans (8.21). That will be then, but here is now. The thought of the Eternal Home and Celestial Homeland delights you. Alas, that hour has yet to come. Yours is another clock, ticking another time. The time for war, the time for labour, the time for temptation. Replenish your depleted soul with the Summum Bonum—that should be your wish. However, alas, the time is not ripe. God is the One. Look for God, until the Kingdom of God comes; Luke has quoted Him on this already (22.18). Today, I chose to dwell on good thoughts, thoughts that based on the truths of Your Word, Father; thoughts that will build me up rather than tear me down. Thank You for renewing my mind and giving me a fresh new attitude of hope. Up to this point, My dear friend, you had to be put to the test and exercised in many different situations. For these, intermediate consolations have been issued to you, but the Final Lump Sum is not due jus yet. Therefore, stay cheery and keep in fighting trim. Especially when it comes to fighting against, as well as to just enduring, the contraries of nature. “Rejoice in the Lord always [delight, gladden yourselves in Him]; again I say, Rejoice. Let all humans know and perceive and recognize your unselfishness (your considerateness, your forbearing spirit). The Lord is near [He s coming soon]. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
“Do not fret or have any anxiety about anything, but in every circumstance and in everything, by prayer and petition (definite requests), with thanksgiving, continue to make your wants known to God. And God’s peace [shall be yours, that tranquil state of a soul assured of its salvation through Christ, and so fearing nothing from God and being content with its Earthly lot of whatever sort that is, that peace] which transcends all understanding shall garrison and mount guard over your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. For the rest, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is worthy of reverence and is honourable and seemly, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely and loveable, whatever is kind and winsome and gracious, if there is any virtue and excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think on and weigh and take account of these things [fix your mins on them], reports Philippians 4.4-8. Often you have to do what you do not want to do; and it is important to leave behind what you truly hold dear. That will forward others’ interests, but it will not necessarily promote yours. What some will say will be heard, but there is no guarantee that what you will say will be worth hearing. Some will beg on the streets, and their pockets will be filled; you will hold your hand out on the corner, and no one will look your way. Some will develop a large following, but you will remain a comparative unknown. Bits and bobs will be done by others, but your immense contributions will go unnoticed. Because of experiences like these, your nature will always be thrown into a hissing fit. However, if you can manage to hang on to your tongue, you will take a giant stride along the path of spiritual progress. In these and many similars, the faithful servant of the Lord usually has to be proved; that is to say, to bring oneself low and to snap one’s attachment to all things. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Die you must to the things of this World, as you already know. However, there is scarcely somesuch in which you need to die more than this; namely, to endure, to suffer what makes your will scream, what does against your grain, what makes you wince at the mere scrape of it. That is especially so when disconveniences are the order of the day. Why? They just do not make sense to you. Even so, because you do not dare resist the Higher Power, you insinuate yourself into an already existing line of authority. Now that must seem hard to you, My dear friend—to walk around awaiting the nod from another Devout who is no worthier than yourself. It is like looking into a mirror and trying not to see yourself. However, think of the fruit of these labours, My dear Devout, the swiftly approaching End and the extravagantly large Reward. Do that, and you will lose your grounds for complaint, but you will surely have the strongest possible ground for patience. From just a small investment in Free Will Limited here on Earth, you will be able to trade up to Free Will Forever in Heaven. There is where you will find everything you want, everything you can possibly desire. You will have the faculty of doing nothing but good, without fear of losing a thing. Yours will be always one with Mine—no secrecies, no privacies. There, nobody will cross you; nobody will complain about you. Nobody will trip you up. No one will go around you. All your desiderata will be present to you at once and the same time, and each and every one will entertain your whole spirit, filling you with refreshment and continuing to top you off. In Heaven, God will match Celestial Comelies—that is to say, glories—with each of the Earthly Uncomelies—that is to say, contumelies—you have had to endure; the woolly white pallium of distinction, as Prophet Isaiah might have put it (6.13), in place of the rough bronze monk’s cloth of sorrow; a seat in the Kingdom of the Ages in place of your stool of ignorance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In Heaven, making special guest appearances will be two fruits of Obedience. Labour of Penitence will rejoice, and Humble Subjection will be crowed with glorious fanfare. That will be then, but this is now. Incline yourself humbly under than hands of Humankind. Do not let yourself get hot and bothered about what someone may have said about your or another may have ordered you to do. However, take great care that whether a Prelate, a Priest, or a Devout demand something of you, you do it whole and entire for the good of the situation and to fulfill all expectations. Odd thing, though! One person asks for a tit; another, for a tat; both become celebrities and are praised to the skies. However, when you do the very same thing, no joy or glory attaches to you. Why? It is that your only joy, if I may say it, My dear Devout, will be found in contempt of self. Which may not be so bad if it means in the Long Run that you will become My pride and joy. One desire, and one alone is all you need, this side of death or that side of life: that God will always be glorified in you. “And my God will liberally supply (fill to full) your every need according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus. To our God and Father be glory forever and ever (though the endless eternities of the eternities). Amen (so be it),” reports Philippians 4.19-20. Lord, do not fully understand the meaning of this experience. I am filled with awe. Your love goes beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I know that someday I will trust you so much that I will not feel afraid; I will not draw back when you express your love to me. Thank you for being so patient. I have much to learn. Good night. Many Christian readers think that psychology undermines faith. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, if your faith is built on the foundation that learning to love God with your whole being, and learning to love others as yourself is the highest priority of the Christian life, then our message will affirm your faith. A psychological understanding of personality can contribute to the effectiveness with which Christians seek to live out their faith. We are also concerned with relationships between person and between a person and God. How can anyone, including a growing Christian, get the most out of life? We have coined a term—“the actualizing Christian”—to describe an approach to living a Christian life based on awareness, honesty, and trust. We believe this lifestyle leads to the graced fulfillment of one’s God-given potentials in life. It results in the full development of one’s personality and the increased capacity to have intimate and enduring relationships with others and God. Actualizing is a lifelong process, not a final state or a rigid ideal of perfectionism. It is a vision of how we can grow throughout the stages of life. The journey of actualizing is an opening of new doors, a becoming, a probing, a going inwards to one’s center, a developing of relationships. Every arrival is a new beginning! We believe that the growth of many people, especially those raised in the New World culture, has been limited by a lack of trust of their whole being—intellectual, emotional, physical, and spiritual. For many people, “head knowledge” is the stuff of life. If it is not logical, rational, and objective, then it is not so important. So these individuals have great difficulty experiencing their intuition or expressing their feelings. For others, emotionality is overemphasized at the expense of clear thinking and responsible planning. Yet others have difficulty when it comes to the body. They consider the body as somehow evil or at least neutral and fail to recognize the importance of the physical realm of human existence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
One of the awesome affirmations of the Christian faith is that Jesus, the Son of God, expressed His deity through a human body. He clearly demonstrated that the physical realm is important and, beyond that, that it is to be valued positively. Actualizing Christians rely upon important information derived from their entire natural and supernatural beings. The growing Christian learns to listen carefully to the messages of the body. A headache may mean we are too tense about life. A backache may mean we have chronically overextended ourselves. An ulcer may mean that we hate someone. In actualizing, we learn to respect the wisdom of our own feeling and inner intuition. This this is called the wisdom organism. Time and again in my clients, I have seen simple people become significant and creative in their own spheres, as they have developed more trust of the process going on within themselves, and have dared to feel their own feelings and express themselves in their own unique ways. The actualizing Christian learns throughout life by continually exploring, expanding, and revising the meaning of one’s beliefs and values. In this open-ended approach, there is a desire to always grow beyond one’s prejudices and premature conclusions about life. In psychological terms, one has an open perceptual field in which new configurations of meaning constantly emerge. In religions terms, one tends to be sensitive to the heart and mind of Christ—one is easily moved by the spirit of God. Everything in the World is moving dynamically in the direction of completion, fulfillment, and actualization. Through the process, there is a vital link between the person’s or thing’s actual characteristics at a given moment and what will characterize it as a fully developed entity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
For instance, the acorn has within it the potential of becoming an oak tree. However, it is only through the process of growth over time that the tiny acorn experiences transformation and actualization. The idea behind entelechy is that the ultimate end or purpose toward which the acorn is developing is embedded in the acorn itself. The internal blueprint pushes, energizes, and guides the acorn in fulfilling its project of becoming a mature oak. In much the same way the person who is rooted in God is being transformed over time into the unique individual that one was created to be. Although the actualizing process is pleasurable, it is not simply a hedonistic pursuit of fun or happiness. There will be real travail for anyone who desires to become a genuinely actualizing person. However, there will be real joy too—the joy of being what one is and becoming more of what one can be. This involves risk, faith, vulnerability, and adventure. We need to learn to place a high priority on our growth toward authentic personhood. It will not happen automatically. Even if we want to, we cannot change ourselves suddenly and drastically. Rather, real and enduring change is a gradual, steady process of becoming. It is nurtured by the courageous acceptance of our whole being—strengths and weaknesses, virtues and vices, talents and deficits. And, if we take it for granted, it may never occur. Just as the athlete trains and warms up before the beginning of the hundred-yard dash, we must learn how to warm ourselves up to the process of actualizing. It does not happen all at once. We need to discover our energies; heighten our awareness of the challenges for meaning that life is inviting us to embrace; and gain access to the spiritual resources of the core of our being. Only then will we be able to live life with sensitivity, wisdom, and vitality that is possible for us. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Learning to live such a life requires concrete and specific guidelines. First of all, the spiritual core, the center of the personality, provides the function of lending stability to the always-evolving nature of the person. The physical appearance of the person changes throughout life in definite ways. The emotional responses change through a single day. The values and attitudes are altered over the course of weeks, months, and years. However, the core self, the center of spiritual identity, remain the same. Recognize and affirm that you are a Center of pure self-consciousness and self-realization. This is the permanent factor in every varying flow of your personal life. It is this which gives one the sense of being, or permanence, of inner security. You are a center of awareness and power. The spiritual core is an individual’s God-given personhood, one’s “God within.” The Holy Spirit dwells here. The core reflects the fact that one is made in the image of God, and shares with God the capacity for awareness, choice, and intimacy. Whether that potential is fully realized during the course of a person’s lifetime depends on one’s responsiveness to the wisdom of the core. The fact remains that the awakening to the Overself leaves great witness and striking testimony that it has passed over a humans’ head. It brings new and subtle powers, an altered outlook upon people and events, and a deep calm in the very center of one’s being. When one is given one’s primal glimpse of the spiritual possibilities of humans, one is immeasurably exalted. When one discovers the dynamic power of the Overself for the first and hears the beautiful hidden rhythm of its life, one’s heart becomes as the heart of Hercules and for hours, days, or weeks one walks on air. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One begins to price is fleshly desires at their true worth and treads them under foot. One has been permitted to taste of the spirit’s fruits, and one knows that they alone are good. A sense of being lifted up from all Worldly cares will pervade one for some time as an afterglow of this experience. The gracious feeling swims away again and leaves one not forlorn but forsworn. One will never gain be alone. The remembrance of what happened is by itself enough to be company for one the rest of one’s life. Through our blessings and invocations, we acknowledge this network of forces that flows through the World, awakening the deeper levels of our consciousness to effect these patterns of change. Deep peace of the running wave to you, of water flowing, rising, and falling, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding. May the stream of your life flow unimpeded! Deep peace of the running wave to you! O look down upon us from Thy dwelling place on high and forgive Thy servant who now worships before Thee, so that Thou wilt prolong one’s days and pardon one’s sins, iniquities, and transgression. Extend Thy right hand to receive one in perfect repentance, and open Thy good treasure to satisfy thirsting creatures, as it is written in the Scripture: The Lord shall open unto thee His good treasure, the Heaven, to give the rain unto your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hand. Amen. Praised art Thou, O Lord our God and God of our fathers, God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, mighty, revered and exalted God. Thou bestowest lovingkindness and possesses all things. Mindful of the patriarchs’ love for Thee, Thou wilt in Thy love bring a redeemer to their children’s children for the sake of Thy name. O King, Thou Helper, Redeemer and Shield, be Thou praised, O Lord, Shield of Abraham. Thou, O Lord, art mighty forever. Thou callest the dead to immortal life for Thou art mighty in deliverance. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included!
Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
The Dead and the Living Can Never be One—God Has Forbidden it!
Life is richest when you realize that we are all snowflakes. Each of us is absolutely beautiful and unique. And we are here for a very short time. Mrs. Winchester was a pretty little brunette, rather pale, with dark hair, brilliant brown eyes, a resolute mouth and a bright, intelligent expression. She was orderly, trim and feverishly energetic, and seemed to live every moment of her life. The Winchester mansion was like a paradise on Earth; and in this light I still regarded it, until a great change came over the temperature, and the month of April introduced me to red-hot winds, sleepless nights, and the intolerable “brain fever” bird. The next morning, rested and invigorated, we set out on a tour of inspection; and it is almost worthwhile to undergo a certain amount of baking on the sweltering heat of the plains, in order to enjoy those deep first draughts of cool hill air, instead of a stifling, dust-laden atmosphere, and to appreciate the green valleys and blue hills by force of contrast to the far-stretching, eye-smarting, white glaring roads that intersect the burnt-up plains—roads and plains that even the pariah abandon, salamander though he be! No doubt the work of some extremely roughish-looking and grotesque imps and demons, who were inflicting various torments. However, to our delight and surprise, Mrs. Winchester had by no means overdraw the advantages of her new estate. The Grand Queen Anne Victorian mansion was solidly built of wood, brick, and stone, nine storied, and ample in size. It stood on kind of a shelf cut out of the hill side, and was surrounded by a pretty flower garden, full of roses, fuchsias, carnations. There was also a fruit orchard, many exotic trees and plants, and an avenue of palm trees. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
There was a delightful, flagged verandah. The stairs were very steep. At the head of them, the passage and rooms were repeated. There were very small nooks, a switchback staircase, which has seven flights with forty-four steps, rising only about nine feet, since each step was just two inches. Miles of twisting hallways, secret passageways in the walls, a labyrinth of rooms, and dressing-rooms, 13 bathrooms, and plenty of good water. From the fourth-floor balcony, there was a glorious view, across a valley, far away, to the snowy range. As we looked around the drawing-room, here were carpets, curtains, solid, very solid chairs, and Berlin wool worked screens, a card-table, and any quantity of pictures. All the rooms were well, almost handsomely, furnished, in an old-fashioned style. There was no scarcity of wardrobes, looking-glasses, or even armchairs, in the bedrooms, and they pantry was fitted out—a most singular circumstance—with a large supply of handsome glass and china, lamps, old moderators, coffee and tea pots, plated side dishes, and candlesticks, cooking utensils and spoons and forks, wine coasters, and a cake-backet. The chins was Spoke, the plate old family heirlooms, with a crest—a winged horse—on everything, down to the very mustard spoons. There were gold- and silverplated chandeliers, imported Tiffany art glass windows, German silver and bronze inlaid doors, Swiss molded bathtubs, rare precious woods like mahogany and rosewood. Handsome Dresden china vases, nice boxes of firewood in every room, clocks, real hair mattresses—in short, it was a treasure trove. It was well built with some peculiar effects such as stairs that lead to the ceiling, doors that go nowhere and that opened onto walls, and chimneys that stop just short of the roof. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
It is estimated that there were some 500 to 600 rooms in the house. However, it is haunted! According to a Boston medium, Mrs. Winchester and her family and her fortune were being haunted by spirits. Supposedly the untimely deaths of her daughter and husband were caused by these spirits, and it was implied that Mrs. Winchester would be the next victim. We soon forget about the dismal prophecy, being too gay and too busy to give her, or it a thought. We had so many engagements—tennis parties and tournaments, picnics, concerts, dances and little dinners. We ourselves gave occasional afternoon teas in the verandah, using the best Spode cups and saucers and the old silver cake-basket, and were warmly complimented on our good fortune in being guests in such a charming house and garden. Mrs. Winchester also had an African grey parrot—a rare bird indeed—and a cute little dog named Zip. Later that night, we had dinner in a handsome and somewhat antique-looking room. A cheerful wood-fire blazed in the capacious hearth; a little at one side an old-fashioned table, with richly-carved legs, was placed—destined, no doubt, to receive the supper, for which preparations were going forward; and ranged with exam regularity stood the tall-backed chairs whose ungracefulness was more than counterbalanced by their comfort. A stranger stopped at the door of the room, and displayed his form and face completely. He wore a dark coloured cloth cloak, which was short and full, not falling quite to the knees; his legs were cased in dark purple silk stockings, and his shoes were adorned with roses of the same colour. The opening of the cloak in front showed the undersuit to consist of some very dark, perhaps sable material, and his hands were enclosed in a pair of heavy leather gloves which ran up considerably above the wrist, in the manner of a gauntlet. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
In one hand he carried his walking-stick and his hat, which he had removed, and the other hung heavily by his side. A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and its fold rested upon plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face!—all the flesh of the face was coloured with the bluish leaden hue which is sometimes produced by the operation of metallic medicines administered in excessive quantities; the eyes were enormous, and the white appeared both above and below the iris, which gave to them the impression of insanity, which was heightened by their glassy redness; the nose was well enough, but the mouth was writhed considerably to one side, where it opened in order to give egress to two long, discoloured fangs, which projected from the upper jaw, far blow the lower lip; the hue of the lips themselves bore the usual relation to that of the face, and was consequently nearly black. The character of the face was malignant, even satanic, to the last degree; and, indeed, such a combination of horror could hardly be accounted for, except by supposing the corpse of some atrocious malefactor, which had long hung blackening upon the gibbet, to have at length become the habitation of a demon—the frightful sport of satanic possession. It was remarkable that the worshipful stranger suffered as little as possible of his flesh to appear, and that during his visit he did not once remove his gloves. There was something indescribably odd, even horrible about all his motions, something undefinable, something unnatural, unhuman—it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
The stranger said hardly anything during his visit, which did not exceed half an hour; and the host himself could scarcely muster courage enough to utter the few necessary salutations and courtesies; and, indeed, such was the nervous terror which the presence of Theophilus Dunn inspired, that very little would have made all his entertainers fly bellowing from the room. During his stay he did not once suffer his eyelids to close, nor even to move in the slightest degree; and further, there was a death-like stillness in his whole person, owing to the total absence of the heaving motion of the chest caused by the process of respiration. These two peculiarities, though when told they may appear trifling, produced a very striking and unpleasant effect when seen and observed. He saw a shadowy and ill-defined form gliding into the apartment. Sharp guests of wind and warning rumblings of thunder that seemed to shake the mountains, blew away the table cloth. As it was whirling into space, Dunn drew his sword, and raising the candle as o throw its light with increased distinctness upon the objects in the room, he entered the chamber into which the figure had glided. No figure was there—nothing but the furniture which had belonged to the room, and yet he could not be deceived as to the fact that something had moved before them into the chamber. A sickening dread came upon him, and the cold perspiration broke out in heavy drops upon his forehead; nor was he more composed when he heard the increased urgency, they agony of entreaty, which Mrs. Winchester implored him not to leave for a moment. “I saw him,” she said. “He is there! I cannot be deceived—I know him. He is by me—he is with me—he is in the room. Then, for God’s sake, as you would save me, do no stir from beside me!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
Mrs. Winchester had it prevailed upon her to lie down upon the bed, where she continued to urger everyone to stay by her. She frequently uttered incoherent sentences, repeating again and again, “The dead and the living cannot be one—God has forbidden it!” and then again, “Rest to the wakeful—sleep to the sleep-walkers.” There was a Greek curse inscribed on a lead tablet in the drawing room from the city of Selinus in Sicily. Mrs. Winchester used it to communicate with gods and spirits. A spirit had been summoned and bound to the tablet to make sure the curse was effective. Souls after death do as yet love their body which they left, as those souls do whose bodies want due burial or have left their bodies by violent death, and as yet wander about their carcasses in a troubled and moist spirit, being, as it were, allured by something that hath an affinity with them. Many spirits had been invoked that night, this one had been brought out and seated on a sixteen-sided stand (an improvement on the double pentacle called Solomon’s seat). Mrs. Winchester lay in the inner chamber, the door of which was open; and by the side of the bed, at her urgent desire, stood her niece Marion “Daisey” Marriam Marriott; a candle burned in the bedchamber, and three were lighted in the outer apartment. Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton arrived, and cleared his voice, as if about to commence a prayer; but before he had time to begin, a sudden gust of air blew out the candle which served to illuminate the room in which Mrs. Winchester lay, and she with hurried alarm, explained: “Sir Lancelot, bring in another candle; the darkness is unsafe.” Sir Lancelot stepped from the bedchamber into the other, in order to supply what she desired. “O God! do not go, Sir Lancelot!” shrieked the unhappy Mrs. Winchester; and at the same time she sprang from the bed and darted after him, in order, by her grasp, to detain him. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
However, the warning came too late, for scarcely had he passed the threshold, and hardly had Mrs. Winchester has time to utter the startling explanation, when the door which divided the two rooms closed violently after him, as if swung to by a strong blast of wind. Sir Lancelot and Dunn both rushed to the door, but their united and desperate efforts could not avail so much as to sake it. Shriek after shriek burst from the inner chamber, with all the piercing loudness of despairing terror. Sir Lancelot and Dunn applied every energy and strained every nerve to force open the door; but all in vain. There was no sound of struggling from within, but the screams seemed to increase in loudness, and at the same time they heard the bolts of the latticed window withdrawn, and the window itself grated upon the sill as if thrown open. One last shriek, so long and piercing and agonized as to be scarcely human, swelled from the room, and suddenly there followed a death-like silence. A light step was heard crossing the floor, as if from the bed to the window; and almost at the same instant the door gave way, and yielding to the pressure of the external applicants, they were nearly precipitated into the room. It was empty. The window was open, and Sir Lancelot sprang to the chair and gazed out upon the fruit orchard and the lake below. He saw no form, but he beheld, or thought he beheld, the waters of the broad lake beneath settling ring after ring in heavy circular ripples, as if a moment before disturbed by the immersion of some large and heavy mass. No trace of Mrs. Winchester was ever after discovered, nor was anything certain respecting her mysterious wooer detected or even suspected; no clue whereby to trace the intricacies of the labyrinth, and to arrive at a distinct conclusion was to be found. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
However, an incident occurred, which, though it will not be received by our rational readers as at all approaching to evidence upon the matter, nevertheless produced a strong and a lasting impression upon the mind of Sir Lancelot. Many years after the events at the Winchester Mansion, which we have detailed, Sir Lancelot, then remotely situated, received an intimation of his father’s death, and of his intended burial upon a fixed day in an independent chapel in Bath late in the day upon which the funeral was appointed to take place. The procession had not then arrived. Evening closed in, and still it did not appear. Sir Lancelot strolled down to the church—he found it open; notice of the arrival of the funeral had been given, and the vault in which the body was to be laid had been opened. The official who corresponds to our sexton, on seeing a well-dressed gentleman, whose object was to attend the expected funeral, pacing the aisle of the chapel, hospitably invited him to share with him the comforts of a blazing wood fire, which as was his custom in winter time upon such occasions, he had kindled on the hearth of a chamber which communicated by a flight of steps with the vault below. In this chamber Sir Lancelot and his entertainer seated themselves; and the sexton, after some fruitless attempts to engage his guest in conversation, was obliged to apply himself to his tobacco-pipe and can to solace his solitude. In spite of his grief and cares, the fatigues of a rapid journey of nearly forty hours gradually overcame the mind and body of Sir Lancelot Charles Lee Brenton, and he sank into a deep sleep, from which he was awakened by someone shaking him gently by the shoulder. He first thought that the old sexton had called him, but he was no longer in the room. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
There was a kind of ghostly twilight. The ghostly lights passed and disappeared in the gathering darkness. He roused himself, and as soon as he could clearly see what was around him, he perceived a female form, clothed in a kind of black robe of muslin, part of which was so disposed as to act as a veil, and in her hand she carried a lamp. She was moving rather away from him, and towards the flight of steps which conducted towards the vaults. Sir Lancelot felt a vague alarm at the sight of this figure, and at the same time an irresistible impulse to follow his guidance. He followed it towards the vaults, but when it reached the head of the stairs, he paused; the figure paused also, and turning gently round, displayed, by the light of the lamp it carried, the face and features of the beloved, Sarah Winchesters. There was nothing horrible, or even sad, in the countenance. On the contrary, it wore the same arch smile which used to enchant him long before in his happy days. A feeling of awe and interest, too intense to be resisted, prompted him to follow the specter, if specter it were. She descended the stairs—he followed; and, turning to the left through a narrow passage she led him, to his infinite surprise, through the door to nowhere, into what appeared to be an old-fashioned Victorian apartment. Abundance of costly antique furniture was disposed about the room, and in one corner stood a four-post bed, with heavy black cloth curtains, and by the light of the lamp which she held towards its contents, she disclosed to the horror stricken clergyman, sitting bolt upright in the bed, the livid and demoniac form of Theophilus Dunn. Sir Lancelottt had hardly seen him when he fell senseless upon the floor, where he lay until discovered, on the next morning, by persons employed in closing the passages into the vaults. He was laying in a cell of considerable size, which had not been disturbed for a long time, and had fallen beside a large coffin which was supported upon small stone pillars, a security against the attacks of vermin. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
To his dying day Sir Lancelot was satisfied of the reality of the vision which he had witnessed, and he has left behind him curious evidence of the impression which it wrought upon his fancy, in a painting executed shortly after the event we have narrated, and which is valuable as exhibiting not only the peculiarities which have made the Winchester Mansion sought after, but even more so as presenting occurrences in Mrs. Winchester’s interviews and journals that defy explanation. However, Mrs. Winchester’s mysterious fate must ever remain a matter of speculation. Yes; sometimes at night the most terrible weeping and sobbing can be heard coming from the “Daisy bedroom,” and a phantom horse can be heard plunging in the carriage house, and the wild, unearthly and utterly appalling shriek. The scene of horrible dinner parities has even been seen in the dining room. A party of ghouls meets there a few times of year, after midnight, and are assembled with the spoils of the graves they have violated, and are feasting on the flesh of long-buried corpses. One of the servants even saw his own wife, who, by the way, never touched supper at home, playing no inconsiderable part in the hideous banquet. Hundreds of wild stories have appeared about this mysterious mansion. It seems odd that none of her relatives or former employees ever came forward to contradict these stories, despite the fact that many of them lived for forty years after the estate was opened for tours. For some reason, did they feel threatened by talking—or did they continue to guard Mrs. Winchesters privacy? At the Winchester Mystery House, we may never be able to separate fact from legend—so here are some stories that have been told since the late 1800s and early 1900s. We leave it to guests and readers to decide for themselves why Mrs. Winchester really built the house the way she did, or what is it really? A portal or just a museum? #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Winchester Mystery House is an extravagant maze of Victorian craftmanship—marvelous, baffling, and eerily eccentric, to say the least. Tour guides must warn people not to stray from the group or they could be lost for hours. Countless questions come to mind as you wander through the mansion—such as, what was Mrs. Winchester thinking when she had a staircase built the descends seven steps and then rises eleven? By the way, Harry Houdini, an occultist, was attracted to the Winchester and tried to escape from the mansiin blindfolded; he also died Halloween 1926.
Winchester Mystery House
What it feels like walking through a microscopic spiderweb….🕷🕸
All Hallows’ Eve, Lost in the House tour tickets are still available for tonight. Hurry and purchase before they sell out!
🎟link: http://ow.ly/k5wM50GqWTb
The Awareness of Human Destructiveness Bursts!
Many humans, at one time, were primarily isolated, but enter relationships with members of the human family in order to satisfy their striving for please. Many of the relationships were sought after and conceived in a way that resemble relations in the marketplace. Each was only concerned with the satisfaction of one’s needs, but it is precisely for the sake of this satisfaction that one had entered into relations with others who offer what one needs, and need what one offers. Each living cell is supposed to be endowed with the two basic qualities of living matter, Eros (love) and the striving for death. We are struck by the significance of the possibility that the aggressiveness may not be able to find satisfaction in the external World because it comes up against real obstacles. If this happens, it will perhaps retreat and increase the amount of self-destructiveness holding sway in the interior. Impeded aggressiveness seems to involve a grave injury. It really seems as though it is necessary for us to destroy some other thing or person in order not to destroy ourselves, in order to guard against the impulsion to self-destruction. A sad disclosure indeed for the moralist! However, the most powerful impeding factor of all and one totally beyond any possibility of control is the death instinct. In theory of death instinct, the awareness of human destructiveness bursts forth in full strength, and destructiveness becomes the one pole of existence which, fighting with the other pole, Eros, forms they very essence of life. Destructiveness becomes a primary phenomenon of life. It is true that evil forces do exist but not true that they exist on the highest level. Insight into the ultimate sees the not. Evil is certainly present, plain to sight and unpleasant to experience, but it is not altogether, nor only what it seems. It is really an appearance, and reconcilable with the benign source of good. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Eros, present in every cell of living substance, has as its aim the unification and integration of smaller units into the unity of humankind. This is love that does not involve pleasures of the flesh, also known as the “love instinct”; love is identified with life and growth, and—fighting with the death instinct—it determines human existence. Humans are no longer conceived of as primarily isolated and egotistical, as l’homme machine, but as being primarily related to others, impelled by the life instincts which make one need union with others. Life, love, and growth are one and the same, more deeply rooted and fundamental then pleasures of the flesh and other pleasures. The change is vision shows clearly in this new evaluation of the Christian biblical commandment, “Though shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” Anything that encouraged the growth of emotional ties between humans must operate against war. These ties may be of two kinds. In the first place they may be relations resembling those toward a loved object, though without having an aim for pleasures of the flesh. There is no need for psychoanalysis to be ashamed to speak of love in this connection, for religion itself uses the same words: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” This, however, is more easily said than done. The second kind of emotional tie is by means of identification. Whatever leads humans to share important interests produces this community of feeling, these identifications. And the structure of human society is to a large extent based on them. Why is history such a record of wars, oppressions, exploitations, invasions, and persecutions? Why have all the saviours, avatars, prophet, and saints succeeded only with individual humans here and there, not with the mass of humankind? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Is the religious dream of universal goodness nothing more than a dream? It is not a help but a self-deception to ignore the double polarity of existence, the yin-and-yang in the Universe, the shadow-self in humans. Only outside of religion, in the philosophic realm of the ultimate being, the Unique, the Real, where the entire World itself is cast out, can we talk of friction-free consciousness, and only in the deepest meditation can we share it. Although the experience is a temporary one, the peace in it so passes the understanding that “the Kingdom of Heaven” is its fit name. Here indeed is the Good raised to its highest degree. Here is a demonstration that human evil is but privation of good. What may be true on the ultimate level—the non-existence of evil, the reality of the Good, the True, the Beautiful—becomes false on the level of duality. Here the twofold powers, the opposites, do not exist, do hold the World in their sway. To deny relative evil here is to confuse different planes of being. The human who would deliberately harm one’s fellows for one’s own ends is a sinner. Evil arises only when an entity goes astray into the delusions of separateness and materialism, and thence into conflict with other entities. There is no ultimate and eternal principle of evil, but there are forces of evil, unseen entities who have gone so far astray and are so powerful in themselves that they work against goodness, truth, and justice. However, by their very nature such entities are doomed to eventual destruction, and even their work of opposition is utilized for good in the end and becomes the resistance against which evolution tests its own achievements, the grindstone against which is sharpens humans’ intelligence, the mirror in which its shows one one’s flaws. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
The lower nature in incurably hostile to the higher one. It prefers its fleeting joys with their attendant miseries, its ugly sins wit their painful consequences, because this spells life to it. Everything and everyone has a negative side. One could fill up a lifetime looking for and finding it. One could go on grumbling, criticizing, ranting, and hating. However, there is also the beneficial side of it. The philosophical attitudes seeks deeper, keeps calmer, for it finds equilibrium on another plane. The descent from faith in Holy Spirit to faith in unholy spirits happens to those who are either too weak to remain at such a high altitude or too incapable of rising from a sensate view of existence. Evil can take every form, even that of the guru, the quest, and the leaner. Some yeas ago someone asked me, “What about absolute evil?” The answer is this: with Confucius we say that sin is due to ignorance, and with Pythagoras that evil is due to the absence of good. Ignorance leads to selfishness and extreme ignorance leads to extreme selfishness, which in turn leads to extreme evil. Now, all these are relative conditions and pass away in time as the person leans one’s lessons though the series of experience and corrects one’s mistake during reincarnations. There cannot be an absolute evil because there is only one Absolute Power, one God, one Supreme Being; and it is this which inspires the highest goodness know to humans when one discovers its presence, through the Overself, in one’s heart. In that sense only I said there was an absolute good. The pairs of opposites exist only in the finite, relative, and limited World. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
There is no opposite to the Supreme Power in the timeless and infinite World, no Satan with whom God is in everlasting conflict. However, on its own level, Mind knows neither good nor bad. There is only IS-ness. It seems that there is evil in the World, but why? What bad humans have done is to let their evil grow like a noxious weed too large and their good too little, whereas good humans have cultivated a high proportion of goodness. There is no absolute evil. It is truer to talk of absolute god for that is there first. Why? Because God is there first. Humans came later and broke the divine laws little by little. They created their own evil consequences. Or for different reasons they harm others and have later to suffer for it. Humans were once looked at as machines driven by chemical processes: feelings, affects and emotions were explained as being caused by specific and identifiable physiological processes. Most of hormonology and of the neurophysiological findings of the last decades were unknown to these humans, yet with daring and ingenuity they insisted on the correctness of their approach. Needs and interests for which no somatic sources could be found were ignored, and the understanding of those processes which were not neglected followed the principles of mechanistic thinking. The model of human behaviour could be repeated today in a properly programmed computer. One develops a certain amount of tension which at a certain threshold has to be relieved and reduced, while this realization is checked by another part, the ego, which observes reality and inhibits relief when it conflicts with the needs for survival. This Freudian robot would be similar to Isaac Asimov’s science-fiction robot, but the programming would be different. Its first law would be not to hurt human beings, but to avoid self-damage or self-destruction. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, the new theory does not follow this mechanistic “physiologizing” model. It is centered on a biological orientation in which fundamental forces of life (and its opposite: death) become the primal forces of motivating humans. The nature of the cell—that is, of all living substance—becomes the theoretical basis for a theory of motivation, not a physiological process that goes on in certain organs of the body. The new theory was perhaps closer to a vitalistic philosophy than to the concept of the German mechanistic materialists. What motivated Dr. Freud to postulate the death instinct? One factor was probably the impact of the First World War. He, like many other humans of his time and age, had shred the optimistic vision so characteristic of the European middle class, and saw oneself suddenly confronted with a fury of hate and destruction hardly believable before August 1, 1914. From there, Dr. Freud became a man preoccupied with death. He thought of dying every day, after he was forty; he had attacks of Todesangst (“fear of death”), and sometimes he would add to his “goodbye”: “You might never see me again.” One might surmise that Dr. Freud’s disposition would have impressed him as a confirmation of his fear of death, and thus contributed to the formulation of death instinct. This preoccupation with death grew in intensity and led him to a concept in which the conflict between life and death was at the center of human experience, rather than the conflict between the two life-affirmative drives, pleasures of the flesh and ego drives. To assume that humans need to die because death is the hidden goal of one’s life might be considered a kind of comfort destined to alleviate one’s fear of death. And it is true, when people’s lives are in danger and they lack security that they learn not to fear death. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
It seems likely that many hearts in American society have waxed cold since September 11, 2001, when there was an attack on American soil that claimed the lives of over 3,500 people. Many people were too young to realize how devastating it was at the moment, but I believe the tragedy affected everyone much like Dr. Freud was confronted with the fury of hate and destruction from August 1, 1914. Acts on war in your homeland make people realize that life is not promised and it can have a psychological impact. “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see,” reports Hebrews 11.1. Begin today to believe that what you have hoped for is going to happen, that good things are on their way. Notice, faith has to do with the unseen World. You may not be able to perceive anything beneficial happening in your life with your natural eyes today. In fact, everything may be falling apart—your finances, your health, your business, your relationships with your family and friend. All kind of problems may be on the horizon. However, do not be discoursed, turn your focus to the supernatural World, look to God and Jesus Christ for solutions and know that your harmony and peace will be restored. The World tells you that you need to live out loud and seeing is believing. However, God says seek ye the Kingdom of Heave first, and all these things will be added to you. Look through your Heavenly eyes of faith, and once you confirm something by faith, it will manifest in the physical World. What do you do when you see others being honored or elevated? You could feel bad about their feeling good. Or you could consider these as occasions for your feeling good about feeling bad. Why? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
If only you knew it, the contempt of humans on Earth should not cause you to shed a single tear. What should you do? Direct your heart toward God in Heaven. In the past, many men did not view woman as equals with men, but some did. Overall, there was a patriarchal bias. However, the very essence of the Platonic myth is that male and female were once one and were then divided into halves, which implies, of course, that the two halves are equals, that they form a polarity endowed with the tendency to unite. Eros (love) aims at complicating life and preserving it, and hence is also conservative, because with the emergence of life an instinct is born which is to preserve it. However, we must ask, if it is the nature of the instinct to re-establish the earliest state of existence, inorganic matter, how can it at the same time tend to re-establish a later form of existence, namely life? Well, according to Plato’s report in the Symposium concerning the original unity of man who was then divided into halves by Zeus, after this division, each desiring his other half, they came together and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one. The living substance at the same time of its coming to life was torn apart into small particles, which have ever since endeavoured to reunite through martial union and procreation. These instincts, in which the chemical affinity of inanimate matter persisted, gradually succeeded, as they developed through the kingdom of the protists, in overcoming the difficulties put in the way of that endeavour by an environment charged with dangerous stimuli—stimuli which compelled them to form a protective cortical layer. These splintered fragments of living substance in this way attained a multicellular condition and finally transferred the instinct for reuniting, in the most highly concentrated form, to the combination of two souls. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
So it is no wonder so many people feel so fractured and incomplete. Their living substance was torn apart. Do you see things getting better in your life? Or are you just drifting along, accepting whatever comes your way? “I know I was not going to get that Cresleigh Havenwood House Residence 4. Noting good ever happens to me.” “This is just my lot in life. I knew I would never get that BMW 750Li with Xdrive.” “I knew I would never be blessed.” In the face of God’s blinding glory, many of us have to be blinkered. Perhaps that is why, without our peripheral vision, we are so easily hoodwinked by Vanity. If I assess myself correctly, never has an injury been done to me by another creature, and hence I have no right, at least not yet, to make a ruckus against God, my Righteous if Riotous Lord. Why? Because I have sinned against God frequently and gravely. Deservedly, therefore, should every creature pick up one’s pike against me. So it is only reasonable to conclude that confusion and contempt are my just due. Yours, however, is praise, honour, and glory. And in the light of these considerations, unless I prepare myself—by being looked down upon by every giraffe, outsped by every gazelle, overlooked by every gryphon—I can be neither pacified and stabilized interiorly, spiritually illuminated, nor fully one with God. Do not limit God with your small thinking. Have extraordinary vision for your life and live with faith and expectancy. You will be surprised that you will become what you believe. Some of the reasons are blessings are delayed in the fulfillment of the promise for year after year, is simply the fact that we cannot see it through our eyes of faith. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Is God trying to do something out of the ordinary in your life? Be sure to get into agreement with God. Do not tell God the reasons why things cannot happen. All the time God is trying to plant new seed of success inside of us. He is showing us that if we do not conceive in our hearts through faith, it will never come to pass. “The things which are impossible with humans are possible with God,” reports Luke 18.27. Let that word plant faith inside of your heart. You do not have to figure out how God is going to solve your problems, but turn the situation over to God. God can do what human beings cannot or will not do. God is supernatural. If you can put your trust and confidence in the Lord, God will surely bring it to pass. If you can see the invisible, God will do the impossible. In God, the love of a friend should stand. God is Ever-living, Everlasting Truth, your friend will not shed a tear if you live of die. It is because of God that love of a friend should stand. It is because of God that one should be loved, that is to say, everyone who is seemed good to you and who is very dear in this life. Without God the love of friendship will not have the strength to last. Nor is the love of friendship true and clear unless God is an integral part of it; that is as His Augustine described it in his Confessions (4.4). Which is another way of saying, you ought to be dead to two-person friendships, especially when the other person is another creature. However, when the other person is God, then something odd happens. The closer you approach God, the farther you recede from every friendly solace. Also the higher you ascend to God, the deeper you descend into yourself and the viler you appear to yourself. I want to get a grander vision for my life, Father, and then live it out with faith and expectancy, knowing that I will become what I believe. Today, I will focus on You, who You are and what You can do in and through me. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Whoever attributes good to oneself only makes it more difficult for oneself to receive the grace of God. Why? Because, as the spiritual wisdom echoing Proverbs (3.34), Psalms (55.22), and First Peter (5.5) has it, the grace of the Holy Spirit always seeks the humble heart. To annihilate yourself, to empty yourself of all created love—that is what you ought to do. And what I ought to do is fill that very same space with a very great grace. When you warm to the wonderfulness of the created World, the Creator’s respect for you begins to cool. Because of the Creator, if for no other reason, learn how to conquer yourself in all things. Do that, and you will have the strength to reach out to Divine Knowledge. However slight it may be, unruly love and irregular respect delay, even detour, your spiritual progress. The anal libido has a deep affinity to the death instinct. Now, controlling and possessing are certainly tendencies opposite of loving, furthering, liberating, which form a syndrome among themselves. However, “possession” and “control” do not contain the very essence of destructiveness, the wish to destroy, and hostility toward life. No doubt, the anal character has a deep interest in and affinity to feces as part of their general affinity to all that is not alive. Feces are the product finally eliminated by the body, being of no further use to it. The anal character is attracted by feces as one is attracted by everything that is useless for life, such as dirt, death, decay. We can say that the tendency to control and possess is only one aspect of the anal character, but milder and less malignant than hatred of life. Eros (love), therefore is looked upon as the biologically normal aim of development, while the death instinct is seen to be based on a failure of normal development and in this sense a pathological, though deeply rooted striving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
If one wants to entertain a biological speculation one might relate anality to the fact that orientation by smell is characteristic of all four-legged mammals, and that the erect posture implies the change from orientation by smell to orientation by sight. The change in function of the old olfactory brain would correspond to the same transformation of orientation. In view of this, one might consider that the anal character constitutes a regressive phase of biological development for which there might even be a constitutional-genetic basis. The anality of the individual could be considered as representing an evolutionary repetition of a biological human functioning. The theoretician arrives at the conclusion that humans have only the alternative between destroying oneself (slowly, by illness) or destroying others; or—putting it in other words—between causing suffering either to oneself or to others. The humanist rebels against the idea of this tragic alternative that would make war a rational solution of this aspect of human existence. An alternate is repression of the instinctual demands, which are the development of culture and civilization. Some people say the Europeans created such a successful society because they learned the art of self-control. The repressed instinctual drive was “sublimated” into valuable cultural channels, but still at the expense of full human happiness. On the other hand, repression led not only to increasing civilization but also to the development of neurosis among the many in whom the repressive process did not work successfully. Lack of civilization combined with full happiness or civilization combined with neurosis and diminished happiness seemed to be the alternative. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The contradiction between the death instinct and Eros confronts humans with a real and truly tragic alternative, a real alternative because one can decide to attack and wage war, to be aggressive, and to express one’s hostility because one prefers to do this rather than to be sick. That this alternative is a tragic one hardly needs to be proven. Something very remarkable, which we should never have guessed and which is nevertheless quite obvious. What happens to the aggressor when one renders one’s desire for aggression innocuous? One’s aggressiveness is introjected, internalized; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from—that is, it is directed toward one’s own ego. There it is take over by a portion of the ego as super-ego, and which now, in the form of “conscience,” is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals. The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it, is called by us the sense of guilt; it expresses itself as a need for punishment. Civilization, therefore, obtains mastery over the individual’s dangerous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by setting up an agency within one to watch over it, like a garrison in a conquered city. The transformation of destructiveness into a self-punishing conscience does not seem to be as much as an advantage as it may seem to imply. According to this theory of conscience, it would have to be as cruel as the death instinct, since it is charged with its energies, and no reason is given why the death instinct should be “wakened” and “disarmed.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Rather, it would see that the following analogy expresses the real consequences of this thought more logically: a city that has been ruled by a cruel enemy defeats one with the help of a dictator who then sets up a system that is just as cruel as that of the defeated enemy; and this, what is gained? The instinct of destruction, moderated and tamed, and, as it were, inhibited in its aim, must, when it is directed toward objects, provide the ego with the satisfaction of its vital needs and with control over nature. This is a good example of sublimation; the aim of the instinct is not weakened, but it is directed toward other socially valuable aims, in this case the “control over nature.” This sounds, indeed, like a perfect solution. Humans are freed from the tragic choice of destroying either others or themselves, because the energy of the destructive instinct is used for the control over nature. However, we must ask, can this really be so? Can it be true that destructiveness becomes transformed into constructiveness? What can “control over nature” mean? Taming and breeding animals, gathering and cultivating planets, weaving cloth, building Cresleigh Homes, manufacturing pottery and many more activities including the construction of Ultimate Driving Machines, railroads, airplanes, skyscraper: al these are acts of constructing, building, unifying, synthesizing, and, indeed, if one wanted to attribute them to one of the two basic instincts, they might be considered as being motivated by Eros rather then the death instinct. With the possible exception of killing animals for their consumption and killing humans in war, both of which could be considered as rooted in destructiveness, material production is not destructive but constructive. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
As a result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus is quite seriously deserved to be called a death instinct, while procreation is the instinct represented by the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of social organs, it is directed outwards, on to objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to day, by destroying an extraneous one. Some portion of the death instinct, however, remain operative within the organism, and we have sought to trace quite a number of normal and pathological phenomena to this internalization of the destructive instinct. We have even been guilty of the heresy of attributing the origin of conscience to the diversion inwards of aggressiveness. If this process is carried too far, you will notice that it is by no means a trivial matter; it is possibly unhealthy. On the other hand if these forces are turned to destruction of the external World, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them for which an explanation also needs to be found. When the good is absent, the evil is present. The cynic who denies the existence of the good, the dreamer who denies the existence of the evil—each ignores the other half of life as evidence in history and in the World around one. When we go to the roots—that is what “radically” literally means—and discover that a great deal of our conscious thinking only veils our real thoughts and feelings and hides the truth; most of our conscious thought is a sham, a mere rationalization of thoughts and desires which we prefer not to be aware of. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
This is revolutionary because it leads people to open their eyes to the reality of the structure of the society they live in and hence to the wish to change it in accordance with the interests and desires of the vast majority. Much of the liberal middle class was suspected of being neurotic because their liberation of pleasures of the flesh is largely part of the ever-increasing consumerism. If people are taught to spend and spend, rather than, as in the nineteenth century, to save and save, if they were transformed into “consumers,” one had not only to permit but encourage consumption of pleasures of the flesh. It is after all the most simple and the cheapest of all consumption. Conservatives used to have a strict code of chastity and liberty of pleasures of the flesh lead to an anticonservative revolutionary attitude. If anything, historical development has shown that liberation of pleasures of the flesh has served the development of consumerism and weakened political radicalism. What more people really want is not to become more human, more free, more independent—that would mean more critical and revolutionary-minded—but they want to suffer no more than the average member of their class. They hardly see a really happy person, only a few people who have succeeded in being relatively satisfied with their lot, especially if they are successful and admired by others. Naturally, quite a few people, having a sympathetic listener to talk to, feel better, aside from the fact that as years go by experience in living makes the average person improve one’s lot, except those who are too sick to learn from experience. The contemporary capitalist society is considered to be the highest, most developed form of social structure. It is because all other social structures are more primitive or utopian, and not really successful. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
An ever-growing number of people have become aware that capitalist society is just one of innumerable social structures and is neither more nor less “real” than the societies of Central African tribes. The invention of artillery and fortifications has in our times forces the sovereigns of Europe to reestablish the use of regular standing troops to guard their fortresses. Yet however, legitimate the motives, there is reason to fear that the effect will be no less fatal. It will be no less necessary to depopulate the rural areas in order to raise armies and garrisons. To maintain them it will be no less necessary to oppress the peoples. And these dangerous establishments have in recent times been growing so rapidly in all of our part of the World, that no one can foresee anything but the imminent depopulation of Europe, and sooner, or later, the ruin of the people who inhabit it. Be that as it may, it should be noted that such institutions necessarily subvert the public domain, leaving only the wearisome resources of subsidies and taxes, which remain for me to discuss. It would be remembered here that the foundation of the social compact is property, together with its first condition that each person should be maintained in the peaceful enjoyment of what belongs to one. It is true that by the same treaty each person at least tacitly obliges oneself to be assessed for public needs. However, since this commitment cannot hard the fundamental law and presumes that contributors acknowledge the evidence of need, it is clear that to be legitimate, this assessment should be voluntary. It is not based on a private will, as if it were necessary to have the consent of each citizen, who should pay only as much as one pleases. This would be directly contrary to the spirit of the confederation. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Rather, it should be through the general will, by majority vote, and on the basis of proportional rates that leave no room for an arbitrary imposition of taxes. This truth (that taxes can be legitimately established only by the general consent of the people or its representatives) had generally been recognized by all the philosophers and jurists who have any reputation in matters of political right. While some of them have established maxims that appear contrary, it is easy to see the private motives that moved them to do so. They stipulate so many conditions and restrictions that it all boils down to exactly the same thing. For whether the people can reuse it or whether the sovereign should not demand it, is a matter of indifference as far as right is concerned. And if it is only a question of force, it is utterly pointless to inquire what is or is not legitimate. The contributions levied on the people are of two kinds: real taxes (levied on things) and personal taxes (paid by the head). Both are called taxes or subsidies. When the people sets the amount it pays, it is called a subsidy; when it grants the entire proceeds of an assessment, it is a tax. In The Spirit of the Laws we find that a head tax is more in keeping with servitude, while a real tax is more suited to liberty. This would be incontestable, were everyone’s head share equal. For nothing would be more disproportionate than such a tax. It is especially in an exacting observance of proportions that the spirit of liberty consists. However, if a head tax is exactly proportioned to the means of private individuals and is thus at once both and personal, it is the most equitable and, as a result, the one best suited to free humans. At first these proportions appear quite easy to observe, because, being relative to each person’s position, the indications are always public. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
However, besides the fact that greed, influence-peddling, and fraud know how to leave no evidence behind, it is rare that an account is taken of all the elements that should enter into these calculations. First, one ought to consider the relationship of quantities according to which, all things being equal, someone who has ten times more goods than someone else should pay ten times more. Second, one ought to consider the relationship of use, that is, the distinction between what is necessary and what is superfluous. Someone who has only the bare necessities of life should not pay anything at all. Taxing someone who has superfluities can, in time of need, be extended to everything over and above the necessities of life. To this one will declare that, given one’s rank, what would be superfluous for a human of inferior standing is necessary for one. However, that is a lie. For humans of superior standing have two legs, just like a cowherd, and, like the cowherd, has only one stomach. Moreover, this alleged necessity of life is so little necessary to one’s standing that, if one knew how to renounce these things for some worthy cause, one could only be respected more. The people would prostrate themselves before a minister who would go on foot to the council because one had sold one’s Ultimate Driving Machines when the state had a pressing need. Finally, the law does not demand magnificence of anyone, and propriety is never reason against right. A cultivated human of taste and feeling can find much that is beautiful in nature and art; and if one is also a moral idealist, one will find much that is good and virtuous in human life and experience. However, it would be incomplete to stop there and ignore the fact that there is also around us much that is base, dark, and even evil. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The two sides put together form a complete observation. However, it is only the mystics and philosopher who can see—because it requires a deeper penetration than the intellect and the sense can give—that the dark side deals with the World of appearances, a World which is fleeting and ephemeral, whereas the good side and the beautiful side is merely a hint of that other World closer to Reality. Evil is a very real problem in this World of time and space. Evil forces exist and must be fought with all our strength. Nevetheless the Power out of which all things and all entities come is a beneficent one. Love is its radiation. There is no evil and no pain in it. They begin only on the lower level of separation and differentiation. Wild air, World-mothering air, nestling me everywhere, that each eyelash or hair girdles; goes home betwixt the fleeciest, frilest-flixed snowflake; that is fairly mixed with riddles, and is rife in every least thing is life; this needful, never spent, and nursing element; my more than meat and drink, my meal at every wink; their air, which, by life’s law, my lung must draw and draw now but to breathe its praise. Please give rain. We are the pure who camped by water. For Jacob’s sake who set the rods in water, O speed us! He strained and rolled the stone from off the water. Please give rain! Blest heirs to Torah’s quickening water, O save us! To win for them and for their offspring water. Please give rain! Today as then we cry for water. For Moses’ sake who found his people water, O speed us! He smote the rock and lo! out gushed the water. O save us, mighty God! Please give us rain! Our sires sang round the well of water. O save us! Because of Moses at Meribah’s water, O speed us! At Thy command he gave the thirsting water. O save us, mighty God! please give rain! Thy holy servants poured Thee water. O save us! For Thy chief minstrel’s sake who longed for water, O speed us! Yet turned and made libation with the water, O save us, mighty God! Please give rain! Four plants we wave that love the water, O save us! For American’s sake, the home of living water, O speed us! The parched Earth open to the Heavens’ water, O save us, mighty God! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
Plenty of room for pumpkin pie filling and spices! A pantry this big lets us imagine we’re on our own episode of Great British Baking Show. 🥧 #Havenwood offers thoughtful floorplans with space for everything practical.
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood features four distinct floor plans ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet and offering up to five bedrooms. Each plan has been thoughtfully designed and includes great features such as single story homes, guest suites, optional offices, garage workshops, and more!
Get the most out of your new home with Cresleigh’s All Ready smart home featuring all the connectivity needed to keep your house running. Best of all, each Cresleigh home comes with owned solar included!
Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, residents of the 83 homesites of Cresleigh Havenwood will benefit from a brand new neighborhood in the charming City of Lincoln. Palo Verde Park, is just down the street and there’s plenty of recreation to take part in all around town. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
More Wonders of the Invisible World
Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. And California had its full share of obscurity. People groping their way in the dark are unlikely to be either stable or judicious, and thus it is hardly surprising that much of the legends about witchcraft are violent and partisan. The Devil improves the darkness of this affair to push us into a blind man’s buffet, and we are even ready to be sinfully, yea, hotly and madly mauling one another in the dark. Some people want to contact the dead and consider seances, but they are dangerous because it is easy for a gate to be opened and something evil to come along with the spirit you want to contact. There is an old urban legend about “Bloody Mary.” If you chant “Bloody Marry” thirteen times into a mirror in a dark room, her spirit will appear. Some say she will prophesize for you, other versions say she will attack you. Historically, Bloody Mary was a nickname for Mary I of England, who suffered several miscarriages. She was also alleged to be a witch and was burned at the stake. Divination by mirror has been practiced in nearly all cultures for as long as mirrors have been around. Before that, any reflective surface, especially still water, was used to prophesy or catch a glimpse of the future. In many of these legends, the danger is that while you are trying to catch a glimpse of your future, you might also see some aspect of Death. Tradition also holds that at the moment of death, all the mirrors in the house should be covered so hey do not trap the departing spirit. Ancient Greeks and Native Americans believed that the reflection contained the soul, and could be capture by water. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
It is bad luck to break mirrors because they are reflections of the soul, and also because they hold the future. That is why the seven years of bad luck occurs, you have broken your future. Many of the persons confessing these myths are witches by their own confession and have therefore abjured God and Chris, and given themselves up to the Devil, the Father of Lies. And what credit is to be given to the testimony of such against the lives of others? Many historians believe these early American legends are important and endeavor that the complete history of secret California witchcrafts and possessions might not be lost. The preservation of that history might in a be a singular benefit unto the church and unto the World, which makes many solicitous about it. Mrs. Winchester, who has been strangely visited by some shining spirits during the construction of her mansion, believed they were good Angels in her opinion of them. She intimated several things unto her friends, whereof some were to be kept secret. She also said that a new storm of witchcraft would fall upon the country to chastise the iniquity that was used in the willful smothering and covering of the last, and that many fierce opposites to the discovery of witchcraft would be thereby convinced. Many people are looking to acquire authentic, single-family Victorian homes because they believe in the renaissance of witchcraft and these homes possess souls, spirit, ghost, hidden occult symbol, and are supposedly spiritual nexuses. They are a power source to contacting the other World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
All spirits have something in common, but it matters who they are haunting. It matters what their traditions were when they were alive. In many Native American legends, they have thousands of Gods, and each of them had attendant monsters and demons. Pishachas are beings who haunt places where violent deaths have occurred. They eat human flesh and are supposed to be the sons of anger. They haunt cemeteries and places where cremations have taken place and can change their shape and become invisible. Sometimes they attack and eat their victims, in other instances they possess them and drive them insane. It is believed because there was some covenanting with the Devil they had committed and it was an unpardonable sin, that sin of which the scriptures said we must not pray for. Sometimes anyone who was not in a proper covenant with God was considered to be a witch. Witches are known to change into rabbits, cats, other familiar animals. Halloween costumes are a surviving remnant of the belief that transformed witches would be abroad before All Hallow’s Eve. Some of the Indian Powows [id est, pries-magicians] in this country during the 17th century, having received the Gospel and given good evidence of a true conversion to God in Christ, had with much sorrow of heart declared how they had, whilst in their Heathenism, by the hands of Evil Angels murdered their neighbours. A Nagual is a human being, a Shaman, who has acquired the power to shapeshift. Some Nagual have vampire qualities, changing into bats or owls to drain blood; in other cases the nagual is a respected and feared member of the community. In some places nagual are said to attack Indians who have too much contact with mestizo or Anglo populations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
There are myriad instances of witchcraft both in history and in the Bible, but some of the demonologists personal experiences are remarkable enough to make us wish they had given a more detailed account of the. In referring to Balaam, the biblical conjurer of familiar spirits, one of them said, “we have seen and know such wizards among the Heathen in our own land.” If I meant anything, it was that a ghost story would have a great pull over other ghost stories if one could see the person it happened to. One does get rather provoked at never coming across him or her. In April, nearly fifteen years after the Winchester Mansion opened for tour, it was a clear spring day, with no fog or half-lights about, and it was not yet four o’clock in the afternoon—not very ghost-like circumstances, you will admit. I had come home early from my club—it was a sort of holiday time with me just then for a few weeks—intending to get some letters written which had been on my mind for some days, and I had sauntered into the library of the mansion, a pleasant, fair-sized room lined with books, on the first floor. Before setting to work I sat down for a moment or two in an easy-chair by the fire, for it was still cool enough weather to make a fire desirable, and began thinking over my letters. No thought, no shadow of a thought of Mrs. Winchester was present with me, of that I am perfectly certain. The door was on the same side of the room as the fireplace; as I sat there, half facing the fire, I also half faced the door. I had not shut it properly on coming in, I had only closed it without turning the handle, and I did not feel surprised when it slowly and noiselessly swung open, till it stood right out into the room, concealing the actual doorway from my view. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
If you think of the door as just hen acting like a screen to the doorway, you will perhaps understand the position better. From where I say I could not have seen anyone entering the room ill he or she had got beyond the door itself. I glanced up, half expecting to see someone come in, but there was no one; the door had swung open of itself. For the moment I sat on, with only the vague thought passing through my mind, “I must shut I before I begin to write.” However, suddenly I found my eyes fixing themselves on the carpet; something had come within their range of vision, compelling their attention in a mechanical sort of way. What was it? I rubbed my eyes and the wavy something that kept gliding, rippling in, gradually assumed a more substantial appearance. It was—yes, I suddenly became convinced of it, it was rippled of soft silken stuff, creeping in as if in some mysterious way unfolded or unrolled, not jerkily or irregularly, but glidingly and smoothly, like little wavelets on the sea-shore. And I sat there and gazed. I sat there still, as if bewitched, or under some irresistible influence, I cannot tell, but so it was. And it—came always rippling in, till at last it began to rise as it sill came on, and I saw that a figure, a tall graceful woman’s figure, was slowly advancing, backwards of course, into the room, and that the waves of pale silk—a very delicate shade of pearly grey I think it must have been—were in fact the lower portion of a long court-train, the upper part of which hung in deep folds from the lady’s waist. She moved in—I cannot describe the motion, it was not like ordinary walking or stepping backwards—till the whole of her figure and the clear profile of her face and head were distinctly visible, and when at last she stopped and stood there full in my view just, but only just beyond the door, I saw—it came upon me like a flash, that she was no stranger o me, this mysterious visitant! #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
I recognized, unchanged I seemed to me since the day, twenty-five years ago, when I had last seen her, the beautiful features of Mrs. Winchester. I should not have said unchanged. There was one great change in the sweet face. You remember my telling you that one of Mrs. Winchester’s greatest charms was her bright sunny happiness—she never seemed gloomy or depressed or dissatisfied, seldom even pensive. However, in this respect the face I sat there gazing at was utterly unlike Mrs. Winchester’s. Its expression, as she—or “it”—stood there looking, not towards me, but out beyond, as if at someone or something outside the doorway, was of the profoundest sadness. Anything so sad I have never seen in a human face, and I trust I never may. However, I sat on, as motionless almost as she, gazing at her fixedly, with no desire, no power perhaps, to move or approach more nearly to the phantom. I was not in the least frightened. I knew it was a phantom, but I felt paralyzed and as if I myself had somehow got outside of ordinary conditions. And there I sat—staring at Mrs. Winchester, and there she stood, gazing before her with that terrible, unspeakable sadness in her face, which, even though I felt no fear, seemed to freeze me with a kind of unutterable pity. I do not know how long I had sat thus, or how long I might have continued to sit there, almost as if in a trance, when suddenly I heard the front-door bell ring. It seemed to awaken me. I started up and glanced round, half-expecting that I should find the vision dispelled. But no; she was still there, and I sank back into my seat just as I heard my brother coming quickly upstairs. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
He came towards the library, and seeing the door wide open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of Mrs. Winchester in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist—only, do not misunderstand me, the figure of Mrs. Winchester till that moment had had nothing unsubstantial about it. She had looked to me, as she stood there, literally and exactly like a living woman—the shade of her dress, the colour of her hair, the few ornaments she wore, all were as defined and clear as a real person, or perhaps became so again as soon as my brother was well within the room. He came forward, addressing me by name, but I answered him in a whisper, begging him to be silent and to sit down on the seat opposite me for a moment or two. He did so, though he was taken aback by my strange manner, for I still kept my eyes fixed on the door. I had a queer consciousness that if I looked away it would fade, and I waned to keep cool and see what would happen. I asked George in a low voice if he saw nothing, but though he mechanically followed the direction of my eyes, he shook his head in bewilderment. And for a moment or two he remained thus. Then I began to notice that the figure was growing less clear, as if it were receding, yet without growing smaller to the sight; it grew fainter and vaguer, the colours grew hazy. I rubbed my eyes once or twice with a half idea that my long watching was making them misty, but it was not so. My eyes were not at fault—slowly but surely Sarah Winchester, or her ghost, melted away, ill all trace of her was gone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
I saw again the familiar pattern of the carpet where she had stood and the objects of the room that had been hidden by her draperies—all again in the most commonplace way: but she was gone, quite gone. Then George, seeing me relax my intense gaze, began to question me. I told him exactly what I have told you. He answered, as every common-sensible person of course would, that it was strange, but that such things did happen sometimes, and were classed by the wise under the head of “optical delusions.” I was not well, perhaps, he suggested. Been overworking? Had I not better see a doctor? However, I shook my head. I was quite well, and I said so. And perhaps he was right, it might be an optical delusion only. I had never had any experience of such things. “Poor” Mrs. Winchester I cannot help calling her. I heard of her indirectly, and probably, but for the sadness of her story, I should never have heard it at all. It was a friend of her husband’s family who had mentioned the circumstances in the hearing of a friend of mine, and one day something brought round the conversation to old times, and he startled me by suddenly enquiring if I remembered Sarah Winchester. I said, of course, I did. Did he know anything of her? And then he told me. She was dead—she had died some months after a long and trying illness, the result of a terrible accident. Something happened one evening when dressed for some grand entertainment or other, and though her injuries did not seem likely to be fatal at the time, she had never recovered the shock. “She was so pretty,” my friend said, “and one of the saddest parts of it is she could have not been any older than twenty when she passed away in 1922. She was such a sweet and bright lady.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
We all thought the she had finished construction of her mansion and moved up north to build another one. I did not tell him my story, for I did not want it chattered about, but a strange sort of shiver ran through me at his words. Not everyone was in agreement that the specters in the Winchester mansion had all been angry spirits or a delusion of the Devil. It having been represented to us that a most horrible witchcraft or possession of Devils hath invested several towns in Our Province of California under your government, and that divers persons have been convicted of witchcraft, like the Prison’s of the River, in Sacramento, California; some whereof have confessed their guilt, but others being of a known and good reputation these proceedings had caused a great dissatisfaction among our good subjects, for which reason you have put a stop thereunto until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore until Our Pleasure should be known concerning the same, We therefore approving of your care and circumspection herein have thought fit to signify Our Will and Pleasure, as We do hereby will and require you to give all necessary directions that in all proceedings against persons accused for witchcraft or being possessed by the Devil the greatest moderation and all due circumspection be used, so far as the same may be without impediment to the ordinary course of justice within Our said Province. And so We bid your very heartily farewell. Given at the Winchester Mansion the 15th day of April, 1947, in the fifth year of Our Reign. By Her Majesty’s Command. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
Although the topic of witchcraft was now explosively controversial in California, nobody was to deny that people practiced it, and there was still some interest in investigating it. There are therefore references to it in many of the sermons in the 19th century. However, after the Winchester mansion was opened for tour, the mysterious disappearance of Mrs. Winchester was thought to be paranormal and a circular letter was sent by the Winchester Repeating Arms Company to investigate the collection of more instances of “remarkable providences” (these would include unusual natural phenomena as well as the preternatural). Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the darkness and strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings in the Winchester mansion, on stones in the basement on the walls in the dressing room, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings in forbidden areas of the mansion which interpret to the mystical the inspired secrets of Mrs. Winchester, in the cryptic emblems of her old books on alchemy, in the ceremonies practiced at reception by this secret society, there were found indications of a doctrine which was everywhere the same and everywhere carefully concealed. It is likewise to be understood, those who are desirous to raise any souls of the dead, ought to select those places wherein these kind of souls are most known to be conversant; or by some alliance alluring the souls into their forsaken bodies, or by some kind of affection in times impressed in them in their life, drawing the souls to certain places, things, or persons; or by the forcible nature of some place fitted and prepared to purge or punish these souls: which places for the most part are to be known by he appearance of visions, nightly incursions, and apparitions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Mrs. Winchester lists convincing evidence that her experience of witchcraft extended well beyond what she had committed to writing: I know a young man who had gone so far as to get ready a Covenant with Satan, written all of it in his own blood. However, before the signing of it, the sinful, I was made the happy instrument of his deliverance. As soon was this man was left alone in the mansion, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud and turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that with which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared closed again. Hence it is that the souls of the dead are not to be called up without blood or by the application of some part of their relict body. In the raising therefore of these shadows, we are to perfume with new blood the bones of the dead, and with flesh, eggs, milk, honey, and oil, which furnish the soul with a medium apt to receive its body. Gosh, it must be terrible to know you witnesses something, but that you will never be able to remember it or tell anyone about it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
I know a woman whose brother was tortured with a cruel, pricking, incurable pain in the crown of his head, which continued until there was found with her a puppet in wax, resembling him, with a pin pricked into the head of it, which being take out her recovered immediately. He goes on about demons. A demon killed his wife, he says, and just expects me to believe it. However, what he looks like to me is someone who let grief turn him into a monster. Whatever happened to his wife, it does not excuse what he had done. He attacks, kills, then springs away before anyone can react. Wicked sorceries have been practised in the land, and, in the late inexplicable storms from the invisible World thereby brought upon us, we were left by the just hand of Heaven unto those errors whereby great hardships were brough upon innocent persons, and (we fear) guilt incurred which we have all cause to bewail with much confusion of face before the Lord. We confess that we ourselves were not capable to understand nor able to withstand the mysterious delusions of the Powers of Darkness and Prince of the Air, but were, for want of knowledge in ourselves and better information from others, prevailed with to take up with such evidence against the accused as on further consideration and better information we justly fear was insufficient for the touching the lives of any, whereby we fear we have been instrumental with others, though ignorantly and unwittingly, to bring upon ourselves and this People of the Lord the guilt of innocent blood, which sin the Lord saith in scripture He would not pardon (2 Kings 24.4), that we suppose, in regard of His temporal judgments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
I know a person who, missing anything, would use to sit down and muter a certain charm, and then immediately by an invisible hand ben directly led unto the place where the thing was to be found. turquoise carvings placed in Native American graves to attract good spirits and guard the grave. Also, turquoise tied onto a bow was supposed to make you shoot more accurately. The body of saints often times cannot be found when their graves are dug up because their bones were frequently interred in the cornerstones of cathedrals, so their spirits would guard the holy location. Unwilling sacrifices would be more likely to become angry spirits instead of guarding. Canaanites sacrificed infants and put them in the foundations of houses and temples. “At the cost of his first-born shall he se up its gates,” reports Joshua 6.26. Bones were discovered in the basement of the original farm house that was engulfed as part of this estate during the expansion. Sightings of Hell Hounds date back to 1888. Some reports say the creatures are threatening. The Victorian parklike grounds seem to breed sightings of big wolf creatures or beast at night. Since the legends have been uncovered, many people have reported seeing a big black wolf and two men walking around the Winchester mansion at night, even when it is closed. Four kids and a police officer allegedly disappeared after climbing the gate to get a closer look one night. Nearly 134 years of sightings. These people are probably sadly deluded and mistaken, their minds are more likely disquieted and distressed, and we do therefore humbly beg forgiveness, first of God for Christ’s sake for this error, and pray that God would not impute the guilt of it to ourselves nor others. And we also pray that we may be considered candidly and aright by the living suffers as being then under the power of a strong and general delusion, utterly unacquainted with and not experienced in matters of that nature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I know a woman who upon uttering some words over very painful hurts and sores did use instantly to cure them, unto the amazement of the spectators. Now, thought I, if this wretch can effectually employ Devils to cure hurts, why may not she to cause them also, which is the worst that the witches do? The matter being so dark and perplexed as that there is no present appearance that all God’s servants should be altogether of one mind in all circumstances touching the same and believing the Devil’s accusations. These practices and principles have been the beginner and procurer of the sores afflictions, not to Llanda Villa only, but to this whole country, that did ever befall them. It should be noted in passing that Llanda Villa’s attorneys have concluded that these peoples visions and afflictions are due to illness caused by demonic possession. No specters evidence may be hereafter accounted valid or sufficient to take away the life or good name of any person or persons within this province. God hath a controversy with us about what was done in the time of the witchcraft. I fear that innocent blood hath been shed, and that many have had their hands defiled therewith. Public acknowledgement of guilt, and humiliation for it, and the more particularly and personally it is done by all that have been actors, the more pleasing it will be to God and more effectual to turn away his judgments from the land, and to prevent his wrath from falling upon the persons and families of such as have been most concerned. Moreover, if it be true, as I have been often informed, that families of such as were condemned for supposed witchcraft have been ruined by taking away and making havoc of their estates and leaving them nothing for their relief, I believe the whole country of lies under a curse to this day, and will do till some effectual course be taken by our honored governor and Supreme Court to make them some amends and reparations. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Get in the Halloween spirit and celebrate the first weekend of October 2021 at the Winchester Mystery House! Our All Hallows’ Eve tickets are selling fast so be sure to grab them while you can 👻
🎟️link in bio. winchestermysteryhouse.com
Must You Wait for the Heart to Change First?
Many people believe that a neurotic or bad or unhappy child must have parents who have produced his negative state, while on the contrary the happy and healthy child has a correspondingly happy and healthy environment. In fact parents have taken the whole of the blame for the unhealthy development of a child on themselves and equally so the praise for the happy outcome of childhood. All data show that they should have not done so. Here is a good example: A psychoanalyst may see a very neurotic, distorted person with a terrible child and say, “It is obvious that the childhood experiences have produced this unhappy outcome.” If one would only ask oneself, however, how many people one had seen who came from the same type of family constellation and turned out to be remarkable happy and healthy people, one would begin to have doubts about the simple connection between childhood experiences and the mental health or illness of a person. The first factor which accounts for this theoretical disappointment must lie in the analyst’s ignoring the differences in genetic dispositions. Take a simple example: One can see even among newborn infants a difference in degree of aggressiveness or timidity. If the aggressive child has an aggressive mother, this mother will do one little harm or perhaps even much good. It will learn to fight with her and not be frightened of her aggressiveness. If a timid child is confronted with the same mother, it will be intimidated by the mother’s aggressiveness, it will tend to become a frightened, submissive and later on perhaps a neurotic person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Indeed, we touch here upon the old and much discussed problem of “nature versus nurture” or genetic disposition versus environment. The discussion of this problem has by no means yet led to conclusive results. From my own experience I have come to the conclusion that genetic dispositions play a much greater role in the formation of a specific character than most analysts credit it with doing. I believe that one aim of the analyst should be to reconstruct a picture of the character of the child when it was born in order to study which of the traits one finds in the analysand are part of the original nature and which are acquired through influential circumstances; furthermore, which of the acquired qualities conflict with the genetic ones and which tend to reinforce them. What we find very often is that by the wish of the parents (personally an as representatives of society) the child is forced to repress or to weaken one’s original dispositions and to replace them by those traits which society wants one to develop. At this point we find the roots of neurotic developments; the person develops a sense of false identity. While genuine identity rests upon the awareness of one’s suchness in terms of the person one is born as, pseudo-identity rests upon the personality which society has imposed upon us. Hence a person is in constant need of approval in order to keep one’s balance. Genuine identity does not need such approval because the person’s picture of oneself is identical with one’s authentic personality structure. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
If throughout childhood, a child were convinced that nobody would ever care for one unless one wanted something from them, that there was no sympathy or love which was no the payment for services or a bribe to preform, a person may go through life without ever having experienced that somebody cares or is interested and does not want anything in return. However, when it happens that such a person experiences another person’s having a real interest without wanting anything, this might drastically change such character traits as suspicion, fear, the feelings of being unlovable, et cetera. Furthermore, the relationship between parents and children is usually seen as a one-way street, namely the effect parents have upon children. However, what is often ignored is that this influence is by no means one-sided. A parent may have a natural dislike for a child and even for a newborn baby, not only for reasons which are often discussed—that it is an unwanted child or that that the parent is destructive, sadistic, et cetera—but for the reason that child and parent just are not compatible by their very natures, and that in this respect the relationship is no different from that between grown-up people. The parents may just have a dislike for the kind of child one produced and the child may feel this dislike for the kind of parents one has and being the weaker, one is punished for one’s dislike by all kinds of more or less subtle sanctions. The child—and equally the mother—is forced into a situation where the mother has to take care of the child and the child has to accept the mother in spite of the fact that they heartily dislike each other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The child cannot articulate that it does not like the mother; the mother would feel guilty if she admitted to herself that she did not like a child she gave birth to, and so both behave under a special kind of pressure and punish each other for being forced into an unwanted intimacy. The mother pretends to love the child and subtly punishes it for being forced to do so, the child pretends in some way or another to love the mother because one’s life depends totally on her. In such a situation a great deal of dishonesty develops which the children often express in their own indirect ways of rebellion and which the mothers usually negate because they feel that nothing could be more shameful than not to like one’s own children. Only one who believes is obedient, and only one who is obedient believes. Jesus says: “First obey, perform the external work, renounce your attachments, give up the obstacles which separate you from the will of God.” Do not say that you have not got faith. You will not have it so long as persist in disobedience and refuse to take the first step. People generally assume that our beliefs and attitudes determine our actions. So if we want to change the way people act, their hearts and minds had better be changed. This assumption lies behind most of our teaching, preaching, counseling, and child rearing. And to some extent it is true: behaviour follows attitudes. However, if social psychology has taught us anything during the last thirty year, it is that the reverse is also true: we are as likely to act ourselves into a new way of thinking as to think ourselves into action. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Evil acts shape the self. People induced to harm an innocent victim typically come to disparage their victim. Those induced to speak or write statements about which they have misgivings will often come to accept their little lies. Saying becomes believing. More action affects the actor, too. Children who resist a temptation tend to internalize their conscientious behaviour. Helping someone typically increases liking for the person helped. Those who teach a moral norm to others subsequently follow the moral code better themselves. Generalizing the principle, it would seem that one antidote for the corrupting effects of evil action is repentant action. Act as if you love your neighbour—without worrying whether you really do—and before long you will like the person more. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Racial attitudes have followed racial behaviour. Prior to desegregation in the United States of America it was often said that you cannot legislate racial attitudes—you must wait for the heart to change first. However, after the initiation of desegregation European American racial attitudes became noticeably less prejudiced. Moreover, as different regions of the country have come to act more alike, they have also come to think more alike. Political socialization techniques have effectively employed the principle. For instance, many people seem to be in support of undocumented people coming into America, even though it is a crime, but are enforcing more laws and restrictions on legal Americans. Many Americans have expressed discomfort at the contradiction of demanding that people follow the law, and their support for undocumented immigration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Prevented from say what they really believe, they try to establish their psychic equilibrium by consciously making themselves believe what they said, which is essentially “Most people should have to follow the law, but I support crime in certain circumstances.” But what happens when they start to rationalize illegal actions of their own, will that lead to lawlessness on a wide scale? Many modern therapy techniques make a more constructive use of action. Behavior therapy and rational-emotive therapy and rational-emotive therapy both prompt their clients to rehearse and practice more productive behaviour. We can all learn a practical lesson here. Like Moses, Jonah, and other biblical heroes, we do not feel like doing what we know we ought. The remedy is to get up and act anyway—to put our fingers on the keyboard and force ourselves to begin that essay or letter, to go to the phone and dial that number, to confront or hare with that person, to turn off the TV and begin studying for that exam. When we do so, we often find that our forced behaviour begins to gain momentum as a real interest in our subject takes hold. Our feelings are hard to control, but we can control our behaviour and by doing so indirectly influence our feelings. To be sure, the attitudes-follow-behaviour principle is more potent in some situations than others—especially in those where people feel some choice and responsibility for their behaviour rather than attributing it to coercion. Nevertheless, it is now a fundamental rule of social psychology that behaviour and attitude generate one another in an endless spiral, like chicken and egg. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
This principle affirms the biblical understanding of action and faith, or an obedience and belief. Depending on where we break into this spiraling chain, we will see faith as a source of action or as a consequence. Action and faith, like action and attitude, feed one another. Much as conventional wisdom has insisted that our attitudes determine our behaviour, Christian thinking has usually emphasized faith as the source of action. Faith, we believe, is the beginning rather than the end of religious development. The experience of being “called” demonstrates how faith can precede action in the lives of the faithful. Elijah is overwhelmed by the Holy as he huddles in a cave. Paul is touched by the Almighty on the Damascus Road. Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Amos are likewise invaded by the Word, which then explodes in their active response to the call. In each case, an encounter with God provoked a new state of consciousness, which was then acted upon. This dynamic potential of faith is already a central tenet of Christian thought. For the sake of balance, we should also appreciate the complementary proposition: faith is a consequence of action. Throughout the Old and New Testaments we are told that full knowledge of God comes through actively doing the Word. Faith is nurtured by obedience. We come to know truth by reason and quiet reflection. This view, translated into Christian terms, equates faith with cerebral activity—orthodox doctrinal propositions. The contrasting biblical view assumes that reality is known through obedient commitment. “The Lord touched their eyes, saying ‘It shall be done to you according to your faith,’” Matthew 9.29. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
If an individual wants to change one’s life, that change must be conceived on the inside. Once that new and improved image shows up, the God will easily develop I on the outside. Living your dream is that simple. Anyone can enjoy a happier and healthier lifestyle. However, the change will not happen immediately and it will not be easy. However, for any improve me, the inception of your vision must occur within your heart and mind first, then it will manifest in your life. “Praise be to the name of God forever and ever; wisdom and power are His. He changes times and seasons; He sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to he discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; He knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him. I thanks and praise you, O God of my fathers; you have given me wisdom and power, you have made known to me what we asked of you, you have made known to us the dream of the king,” reports Daniel 2.20-23. When we close our eyes, we should be big dreamers, an see our whole family serving God, and rising to new levels of effectiveness. One should see themselves achieving more success next year, and their family healthy and happy. You might even see yourself getting better looking. Believe that you will get a promotion at work. Know that you will pay off that house. Understand God is using you in a better way. Trust that you are stronger, healthier, and living a life full of God’s grace. Walk by faith and not by sight. When you look into the future, see your children happy and successful and marrying excellent people. Take a few moments everyday and pray for your dreams to come true. Envision yourself there. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Entropy by its very character assures us that though it may be the universal rule in the Nature we know, it cannot be universal absolute. If a person says, “Humpty Dumpty is falling,” you see at once that this is not a complete story. The bit you have been told implies both a later chapter in which Humpty Dumpty will have reached the ground, and an earlier chapter in which he was still stead on the wall. A nature which is “running down” cannot be the whole story. A clock cannot run down unless it has been wound up. Humpty Dumpty cannot fall off a wall which never existed. If a Nature which disintegrates order were the whole of reality, where would she find any order to disintegrate? Thus on any view there must have been a time when processes the reverse of those we now see were going on: a time of winding up. The Christian claim is that those days are not gone for ever. Humpty Dumpty is going to be replaced on the wall—at least in the sense that what has died is going to recover life, probably in the sense that the inorganic Universe is going to be re-ordered. Either Humpty Dumpty will never reach the ground (being caught in mid-fall by the everlasting arms) or else when he reaches it he will be putt together again and replaced on a new and better wall. Admitted, science discerns no “king’s horses and men” who can “put Humpty Dumpty together again.” However, you would not expect her to. She is based on observation: and all our observations are observations of Humpty Dumpty in mid-air. They do not reach either the wall above or the ground below—much less he King with the horses and men hastening towards the spot. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
The Transfiguration or “Metamorphosis” of Jesus is also, no doubt, an anticipatory glimpse of something to come. He is seen conversing with two of the ancient dead. The change which His own human form had undergone is described as one to luminosity, to “shining whiteness.” A similar whiteness characterizes His appearance a he beginning of the book of Revelation. One rather curious detail is that this shining or whiteness affected His clothes as much as His body. St. Mark indeed mentions the clothes more explicitly than the face, and adds, with his inimitable naivety, that “no laundry could do anything like it.” Taken by itself this episode bears all the marks of a “vision”: that is, of an experience which, though it may be divinely sent and may reveal great truth, yet is not, objectively speaking, the experience it seems to be. However, if the theory of “vision” (or holy hallucination) will not cover the Resurrection appearances, it would be only a multiplying of hypotheses to introduce it here. We do not know to what phase or feature of the New Creation this episode points. It may reveal some special glorifying of Christ’s manhood at some phase of its history (since history it apparently has) or it may reveal the glory which that manhood always has in its New Creation: it may even reveal a glory which all risen humans will inherit. We do not know. It must indeed be emphasized throughout that we know and can know very little about the New Nature. The task of the imagination here is not to forecast it but simply, by brooding on many possibilities, to make room for a more complete and circumspect agnosticism. It is useful to remember that even now sense responsive to a different, almost beyond recognition, from the space we are now aware of, yet not discontinuous from it: that time may not always be for us, as it now is, unilinear and irreversible: that other parts of Nature might some say obey us as our cortex now does. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It is useful not because we can trust these fancies to give us an absolute truths about the New Creation but because they teach us not to limit, in our rashness, the vigour and variety of he new crops which this old field might produce. We are therefore compelled to believe that nearly all we are told about the New Creation is metaphorical. However, not quite all. That is just where the story of Resurrection suddenly jerks us back like a tether. The local appearances, the eating, the touching, the claim to be corporeal, us be either reality or sheer illusion. The New Nature is, in the most troublesome way, interlocked at some points with the Old. Because of its novelty we have to think of it, for the most part, metaphorically: but because of the partial interlocking, some facts about it come through into our present experience in all their literal facthood—just as some facts about an organism are inorganic facts, and some facts about a solid body are facts of linear geometry. Even apar from that, the mere idea of a New Nature, a Nature beyond Nature, a systematic and diversified reality which is “supernatural” in relation to the World of our five present senses but “natural” from its own point of view, is profoundly shocking to a certain philosophical preconception from which we all suffer. I think Kant is at the root of it. It may be expressed by saying that we are prepared to believe either in a reality with one floor or in a reality with two floors, but not in a reality like a skyscraper with several floors. We are prepared, on the one hand, for the sort of reality that Naturalists believe in. That is a one-floor reality: this present Nature is all that there is. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Say no to self and mean it, or one will never find oneself a free human—that is what Jesus told His Disciples, that is how Matthew recorded it (16.24), and that is what He is telling us, My dear friend. Until that sweet time comes, count oneself a prisoner, under house arrest, in one’s own body. Well, one feels as if one owns one’s own self, are one’s own best friend, lust for tacky stuff to decorate one’s own domain, peep through the arras at others more fortunate than oneself. One feels one is something of a dervish whirling in a circle until one turns to butter, or a Sybarite seeking soft sheets for oneself instead of the rock-hard life of Jesus Christ. Paul wrote much the same thing to the Philippians (2.21). Maybe one feels one is one of those thinkers who spend their time thinking up and putting together gadgets. They will work for a time, but then they will break down. Which is another way of saying, I think no project is likely to be successful unless it has its source somewhere in Jesus Christ. Here are some words of advice that one could never logick one’s way to. Give up everything, and one will find everything. Leave greed behind, and one will find rest. With this sort of attitude and his sort of resolve, one will understand all things. Father, because of You, I will dare to dream big dreams. With faith and confidence in You, I know what I can accomplish the goals that You have placed within my heart. The basis of higher healing work is the realization of humans as Mind. However, the latter is a dimensionless unindividuated unconditioned entity. It is not my individual mind. The field of Mind is a common one where as the field of consciousness is divided up into individual and separate holdings. This is a difference with vast implications, for whoever can cross from the second field to the first, crosses at the same time from an absurdly limited World into a supremely vital one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Consequently, genuine and permanent healing is carried on without one’s conscious association and can be effected by dropping the ego-mind and with it all egoistic desires. Hence the first effort should be to ignore the disease and gain the realization. Only after the latter has been won should the thoughts be allowed to descend again to the disease, with the serene trust that the bodily condition may safely be left in the hands of the World-Mind for final disposal as It decides. There should not be the slightest attempt to dictate a cure to the higher power nor the slightest attempt to introduce personal will into treatment. Such attempts will only defeat their purpose. The issues will partly be decided on the balance of the Universal Law and evolutionary factors concerned in the individual case. And yet there are cults which do not find it at all incongruous to suggest to the Infinite Mind what should thus be One surrender is truly made, the desires of the self go with it and pace reigns in the inner life whether illness still reigns in the external life or not. Thus there is a false easy yielding of the will which deceives no higher power than the personal self, and there is an honest yielding which may really invoke the divine grace. It is a mistake, however, to turn the higher self into a mere convenience to be used chiefly for obtaining healing or getting guidance, for healing the sickness of the physical body, or guiding the activities of the physical ego. It should be sought for its own sake, and these other things should be sought only occasionally or incidentally, as and when needed. They should not be made habitual. In one’s periodic meditations, for instance, the aspirant should seek the divine source of one’s being because it is right, necessary, and good for one to do so and one to do so and one should forget every other desire. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Only after one has done that and found the source, and only on one’s backward journey to the day’s activities, may one remember these lesser desires and utilize the serenity and power thus gained for attending to them. Your assertion that Jesus primarily wished to free humans of disease and viruses, or to teach them how to become so, is untenable. Whoever has entered into the consciousness of one’s divine soul—which Jesus had in such fullness—has one’s whole scale of values turned over. It is then that one sees that the physical is ephemeral by nature, whereas the reality whence it is derived is eternal by nature; that what happens inside a person’s heart and head is fundamentally more important than what happens inside one’s body; and that the divine consciousness may and can be enjoyed even though the fleshly tenement is sick. The sufferer should use whatever physical medical means are available—both orthodox and unorthodox ones. At the same time one should practise daily prayer. However, one should not directly ask for the physical healing for its own sake. One should ask first for spiritual qualities and then only for the physical healing with the expressed intention of utilizing one’s opportunity of bodily incarnation to improve oneself spiritually. Healing is but a mere incident in the work of a self-actualized person. Such a one will always keep as one’s foremost purpose the opening of the spiritual heart of humans. It is from the first moment of life that one must learn to deserve to live; and since birth one shares the rights of citizens, the moment of our own birth should be the beginning of the exercise of our duties. If there are laws for those of mature age, there should also be some for the very young which teach them to obey others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
And since each human’s reason cannot be allowed to be the sole arbiter of one’s duties, a fortiori the education of children cannot be abandoned to the light and prejudices of their fathers, since it is of even more importance to the state than it is to their fathers. For according to the natural course of things, the death of the father often strips one of the last fruits of this education, but sooner or latter the country feels its effects. The state remains; the family dissolves. Now if the public authority, in taking the fathers’ place and charging itself with this important function, acquires their rights by fulfilling their duties, the fathers have that much less reason to complain, because strictly speaking, in this regard, they are merely changing a name, and will have in common, under the name “citizens,” the same authority over their children they exercised separately under the name of “fathers,” and will be obeyed no less well when they speak in the same of the law than they were when they spoke in the name of nature. Public education under the rules prescribed by the government and under the magistrates put in place by the sovereign, is therefore one of the fundamental maxims of popular or legitimate government. If children are raised in common and in the bosom of equality, if they are instructed to respect above all things, if they are surrounded by examples and objects that constantly speak to them of the tender mother who nourishes them, of the love she bears for them, of the inestimable benefits they receive from her, and in turn of the debt they owe her, doubtlessly they thus will learn to cherish one another as brothers, never to want anything but what the society wants, never to substitute the actions of humans and of citizens for the sterile and vain babblings of sophists, and to become one day defenders and the fathers of the country whose children they will have been for so long. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
I will not discuss the magistrates destined to preside over his education, which certainly is the state’s most important business. Clearly, if such marks of public confidence were lightly granted, if this sublime function were not, for those who had honorable and sweet repose of their old age and the high point of all their honors, the entire understanding would be useless and the education unsuccessful. For whatever the lesson is unsupported by authority, or the precept by example, instruction remains fruitless, and virtue itself loses its influence in the mouth of one who does not practice it. However, let the illustrious warriors bent under the weight of their laurels preach courage; let upright magistrates, whitened in the wearing of purple and in service at the tribunals, teach justice. Both of these groups will thus train virtuous successors and will transmit from age to age to the generations that follow the experience and talents of leaders, the courage and virtue of citizens and the emulation common to all of living and dying for one’s country. I know of but three peoples who in an earlier era practiced public education, namely, the Cretans, the Lacedemonians, and the ancient Persians. Among all three it was the greatest success and brought about marvels among the latter two. Since the time the World was divided into nations too large to be governed well, this method has not been practicable. And other reasons the reader can easily see have also prevented it from being tried by any modern people. It is quite remarkable that the Romans were able to do without it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
However, Rome was for five hundred years a continual miracle that the World cannot hope to see again. The virtue of the Romans, engendered by the horror of tyranny and the crimes of tyrants and by an inborn love of country, made all their homes into as many schools for citizens. And the unlimited power of fathers over their children placed to much severity in private enforcement that the father, more feared than the magistrates, was the censor of mores and the avenger of laws in one’s domestical tribunal. In this way an attentive and well-intentioned government, constantly valiant to maintain or restore love of country and good mores among the people, anticipates far in advance the evils that sooner or later result from citizens’ indifference to the fate of the republic, and restricts within narrow limits that personal interests which so isolates private individuals that the state is weakened by their power and has nothing to hope for from their good will. Anywhere the populace loves it country, respects its laws and lives simply, little else remains to do to make it happy. And in public administration, where fortune plays less of a role than it does in the lot of private individuals, wisdom is so close to happiness that these two objects are confounded. Waters, you are the ones who brings us the life force. Please help us to find nourishment so that we may look upon great joy. Please let us share in the most delicious sap that you have, as if you were loving mothers. Please let us go straight to the house of the one for whom your waters give us life and give us birth. For our well-being please let God be an assistant to us, the waters be for us to drink. Please le hem cause well-being and health to flow over us. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Mistresses of all the things that are chosen, rulers over all peoples, the waters are the ones I beg for a cure. God has told me that within the waters are all cures and Jesus Christ who is salutary to all. Water, please yield your cure as an armour for my body, so that I may see the sun for a long time. Waters, carry for away all of this that has gone bad in me, either what I have done in malicious deceit or whatever lie I have sworn to. I have sought the waters today; we have joined with their sap. O Jesus Christ full of moisture, come and flood me with splendour. O God, we beseech Thee, please save! O please save! O God! like sheep we all have gone astray; from out Thy book wipe not our nae away. Please save! O save! O God! sustain the sheep for slaughter;–see these deal with wrathfully and slain for Thee. Save! O save! O God! Thy sheep! the sheep whom Thou didts end in pasture; Thy creation and Thy friend. Save! O save! O God! they lift their eyes to Thee, long sought; please let those who rise against Thee count as naught. Save! O save! O God! they pour out water, worshipping—let them be drawing from salvation’s spring. Save! O save! O God! to Zion saviours send at length, endowed of Thee, and saved by Thy name’s strength. Save! O save! O God! in garb of vengeance clad about, in mighty wrath cast all deceivers out. Save! O save! O God! and Thou wilt surely not forget her, by love-tokens bought, that hopeth yet. Save! O save! O God! they seeking Thee with willow bough, regard their crying from Thine Heaven now. Save! O save! O God! as with a crown bless Thou the year; yea, Lord, my singing, I beseech Thee, hear. Save! O save! I beseech Thee, O God, save! O save, I beseech Thee. Thou art our Father. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
CRESLEIGH HAVENWOOD
Lincoln, CA | from the mid $600s
Now Selling!
Now selling! Cresleigh Havenwood is the newest Cresleigh community coming to Lincoln, CA. With four distinct floor plans to choose from ranging from 2,293 – 3,489 square feet offering up to five bedrooms, we are sure you’ll find your dream home here at Havenwood! https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/
The Devil Loveth No Salt in His Meat!
Every night in the year, four of us sat in the parlous of the Winchester Mansion. This particular night, there was a thin, bright moonshine: it was bitter cold, windy, and frosty; the town had not yet awakened, but an indefinable stir already preluded the noise and business of the day. The ghouls had come later than usual, and they seemed more than usually eager to be gone. They wished, and declared their wish, that their blood might be the last innocent blood shed. They prayed that God would discover the witchcraft were among us. They forgave their accusers. The fervency of the spirits were very affecting and drew tears from many. Affecting and melting to the hearts of some considerable spectators. They prayed earnestly for pardon for all other sin and for an interest in the precious blood of our dear Redeemer, and seemed to be very sincere, upright, and sensible of their circumstances. One of the ghouls said, “I have been put to death, and my grandfather suffered, and all his estate seized because of my own vile and wretched heart, confessed several things contrary to my conscience and knowledge, though to the wounding of my own soul—the Lord pardon me for it. But oh! the terrors of a wounded conscience, who can bear? Blessed be the Lord; He would not let me go in my sins, but in mercy I hope so my soul would not suffer me to keep it in any longer, but I was forced to confess the truth. Gunshots in the hills and the echo of that awful hellspawn voice in my head. I was sought after by a sorcerer, which resulted in fatal mishaps for those sorcerers because they caught me in the wrong mood, and I turned into a lethal weapon. Dear Mrs. Winchester, let me beg your prayers to the Lord on my behalf, and please send us a joyful and happy meeting in Heaven.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Mrs. Winchester replied, “But the Lord He know it is, if it be possible, that no more innocent blood be shed, which undoubtedly cannot be avoided in the way and course you go in. I question not but your honours do to the utmost of your powers in the discovery and detecting of witchcraft and witches, and shall not be guilty of innocent blood for the World.” A horrible sense of blackness and the treachery of fate seized hold upon the soul of the unhappy student and the other ghouls. “My God! she cried, “but what have I done? and when did I begin?” Nothing could be explained any further because we realized that we had long since ceased to pay attention to anything said by the suspect. Our minds and hearts were so filled with the hideous torments of the afflicted and the frightful tales of the confessors that we were quite unable to absorb anything else. The student was violent, and it was said that she had beaten to death a former teacher and other students in the classroom before she and her accomplices were shot dead by a Winchester model 1866. They were much addicted to sorcery in the said town, and there were forty men in it that could raise the Devil as well as any astrologer. Time had little changed this small town. It stood then, as now, upon a crossroad, out of call of human habitations, and buried fathom deep in the foliage of six thousand cedar trees. The cries of the sheep upon the neighbouring hills, the streamlets upon either hand, one loudly singing among pebbles, the other dripping furtively from pond to pond, the stir of the wind in mountainous old flowering chestnuts, and once in seven days the voice of the bell and old tunes of the precentor, were the only sounds that disturbed the silence around the rural Winchester Mansion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
The Resurrection Man was not to be deterred by any of the sanctities of customary piety. It was part of his trade to despise and desecrate the scrolls and trumpets of old tombs found on the estate, the paths worn by the feet of legions of spirits and mourners, and the offerings and the inscriptions of bereaved affection. To rustic neighbourhoods, where love is more than commonly tenacious, and where some bonds of blood or fellowship unite the entire society of a parish, the body-snatcher, far from being repelled by natural respect, was attracted by the ease and safety of the task. To bodies that had been laid in Earth, in joyful expectation of a far different awakening, there came that hasty, lamp-Iit, terror-haunted resurrection that often happened at the Winchester Mansion, which was fully of uneasy ghosts. It was pitch dark; and we had just raised a few souls from the dead. Their bodies awaited them in the basement. Here and there a white gate or a white stone in the wall guided them for a short space across the night; but for the most part it was at a foot pace, and almost groping, that they picked their way through the resonant blackness to their solemn and isolated destination. In the basement the last glimmer failed them, and it became necessary to kindle a match and reillumine one of the lanterns of the gig. Thus, under the dripping pipes, and environed by huge and moving shadows, they reached the scene of their unhallowed labours. However, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for taking possession of one of these resurrected bodies. A creeping chill began to possess my soul. It grew upon my mind that some unnatural miracle had been accomplished, that some nameless change had befallen one of the dead bodies, and in fear of their unholy burden wolves were outside the mansion howling. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The curse of evil had come into one of the bodies, and the evil malediction spread into his parts with a strange kind of screaming sound that made me turn pale with fear. He then rose to his feet, proclaiming he was the Devil and that he would take these other resurrected bodies with him to the underworld and speak with the dead. Mrs. Winchester said, “I rebuke you, Satan!” The Devil laughed and said he was not at all afraid of us. “You insult me with these testimonies as if you were Divine Oracles!” he said. Then departed in a black cloud of smoke with the resurrected bodies. How often I have read in books written by Jesuits that Martin Luther was a wizard, and that he did himself confess that he had familiarity with Satan! The Holy Son of God himself was reputed a magician, and one that had familiarity with the greatest of Devils. The blaspheming Pharisees said, “He casts out the Devils through the Prince of Devils,” reports Matthew 9.34. There is then not the best saint on Earth, man or woman, that can assure themselves that the Devil shall not cast such an imputation upon them. At the time when Luther died all the possessed people in the Netherlands were quiet. The Devils in them said the reason was because Luther had been a great friend of theirs, and they owed him that respect as to go far as Germany to attend his funeral. But the Father of Lies is never to be believed. He will utter twenty great truths to make way for one lie; he will accuse twenty people of witchcraft if he can but thereby bring one innocent person into trouble. However, it is better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned. The Devil makes his witched to dream strange things of themselves and others which are not so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras of Samos, who invented the Pythagorean theorem, a^2+ b^2 = c^2, also lead seances in approximately 540 BC, using something like a Quija board. Grim reapers are purely psychic entities, with power over time and perception. They can change the way a human sees one’s surroundings, and change their own appearance, usually to ease the transition from life into death. If it is by virtue of some contract with the Devil that witches have the power to do such things, it is hard to conceive how they can be bid to do them without being too much concerned in that Hellish covenant. We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. The Devil have of late accused some eminent persons. It is an awful thing which the Lord had done [id est, permitted] to convince some among us of their error. To take away the life of anyone merely because a specter or Devil in a bewitched or possessed person does accuse them will bring the guilt of innocent blood on the land where such a thing shall be done. What does such an evidence amount unto more than this: either such an one did afflict such an one, or the Devil in one’s likeness, or one’s eyes were bewitched. The natural way for a living person to see a reaper is as a wraith-like figure wearing tattered winding sheets or burial cloth. Black dogs are also buried in the foundations of churches to guard and protect the gates between here and the afterlife. What will be the issue of these troubles God only knows. I am afraid that ages will not wear off that reproach and those stains which these things will leave behind them upon our lands. It is possible that bewitched and possessed person are afflicted by the Devil, but without agency of witches. Yes, there are witches, and there have been since the beginning of the World. Their craft is performed with the Devil’s assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
During one evening at the mansion, Mrs. Winchester invited the maid in for a séance. She chanted, “By the virtue of the holy resurrection and the torments of the damned, I conjure and exorcise thee, spirit of Malphas, thirty-ninth Spirit, to answer my liege demands, being obedient unto these sacred ceremonies, on pain of everlasting torment and distress. Arise, arise, arise, I charge and command thee.” A black man appeared, I do not think he was human. His skin was black as midnight and I could not see his eyes, teeth, or any other features. He was just black and in the shape of a man. He offered her a book to sign. The book was supposed to contain witches’ pacts, and he told her that is she touched it, it would cure her of the hauntings. In all, Mrs. Winchester was tempted from three boos. The third she demanded that they let her read before she think of signing it. The man refused. In general the book seemed a journal of the chief things acted or designed a their great witch-meetings, not without some circumstances that carried an odd resemblance of the Koran. It has in it the methods to be used in seducing of people unto the service of the Devil, and the names of them that had been seduced, with terms which they were to serve. It particularly surprised some in the room, on the even of May 13, 1888, to overhear her, in the book then opened unto her, spelling a word that was in Latin. The letters she recited was “Quadragesima.” Mrs. Winchester conversed at length with the spirit(s) who visited her, and the voices were “big, low, thick,” as they had been reported to be in European witchcraft accounts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
We saw flames arise from the cauldron on the table, and the room smelled of brimstone. The spirit of a bird appears. It attacked the maid and the next morning, she was found tied to the tree top. She was excessively sore when we brought her down from the tree. There were blisters raised upon her. To cure the soreness which last night’s fiery trail gave to her, we were forces sometimes to apply oil commonly used for the cure of scads. And yet (like other witch-wounds) in a day or two all would be well again. Only the marks of some wounds thus given her, she will probably carry to her grave. I may add that once they thrust an hot iron down her throat, which though it were to us invisible, yet we saw he skin fetched off her tongue and lips. Indeed, her sufferings were so severe that Mrs. Winchester thought the rapid healing of her wounds was part of a design to keep her in continual torment. She was, Mrs. Winchester wrote, “wounded with a thousand pains all over, and cured immediately that the pains of these wounds might be repeated.” One of the maid’s symptom occurred when her hallucinations were peopled by specters bring her a little cup that had a whitish liquor in it (unto us wholly invisible), which they would pour down her throat, holding her jaws wide open, in spite of all [her] shriekings and strivings. We saw her swallow this poison, though we saw not the poison, and immediately she would swell prodigiously and be just like one poisoned with a dose of rats-bane [arsenic trioxide]. After these potions she was capable ordinarily to beg of us that we would he her to some salad-oil, upon the taking whereof the swelling would in a little while abate. Sometimes our laying our hands on the mouth of the maid, when she perceived the specters forcing their poisons into her mouth, did keep her from taking of them in. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The maid, Agnus, was unable to hear prayer or religious instruction directly. However, not only did she hear the spectral Christmas dance, but several times Agnus had her arms cruelly scratched and pins thrust into her flesh by Fiends while they were molesting her. Several persons did sometimes actually lay their hands upon these Fiend. The wretches were palpable while they were not visible, and several of our people though they saw nothing, yet felt a substance that seemed like a dog. And though they were not fanciful they died away [id est, fainted] at the fright. And at this time, Mrs. Winchester believed much of this unchristian practice was the result of someone delivering curses. A curse delivered by a woman, Margaret Rhodes Crocker, known to have dabbled in witchcraft, although again it is not absolutely certain that she practiced malefic witchcraft. It was upon the Lord’s Day, the 8th of September, in the year 1889, that Margaret Crocker, after some hours of previous disturbance in the Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, fell into odd fits, which caused her friends to carry her home, where her fits in a few hours grew into a figure that satisfied the spectators of their being preternatural. Some of the neighbours were forward enough to suspect the rise of this mischief in an house hard-by, where lived a miserable woman who had been formerly imprisoned on the suspicion of witchcraft, and who had frequently cured very painful hurts by muttering over them certain charms, which I shall not endanger the poisoning of my reader by repeating. This woman had, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins Searless, the evening before Margret fell into her calamities, very bitterly treated her and threatened her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the hazard of hurting a poor woman that might be innocent, notwithstanding surmises that might have been more strongly grounded than those, caused the pious people in the vicinity to try whether incessant supplication to God alone might not procure a quicker and safer ease to the afflicted than hasty prosecution of any supposed criminal. Mary Francis was assaulted by eight cruel specters, whereof she imagined that she knew three or four, but the rest came still with their faces covered, so that she could never have a distinguishing view of the countenance of those who she thought she knew. She was very careful of my reiterated charges to forbear blazing the names, lest any good person should come to suffer any blast of reputation through the cunning malice of the great Accuser. Nevertheless, she having since privately named them to myself, I will venture to say this of them, that they are a sort of wretches who for these many years have gone under as violent presumptions of witchcraft as perhaps any creatures yet living upon Earth, although I am far from thinking that the visions of this young woman were evidence enough to prove them so. Margaret Crocker’s hallucinations were somewhat varied. She saw not only spectral witches and the “Black Man….their master” who was often seen in abandoned mansions, where he resisted new residents, but also a “White Spirit” who she took to be an Angel. Such a figure had also been seen at the Winchester and in several Oakland witchcraft cases, such as at the Ellen Kenna Mansion, Emma Bray’s Mansion, and at Alexander Dunsmuir’s mansion. The white spirit comforted and advised Margaret during her attack. Among other things, the Angel told her that Oliver Winchester was her spiritual father. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The Angel had always maintained the Devils might appear in the shape of an innocent person. Mrs. Winchester cried for the Lord, as for the deliverance of these women from the malice of Hell, for the deliverance of the powers of Hell has now seized upon all of them. And that the whole plot of the Devil to reproach her poor maid, Angus, be defeated by the Lord Jesus Christ. During a séance Mrs. Winchester was told that one of the several beings that was haunting her and these other grand estates was a Rakshasa. A being reincarnated from evil human beings. They are a type of demon. Rakshasa have the power to change their shape at will and appear as animals, as monsters, or in the case of female demons, as beautiful women. They also have magical powers, including invisibility. They are cannibalistic, and particularly target anything religious or holy. In addition to human flesh they, they will eat spoiled food. Their finger nails are poisonous. They are most powerful in the evening, particularly during the dark person of a new moon, but are dispelled by the rising sun. They especially detest sacrifices and prayer. Most powerful among them is their kind, the 10-headed Ravana. Many believe him to be Satan. Margaret had the common inability of afflicted persons to hear religious words, especially, in her case, the words of prayer. She had a full catalog of physical symptoms. She would be strangely distorted in her joins an thrown into such extravagant convulsions as were astonishing unto the spectators in general. She would be cruelly pinched with invisible hands very often in a day, and the black and blue marks of the pinches became immediately visible unto the standers by. She was also afflicted with pins, both real ones found about her person and spectral ones. The psychosomatic skin lesions would in a few minutes ordinarily be cured. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As with Mary Frances, her specters burnt her with spectral brimstone, and she would be so bitterly scorched with the unseen sulphur thrown upon her that very sensible blisters would be raised upon her skin. Like Angus, Margaret was forced to swallow spectral poison. She would sometimes have her jaws forcibly pulled open, whereupon something invisible would be poured down her throat. We all saw her swallow, and yet we all saw her try as she could that she might not swallow. She would cry out “as of scalding brimstone poured into her” and would be so monstrously inflamed that it would have broken a heart of stone to have seen her agonies. The spectators would testify also that the Crocker Mansion often reeked “so hot of brimstone that we were scarce able to endure it.” And one of the occasion “the standers by plainly saw something of that odd liquor itself on the outside of her neck.” There was a spectral powder thrown into her eyes, and “one time some of this powder was fallen actually visible upon her cheek, from whence the people in the room wiped it with their handkerchiefs.” Mrs. Winchester was also afflicted by spirits. “We once thought we perceived something stir upon her pillow at a little distance from her, whereupon one present [the Butler Clayton] laying his hand there, he to his horror apprehended that he felt, though none could see it, a living creature not altogether unlike a vampire bat, which nimbly escaped from him. And there were diverse other persons who were thrown into a great consternation by feeling, as they judged, at others times the same invisible animal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, the most starling phenomenon in Mrs. Winchester’s case was levitation. “Once,” said Clayton, “her tormentors puled her up to the ceiling of the chamber and held her there before a very numerous company of spectators, who found it as much as they could all do to pull her down again.” Clayton obtained signed confirmations of this and other instances of levitation: “I do testify that I have seen Mrs. Winchester in her hauntings from the invisible World lifted up from her bed, wholly by an invisible force, a great way towards the top of the room where she lay. In her being so lifted she had no assistance from any use of her own arms or hands or any other part of her body, not so much as her heels touching her bed or resting on any support whatsoever. And I have seen her thus lifted when not only a strong person hath thrown his whole weight across her to pull her down, but several other persons have endeavoured with all their might to hinger her from being so raised up, which I suppose that several others will testify as well as myself when called unto it. Witness my hand,” Clayton Straus. “We can also testify that we have several times seen Mrs. Winchester so lifted up from her bed as that she had no use of her own limbs to help her up, but it was the declared apprehension of us, as well as others that saw it, impossible for any hands but some of the invisible World to life her.” Henry Brown, Frank Drew, Phillip Goodwin. “We whose names are underwritten do testify that one evening when we were in the chamber where Mrs. Winchester then lay in her haunting, we observed her to be by an invisible force lifted up from the bed whereon she lay, so as to touch the garret floor, while yet neither her feet nor any other parent of her body rested either on the bed or any other support, but were also by the same force lifted up from all that was under her, and all this for a considerable while. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
“We judged it several minutes, and it was as much as several of us could do with all our strength to pull her down. All which happened when there was not only we two in the chamber, but we supposed ten or a dozen more whose names we have forgotten.” W. R. Leigh and Spenser T. Olin. These accounts could not be the power of suggestion because these people were not just bystanders. They believed that they witnessed levitation, and they were engaging in violent physical activity, trying to bring her body back to the bed. Such activity would, ordinarily, break the power of suggestion. And levitation has been so frequently reported, from so many times and places (from the 5th century to the 21st century), that one cannot be at all sure there is a satisfactory explanation for it, particularly since so many witnesses insisted that no part of Mrs. Winchester’s body was touching the bed. However, whatever the explanation for these symptoms, Mrs. Winchester and her estate are truly a mystery. However, it is also noted the other prominent Queen Anne Victorian Mansions and other built during the Victorian times experienced afflictions. Witchcraft is one of the most hidden works of darkness. Although some people and some estates were more haunted than others, the Bay Area, during Victorian Times, had its full share of obscurity. All publications on witchcraft and supernatural events have been forbidden by these prominent families at the time. Their desire was to quail tempers, and use wisdom to relax fear, while upholding their honour, integrity, and reverence for the Victorian era. “All things are possible to one that believeth,” reports Mark 9.23. Who that beareth it upon one shall not dread one’s enemies, to be overcome, nor with no manner of poison be hurt, nor in no need misfortune, nor with no thunder one shall be smitten nor lightning, no in no fire be burnt suddenly, nor in no water be drowned. Nor one shall not die without shrift, nor with thieves to be take. Also one shall have no wrong neither of Lord or Lady. This be in the names of God and Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Winchester Mystery House will be going dark this weekend for All Hallows’ Eve, but we will be back to haunt you Thursday, September 30th! Purchase your tickets for next weekend early and let the ghoul times roll 👻
See link in bio for ticket info 🎟 winchestermysteryhouse.com
Randolph Harris II International 