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Western Fever!
Some well-meaning moralists who say that the disciple should no longer look for the evil in others swing to the other extreme and say that he should look only for the good. Philosophy, however, does not endorse either point of view, except to remark that we have no business to judge those who are weaker than ourselves and less business to condemn them. It further says that to look only for the good in others would be to give a false picture of them, for a proper picture must combine the bright and the dark sides. Therefore, it prefers mentally to leave them alone and not to set any valuation upon them, to mind its own affairs and to leave them to the unerring judgment of their own cycles of retaliation. The only exception to this rule is when a disciple is forced to have dealings with another man which make it necessary for him to understand the character of the person with whom he is dealing; but even this understanding must be fair, just, calmly made, impartial, and unprejudiced. Above all, it must not arouse personal emotions or egoistic reactions: in short, he will have to be absolutely impersonal. However, it is seldom that a disciple will have to make such an exception. He should refrain from giving attention to the imperfections and shortcomings of others, and he should certainly never blame them for these. He should turn his critical gaze towards himself alone—unless he is specifically asked by others to examine them—and exercise it to correct himself and improve himself and reform himself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
To create a lasting, happy marriage, couples must learn how to resolve conflicts so that each individual feels understood and decisions are made that involved acceptable compromise. “If a husband and wife sometimes enjoy pleasures of the flesh for different reason, is there good communication? I mean, suppose for one it is an emotional things on the one part and physical on the other?” Wonderful blessings flow from resolving conflict in an atmosphere of love. “There are times when I feel much more emotionally in need than physically. Isn’t it perfectly all right for me to go ahead and just find the emotional satisfaction I want even thought I know it would be more stimulating to my husband if I reacted more physically?” Of course, it is all right. Both you and your husband must be completely free to express what you want and feel what you want every time. And knowing there is complete trust between the two of you, you are completely attuned to each other’s wishes, and understand that you have moods and that you are a different person with different needs at different times. “Can any couple ever really be completely attuned to each other?” Well, being attuned is not magic. It is communication. It is something you participate in by identifying with another person and sharing with that person and learning how to reconcile your private, intimate thoughts and feelings with those of other person. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Being attuned results as well from good nonverbal communication. And being attuned is the key to an important point. Expression of intimate passions is not necessarily a matter of yes or no, to bed or not to bed. Expression of pleasures of the flesh exists on a continuum. It includes a very wide range of behaviour. It means reaching out just to touch, drawing close to share a mood, developing it or letting it drift. It means enjoying the feelings of pleasures of the flesh in the moment without necessarily turning them into an invitation or request or command. However, being attuned also means sensing when the mood is right to take the next step, and then you should be free to respond in the way that feels best for you. To be able to say, “This time I am going along for the ride.” Or not even say it; just feel it. Or to be demanding—and, if it goes wrong, to communicate and say, “look…” “Isn’t it natural sometimes not to be completely with it? To be a little removed? Sometimes I even find I’m short of watching…Is there anything wrong with that?” There probably is not anyone who, while having pleasures of the flesh, does not become a spectator for a time. On occasion, we watch what we ourselves may be doing or what our partner is doing. It is perfectly natural to consciously observe the procedure; in fact, it is quite stimulating to do this now and then. What is important is the degree to which we assume this spectator’s role. In some cases, being the spectator on occasion may reflect a detachment from any emotional involvement. This is natural and no cause for concern. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
However, being a spectator does cut down on the input of the stimulus. If you are the spectator during pleasures of the flesh activities, for instance, some degree of your wife’s pleasure and excitement does not really get through to you, which means you lose that stimulation. Ans to a degree your own pleasure is dulled because you are not lost in the experience—you are observing. I am not saying that you experience no pleasure at all. I am just saying that some of it is blocked. A level of perception is blocked. This becomes critical in cases of sexual dysfunction. For example, suppose the male has trouble achieving or maintaining “attention.” In that circumstance both partners have fears. Whenever the wife approaches her husband, he worries: can I? will I? And then there is his wife’s fear: will he? can he? or am I going to be left hanging? “Is it my fault?” Do I contribute to the problem? Am I pushing him too much? And in that case, when dysfunction crops up, the fear of performance rather than the pleasure of performance becomes dominant. Then one really becomes a spectator. Because both partners are off in the corner, watching to see what happens. Usually nothing does. “What the male cannot sustain himself in the long run—what is the main cause? Are you asking about the male who loses “attention” without climax or who climaxes too soon? “Too soon.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Premature climax is very difficult to define. However, or concept of it, basically speaking, hold that is a man maintains control long enough to provide the opportunity for his female partner to achieve satisfaction approximately fifty percent of their coital opportunities, he cannot be consider a premature climaxer. Now, there are certain circumstances under which any man may tend to function to such a rush that his partner is unsatisfied. Suppose he had been away for a couple of weeks. The first time after that he usually has trouble, He may have similar trouble during his first encounter with a new woman. These are classic situations. However, if the problem is a consistent one within the marital unit, there is a technique to remedy matters. When this technique is used longingly by husband and wife together, almost every man can learn self-control. It is simple enough to put into practise easily but too complicated to describe in detail right now. “You said before that pleasures of the flesh are a natural process. To not wait it—is that unnatural?” On occasion or for a long period of time? It is perfectly natural on occasion—sometimes you are just not hungry. If it lasts two or three weeks, though, it may be time to give the matter some thought. “Say it lasts a month.” Tension involving pleasures of the flesh exists in the body just as the appetite for food exists. If the desire for intimate passions is lacking, we would first want to check for physical disability, just as we would if a person went too long without feeling hungry. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
However, in one respect pleasures of the flesh is like no other physical process. It is the only physical process that can be denied indefinitely, even for lifetime. It is one thing, of course, for someone with reasons that are valid for him or her deliberately to condition himself to set it aside. However, fi you are talking about someone who suddenly finds that now there is no interest where there was interest before, and if there seems to be no physical explanation, then the answer may lie in the cares and concerns that are draining his energies. “Is this problem—you know, lack of desire and all that—is it the same for a woman? If she’s busy with the house and the children and she’s just beat…” Of course that is going to affect her responsiveness! How could it not? There is probably no young mother in the country who would not know what you are talking about. “Isn’t it a fact that women have their strongest sexual drive at a later age than men? What is it—eighteen to twenty-five for men and twenty-give to thirty-three for woman?” That is a reflection of the old Kinsey data. It is not a physiological fact but a sociological one. It is culturally induced. Perhaps one of society’s ways of protecting young girls from the risk of pregnancy was to teach them that they had no feelings for pleasures of the flesh; they were given all the moral precepts to make sure they remembered the lesson. Boy were permitted—even encouraged—to have pleasures of the flesh feelings, so they got off to a head start. Girls took longer to catch up, that is all. It is cultural, not biological. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Differences of opinion, habit, or background are inevitable, but we have ample resources to help us know how to cope. Couples can learn methods for dealing with conflict. Inspiration can lead to changing hearts that soften each spouse from the inside. Some of our greatest opportunities to demonstrate our love will be within the walls of our own homes. Love should be the very heart of family life, and yet sometimes it is not. There can be too much impatience, too much arguing, too many fights, too many tears. When troubles persist and become destructive to family life, there can be more serious causes of conflict, including immaturity, selfishness, desire to win power struggles, and pride. I have long felt that the greatest factor in a happy marriage is an anxious concern for the comfort and well-being of one’s compassion. In most cases, selfishness is the leading factor that cases argument, separation, divorce, and broken hearts. Whenever one considers the bad feeling and the unpleasantness caused by contention, it is well to ask, “Why do I participate?” It is important to recognize that we choose our behaviour. At the root of this issues is the age-old problem of pride. When problems persist, whatever the cause, we need to learn new skills and soften our hearts. If his higher faculties have not yet awakened and possessed him, why blame a person for what he does? He is only doing what he can. Moreover, it is prudent never to condemn others. For others will then by retaliation condemn you. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
We need not be unaware to the vaults and lapses of inspired men, but we ought to forgive them. A balancing of accounts justifies this attitude. Those who bring this rare gift with them deserve a wider indulgence than others. We should always remember that everyone, on all the different and varying levels of spiritual advancement, has his own difficulties and problems. To accept these without giving way to negative emotions is the first step in the right direction. Coming to terms with life and oneself is a never-ending procedure from which no one is exempt. The very nature of existence is synonymous with the individual struggle for self-development. Do not belittle any human being who is awake to his higher nature. Do not condemn another soul for his misdeeds, even though he be the wickedest of all men. Firstly, because he cannot be other than he is, for time, experience, tendencies, and destiny have brought him to this particular point and way of self-expression. Secondly, because the worse his misdeeds the greater will be the redemptive suffering to which he unconsciously condemns himself. It seems to me that this way of living is also the way of exploration and the way of science, when it is truly exploring and truly scientific, and the way of learning (education), and that this is also the way of infants before they know anything except what they are born with. An adult is a deteriorated child. One of the major theoretical hypotheses of client-centered therapy is that during therapy the concept of the self is revised to assimilate basic experiences which had previously been denied to awareness as threatening. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Why do we “do it” to each other in our relationships? Why do people manipulate each other? Why do some women constantly “do it” to their husbands by reminding him of his obligations rather than supporting his need for self-expression?” Some women prevent their husbands from doing what he wants to do, just so they can keep up the mask. Each of us has a number of emotionally charged ideas about life, which are called values: anger, love, strength, weakness, criticalness, support, dependency and control. Somewhere in our development, we form the notion that one of more of these values is “taboo,” forbidden. One of the forbidden values is sometimes control. To some women, the woman is supposed to be dependent. The man is supposed to be in control. Yet women know, deep down, that they have the capacity to be independent, to take control, to support themselves and their family. This is the reality. The forbidden reality. However, because women have formed the opinion that this reality is unavailable to them, they mask it with the opposite face, the face of the helpless manipulator. However, women may not know on a conscious level that they have to capacity to be independent. On this level, all many of them have are their ideas, the values impressed on them during their upbringing, her thoughts about the way things should be and her obvious actions. It is inly by coming into touch with her feelings about dependency that a woman is able to get a conscious knowledge of what is really true for her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
This is not always easy. At one point in any relationship, matters sometimes get so strained, couples sometimes have a hard time being together at all. Women sometimes constantly judge their husbands for wanting to shirk his duties; men sometimes constantly put their wives down for not appreciating them. Sensing is a great way to start doing things together so as to create a closer relationship. Taking walks together, doing household chores together, reading to each other are great ways to bond and heal a relationship. After a woman realizes that she is masking her true values, she may find it increasingly easier to be comfortable with herself, with the notion that she no longer needs her husband’s income or control. After that session, when he usually begins to talk about his frustration with a therapist or ministry, a woman will typically open up and may become spontaneously warn towards her husband. She understands she can just “be with” his frustration and not try to avoid or condemn it. Interestingly, the number of things a could does together decreases after a time, yet their relationship still grows closers because as they learn to unmask their feelings, they can be together more, while actually seeing each other less. In order to make her martial relationship free, some woman lean to understand the concept of interdependence. She cannot be dependent upon her husband all the time, though this is precisely what some women have tried to do. Since two people are in an intimate relationship, one spouse cannot be entirely independent of the other all the time either. There are times, however, when it is appropriate for woman to be totally dependent or independent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
For example, some women do not have the heart to discipline their children. When they do something which is a clear violation of the rules, about all she can do is scold them with, “You know you are not supposed to do that. You should be ashamed of yourself.” On the other hand, many the fathers find it easy to be the disciplinarian, taking away the children’s privileges and putting up with their protests. Thus, when it comes to discipline, woman can be totally dependent on their husband—without manipulation or suppression. When it comes to running the house, generally women feel entirely competent. Man can feel lost. A woman does not typically have to consult her husband on how much to pay for caviar or when to get a faucet fixed. In that realm, she can be totally independent—again, without manipulation or suppression on the part of either of them. Apart from these instances, there are a number of situations which call for interdependence. If a man should leave his job and stay at home writing, he would need his wife’s ability to work and provide an income for them. At the same time, however, sometimes a housewife knows nothing about investing and the needs of her husband’s help in committing their excess funds to the financial plans. What some women have to learn is that no relationship can exist for long with one person always being the superior and the other being the subordinate. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Each person in a couple must permit independence, dependence and interdependence. The proper balance of these three aspects is difficult to achieve, but it is equally freeing to both parties, who can then stop “doing it” to each other and just “be with” each other in the way that the situation dictates. Emotional interdependence is like a dance, in which each partner is aware of and sensitive to the movements of the other. They do not battle, they do not fight for control. Rather, each responds to the music in the rhythmic flow with the other. As partners, neither is a superior or subordinate. Each is sure of oneself as a dancer and does not need to push the other around or be pushed around. Many marital or family conflicts arise because of uncontrolled anger. If we are not careful, we can follow an angry incident with constant thinking about how we were wronged. The longer we ruminate, the more reasons we can generate to justify our perspective. This brooding can prevent us from calming down, and when a second wave of anger emerges before the first is resolved, hormonal reactions can lead to additional outbursts. Therefore, before you try tackling a problem, allow your emotions to cool down. Wait out the chemical reaction that may be taking place. Find a distraction. Choose to think about something else or take a walk. Write down your thoughts for feelings. For some, this helps to increase self-awareness. Let it out in productive ways. Yelling about your feelings will not “get it out of your system.” The more you vent in an angry manner, the more intense your feelings will become. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Adolescent members of society can face challenges related to navigating the strict moral code of the religion while also dealing with typical teenage pressures like peer influence, identity exploration, and grappling with issues like pleasures of the flesh, particularly when it comes to same-gender attraction, which can lead to feelings of isolation or conflict with religious teachings; additionally, the heavy emphasis on personal accountability and “worthiness” can contribute to anxiety and guilt among struggling teens. Masturbation is something of his own. He is not sure what to do with his new feelings for pleasures of the flesh or hot to fit them into his plan, so he reacts to them with the earlier feelings he has become familiar with, his racket. Masturbation may also put him through the agony of a true existential crisis: it is something he does or does not do at a given moment, and it is (or should be) his decision alone; and once he has done it, he, and he alone, must take the consequences. These may be private feeling such as guilt (because masturbation is wicked), fear (because it will damage his health, he thinks), or inadequacy (because it will weaken his will power, he thinks). All these are “head transactions” between the Parent and the Child in his skull. On the other hand, he may have transactional feelings which depend on the reactions, real or imaginary, of his public: hurt, anger, or embarrassment, because now he thinks they have a real reason to make fun of him, hate him, or shame him. In any case, masturbation gives him a way of fitting the new feelings of pleasures of the flesh in with the old feelings he learned as a child. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
However, he also learns to be more flexible. From his schoolmates and teachers, he gets “permission” to react with feelings other than those encouraged at home, and he also learns to cool it: not everybody takes seriously the things his folks worry about. This switch in his feeling-system gradually separates him from his family and draws him closer to people his own age. He adapts his script to the new situation and makes it more “presentable.” He may even change his role from being a total failure to being a partial success, from being a loser to being merely a nonwinner and at least breaking even. If he has a winning script, he discovers that that requires a certain objectivity. He is not in a competitive situation and victories do not come automatically, but only after a certain amount of planning and work; and he learns to take a few losses without getting shaken up. When children can benefit from their parents’ wisdom is ironically often the time when they are least likely to accept it. Adolescent children, in particular, strive to become independent, and the urgency of that drive, heightened by the pull of peers and Worldly influence, sometimes draws them away from those who could help them the most. Sadly, their parents, wanting desperately to help, sometimes watch helplessly as they make unfortunate mistakes. Headstrong children, bent on doing things their own way, rebuff the most loving of fathers and mothers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Boredom arises from doing repetitive, unchallenging work. It arises as a consequence of relationships with persons who lack spontaneity and who do not relate to us in ways that meet our needs for affection, understanding or intellectual stimulation. Boredom arises when people do not actively choose what they will do, but instead permit their lives to be lived for them by social pressures to conform with rigid roles and concepts of respectability. Boredom is inevitable in human life, but there are healthy and unhealthy methods of coping with it. The unhealth patterns include permitting it to continue for indefinite periods of time without making an effort to understand its causes, and impulsively seeking excitement or diversion without striving to understand the causes of boredom. For example, some people may drive automobiles at breakneck speeds, smoke marijuana, or fornicate simply to interrupt monotony. Other flee ennui by attending many movies, drinking too much liquor, using other drugs, watching television for long hours, staying on the Internet, or reading escape literature. The healthier approach to boredom is to reflect upon one’s life, to ascertain what one truly wants and the ways in which existence if failing to provide legitimate satisfaction. If persons are unable to diagnose their own needs, they are serving the interests of healthy personality by discussing their situation and personality with a friend or by seeking counseling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Geography is important because it provides a foundational understanding of how the physical environment interacts with human societies, allowing us to analyze and address global issues like climate change, resource management, population distribution, and political conflicts, essentially giving us a holistic view of the World and how different places are connected and influenced by their geographic features. The most instructive way to look at a World-Map is to reposition the map so that East is down. The reexperience the long climb of humanity from East to West. The busy caravans like ant-files shuttling up and down the Asian trade routes. The enormous ant-armies of Alexander overrunning the past—no Worlds for him to conquer westward. Genghis Khan’s fast-moving mobile, equine technology storming columns. Roman legions painfully pushing up into Gaul sense the movement of human swarms over the centuries—the empire-hives sending out columns and waves, the exploratory probes westward. The flotillas of frail craft moving up the Atlantic, shipping that most basic cargo: sperm and eggs. The other cargoes are support-logistic. When you watch the sun disappear over the horizon, you are looking into the future. The greatest technological problems faced by DNA on this planet was scaling the Atlantic Ocean. For over a thousand years, from 40 to 1400 AD, the waves of mobile-elite sperm-eggs splashed up to the Western-European Atlantic beach-ledges—and waited. It was the greatest swarming phenomenon in human history! #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Port-cities teeming with migragents, explores, and space-travelers. Western Fever! And Columbus—Columbus obsessed with this Everest problem, commanded by genetic directive to scale this mountain of water three-thousand-miles-high. He said, “I gave the keys of those mighty barriers of ocean which were closed with such mighty chains.” Not the timing of Atlantic Ascent. It has to await the Protestant Reformation. The Luther self-actualization freed gene pools from the Catholic-hive center. Only a society of self-actualized families, democratically linked together, was capable of pushing gene pools three-thousand-miles up, into the storm altitudes of the North Atlantic. Recall that the ascent had been made mover and over again during the ten centuries before Columbus by doughty Vikings, fervent Irish monks and hundreds of masculine bands. Some returned to tell the story of the new ecological niche. However, this signal did not activate the swarm because the technology for lifting gene pools three-thousand-miles into the unknown had not yet emerged. Thousands of European sailors who found the new lands did not return. Instead, they were absorbed by native gene pools. If thousands of Amazon female sailors had reached North American before the Protestant Revolution, they too would have been swallowed up by the native gene pools. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Philosophy secularized the ideal. However, tyrants appear who soon secularize the philosophies that give them the right to do so. Nietzsche had already predicted this development in discussing Hegel, whose originality, according to him, consisted in inventing a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffering could no longer sever as arguments against the divinity. “But the State, the powers that be, immediately made use of this grandiose initiative.” He himself, however, had conceived of a system in which crime could no longer serve as an argument and in which the only values reside in the divinity of man. This grandiose initiative also had to be put to use. Socialism in this respect was only a transitory heir, only the speculative and rabid outcome of nihilism. In all other respects those who, in correcting Nietzsche with the help of Marx, will choose to assent only to history, and no longer to all of creation, will be perfectly logical. The rebel whom Nietzsche, at least in his theory or superhumanity, and Marx before him, with his classless society, both replace the Beyond by the Later On. In that way, Nietzsche betrayed the Greeks and the teachings of Jesus Christ, who according to him, replaced the Beyond by the Immediate. Marx, like Nietzsche, thought in strategic terms, and like Nietzsche, hated formal virtue. Their two rebellions, both of which finish similarly in adhesion to a certain aspect of reality, end by merging into Marxism-Leninism and being incarnated in that caste, already mentioned by Nietzsche, which would “replace the priest, the teacher, and the doctor.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
The fundamental difference is that Nietzsche, in awaiting the superman, proposed to ascent to what exists and Marx to what is to come. For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek. Nietzsche, at least, foresaw what was going to happen: “Modern socialism tends to create a form of secular Jesuitism, to make instruments of all men”; and again: “What we desire is wellbeing…As a result we march toward a spiritual slavery such as has never been seen…Intellectual Caesarism hovers over every activity of the businessman and the philosopher.” Placed in the crucible of Nietzsche philosophy, rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism. The absolute negative had driven Stirner to deify crime simultaneously with the individual. However, the absolute affirmative leads to universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously. Marxism-Leninism has really accepted the burden of Nietzsche’s freewill by means of ignoring several Nietzsche virtues. The great rebel thus creates with his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity. Once he had escaped from God’s prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department exists to serve the residents and visitors of the City of Sacramento, and the entire Capital Region. They accomplish this through a full-time, career staffing. Their team is comprised of well-trained, diverse, and highly motivated individuals who provide services in fire safety education, fire codes enforcement, emergency management, and all-hazards emergency response. “In Sacramento, I was rotating from the squad to the engine. I worked the engine that night, and I had the tip. We had two first-engine jobs and I was taking a beating, because I was fighting a lot of fires. I had also been a paramedic for a long time. So it was two good jobs, and I hate the tip in both. When you fight fire constantly, you grow accustomed to it, but when you rotate, you’re in squad 90 percent of the time. I think that the most meaningful thing is being both a firefighter and a paramedic and just whipping them all together. There’s great satisfaction in fighting a fire. And when you’re a paramedic and you get somebody who is having a heart attack, you know that if you don’t do the right thing within the next five minutes, this person is going to be down. You feel obligated, you give them the right drug, and they get straightened out. That’s meaningful. The paramedic just does rescue work when there are two men on the squad. If you have three men, that third man rotates out to the engine. What happened was, I had been on a two-man squad for many a year, and I was constantly doing paramedic work. Then we got a third man and we started rotating, so that every third week you would go on an engine. When you’re been away from breathing smoke for a while, it’s a little bit harder. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“I got into the paramedics by accident. I was a rookie in a ladder company, and when they needed an EMT, they naturally picked on the rookie. So they made me an EMT, and I worked the rescue squad. An EMT does basic life support, that is, splinting legs, doing CPR if necessary, then running the patient to the hospital. A paramedic goes into heavy life support, he gives IVs, gets into cardiac defibrillation and drug administration, he gets patients to the hospital and contacts the doctor. He has basic command with the doctor and does what is called prehospital care. I love the system in Sacramento, where we rotate into the engine. Some paramedics don’t like that. When I got into the fire department, being a fireman was something I had always dreamed of doing. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved the horns, I used to watch the engines go by, and my dream was to be one of the guys on the fire truck. I did a lot of job. As a matter of fact, I was in my forth year as a pipefitter’s apprentice, and I quit when I was called for the fire department. I loved fighting the fires, and I still love it. When you’re fighting fires, you say, “There’s a fire. There’s a challenge.” You rise to that challenge, you want to beat it. When you do, you feel high. When you’re a paramedic, it gets down to you and your partner. You find somebody who is unconscious, you’re got to find out what’s wrong, figure out the right thing to do, and do it. There’s satisfaction in know that you are doing something for somebody, you’re doing something that’s important. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“That’s the basic line in both jobs. You’re doing something important. That’s what all firefighters feel about themselves: they feel important. I’ve done other jobs where I’ve made more money, but I never felt any sense of worth. It makes me feel good when the kids in the neighborhood come to me when one of them’s gotten cut playing football or something. I’m the neighborhood medic, a sort of neighborhood hero. The kids look up to you. It takes some intelligence to become a paramedic, but we all have to have a certain amount of intelligence to get where we are, the ability to grasps the information, retain it, and then apply it. It’s not a matter of superior intelligence, just being open to somebody teaching you something. What makes a good fireman is being able to do anything that’s put before him. Most of us have another occupation, we’re plumbers, carpenters, electricians, whatever. Each one is a jack-of-all-trades. They can do just about anything. We have deaths too much, too often. My life peaked when I first became a fireman, I was doing everything I ever wanted to do. Then they made me a paramedic, and I went through a little valley. As a rookie paramedic, I was a little unsure of myself, then I had a few failures, patients who didn’t make it. I remember going home and spending four days off just sitting in the house, depressed, worried that I didn’t do the right thing. Then as time went on, I felt better, I got more confidence in myself. I knew I was doing the right thing, and whatever happened was the will of God, whether it was a save or not. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“Being a paramedic is hard mentally, because you have to deal with people at their worst. Sometimes you can change it, you can right it and make things better. But sometimes you can’t, so you have to deal with a lot of tragedy. You have to get used to it, and that’s where it takes a good partner. If you don’t have a good partner, being a paramedic can get real depressing. The worst things that stick in my mind are crib deaths, babies. Elderly persons have already lived their lives. But a dead baby is somebody who didn’t even have the chance to talk yet, or see where they’re going. What bothers me most is kids. You have to deal with the parents, but after you’ve been a paramedic for a while, you know who to tune in, and who to tune out. So a lot of times you have to tune a parent out, just to deal with their kid and with the situation. The only thing that really affects me is my particular patient. I’ll do anything the fire department wants me to do. I don’t know if I can do anything else that would make me more satisfied. The only thing that they could do for me now is give me more time off and more money. There is no other job I could want. If there’s anything else, this is just a personal thing with me, I would like to go fifty-fifty between the fireman and paramedic. I would like to do it more firefighting. I like to do them both, for they are important in different ways.” #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. Elon Musk recently warned that America is going bankrupt. The national debt is nearly $40 trillion, and the interest payments on the debt is $1 trillion. America is paying more in interest than on the principal of the national debt. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
Winchester Mystery House
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Hell is Empty, All the Devils are Here
Personal colouring of the truth is inevitable the moment it is given a shape in thoughts or words. If a man speaks at all—for in the divine presence he hangs his head—let it be with the high voice of true authority. Let it come out of the great stillness to shame lesser voices of the mean, the petty, and the ignorable. In this World rid of God and of moral idols, man is now alone and without a master. No one has been less inclined than Nietzsche (and in this way he distinguishes himself from the romantics) to let it be believed that such freedom would be easy. This complete liberation put him among the ranks of those of whom he himself said that they suffered a new form of anguish and a new form of happiness. However, at the beginning, it is only anguish that makes him cry out: “Alas, grant me madness…Unless I am above the law, I am the most outcast of all outcasts.” He who cannot maintain his position above the law must in fact find another law or take refuge in madness. From the moment that man believes neither in God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything that, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” He who cannot maintain his position above the law must in fact find another law or take refuge in madness. From the moment that man believes neither God nor in immortal life, he becomes “responsible for everything alive, for everything, born of suffering, is condemned to suffer from life.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 26
It is he, and he alone, who must discover law and order. Then the time of exile begins, the endless search for justification, the aimless nostalgia, “the most painful, the most heart-breaking question, that of the heart which asks itself: where can I feel at home?” Because his mind was free, Nietzsche knew that freedom of the mind is not a comfort, but an achievement to which one aspires and at long last obtains after an exhausting struggle. He knew that in wanting to consider oneself above the law, there is a great risk of finding oneself beneath the law. That is why he understood that only the mind found its real emancipation in the acceptance of new obligations. The essence of his discovery consists in saying that if the eternal law is not freedom, the absence of law is still less so. If nothing is true, if the World is without order, then nothing is forbidden; to prohibit an action, there must, in fact, be a standard of values and an aim. However, at the same time, nothing is authorized; there must also be values and aims in order to choose another course of action. Absolute domination by the law does not represent liberty, but no more does absolute anarchy. The sum total of every possible amounts to slavery. Chaos is also a form of servitude. Freedom exists only in a World where what is possible is defined at the same time as what is not possible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26
Without law there is no freedom. If fate is not guided by superior values, if chance is king, then there is nothing but the step in the dark and the appalling freedom of the blind. On the point of achieving the most complete liberation, Nietzsche therefore chooses the most complete subordination. “If we do not make of God’s death a great renunciation and a perpetual victory over ourselves, we shall have to pay for that omission.” In other words, with Nietzsche, rebellion ends in asceticism. A profounder logic replaces the, “if nothing is true, everything is permitted,” of Karamazov by, “if nothing is true, everything is permitted.” To deny that one single thing is forbidden in this World amounts to renouncing everything that is permitted. At the point where it is no longer possible to say what is black and what is white, the light is extinguished and freedom becomes a voluntary prison. It can be said that Nietzsche, with a kind of frightful joy, rushes toward the impasse into which he methodically drives his nihilism. His avowed aim is to render the situation untenable to his contemporaries. His only hope seems to be arrived at the extremity of contradiction. Then, if man does not wish to perish in the coils that strange him, he will have to cut them at a single blow and create his own values. The death of God accomplishes nothing and can only be endured in terms of preparing a resurrection. “If we fail to find grandeur in God,” says Nietzsche, “we find it nowhere; it must be denied or created.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 26
To deny the grandeur in God was the task of the World around Nietzsche, which he saw rushing toward suicide. To create was the superhuman task for which he was willing to die. He knew in fact that creation is only possible in the extremity of solitude and that man would only commit himself to this staggering task if, in the most extreme distress of mind, he was compelled to undertake it or perish. Nietzsche cries out to man that the only truth is the World, to which he must be faithful and in which he must live and find his salvation. However, at the same time he teaches him that to live in a lawless World is impossible because to live explicitly implies a law. How can one live freely and without law? To this enigma man must find an answer, on pain of death. Nietzsche at least does not flinch. He answers and his answer is bold: Damocles never danced better beneath the sword. One must accept the unacceptable and hold to the untenable. From the moment that it is admitted that the World pursues no end, Nietzsche proposes to concede its innocence, to affirm that it accepts no judgment since it cannot be judged on any intention, and consequently to replace all judgments based on values by absolute assent, and by a complete and exalted allegiance to this World. Thus, from absolute despair will spring infinite joy, from blind servitude, unbound freedom. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26
To be free is, precisely, to abolish ends. The innocence of the ceaseless change of things, as soon as one consents to it, represents the maximum liberty. The free mind willingly accepts what is necessary. If it is absolute, Nietzsche’s most profound concept is that the necessity of phenomena, without rifts, does not imply any kind of restraint. Total acceptance of total necessity is his paradoxical definition of freedom. The question “free of what?” is thus replaced by “free for what?” Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, “the bow bent to the breaking-point.” This magnificent consent, born of abundance and fullness of spirit, is the unreserved affirmation of human imperfection and suffering, of evil and murder, of all that is problematic and strange in our existence. It is born of an arrested wish to be what one is in a World that is what it is. “To consider oneself a fatality, not to wish to be other than one is…” Nietzsche asceticism, which begins with the recognition of fatality, ends in a deification of fate. The more implacable destiny is, the more it becomes worthy of adoration. A moral God, pity, and love are enemies of fate to the extent that they try to counterbalance it. Nietzsche wants no redemption. The joy of self-realization is the joy of annihilation. However, only the individual is annihilated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26
The movement of rebellion, by which man demanded his own existence, disappears in the individual’s absolute submission to the inevitable. Amor fati replaces what was an odium fati. “Every individual collaborates with the entire cosmos, whether we know it or not, whether we want it or not.” The individual is lost in the destiny of the species and the eternal movement of the spheres. “Everything that has existed is eternal, the sea throws it back on the shore.” Nietzsche then turns to the origins of thought—to the pre-Socratics. The philosophers suppressed ultimate causes so as to leave intact the eternal values of the principles they upheld. Only power without purpose, only Heraclitus’ “chance,” is eternal. Nietzsche’s whole effort is directed toward demonstrating the existence of the law that governs the eternal flux and of the element of chance in the inevitable: “A child is innocent and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a gamble, a wheel that spins automatically, a first step, the divine gift of being able to consent.” The World is divine because the World is inconsequential. That is why art alone, by being equally inconsequential, is capable of grasping it. It is impossible to give a clear account of the World, but art can teach us to reproduce it—just as the World reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26
The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same shore. However, at least he who consents to his own return and to the return of all things, who becomes an echo and an exalted echo, participates in the divinity of the World. By this subterfuge, the divinity of man is finally introduced. The rebel, who at first denies God, finally aspires to replace Him. However, Nietzsche’s message is that the rebel can only become God by renouncing every form of rebellion, even the type of rebellion that produces gods to chastise humanity. “If there is a God, how can one tolerate not being God oneself?” There is, in fact, a god—namely, the World. To participate in its divinity, all that is necessary is to consent. “No longer to pray, but to give one’s blessing,” and the Earth will abound in men-gods. To say yes to the World, to reproduce it, is simultaneously to re-create the World and oneself, to become the great artist, the creator. Nietzsche’s message is summed up in the word creation, with the ambiguous meaning it has assumed. Nietzsche’s sole admiration was for the egotism and severity proper to all creators. The transmutation of values consists only in replacing critical values by creative values; by respect and admiration for what exists. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26
Divinity without immortality defines the extent of the creator’s freedom. Dionysos, the Earth-god, shrieks eternally as he is torn limb from limb. However, at the same time, the represents the agonized beauty that coincides with suffering. Nietzsche thought that to accept this Earth and Dionysos was to accept his own sufferings. And to accept everything, both suffering and the supreme contradiction simultaneously, was to be kind of all creation. Nietzsche agreed to pay the price for his kingdom. Only the “sad and suffering” World is true—the World is the only divinity. Like Empedocles, who threw himself into the crater of Mount Etna to find truth in the only place where it exists—namely, in the bowels of the Earth—Nietzsche proposed that man should allow himself to be engulfed in the cosmos in order to rediscover his eternal divinity and to become Dionysos. The Will to Power ends, like Pascal’s Pensees, of which it so often reminds us, with a wager. Man does not yet obtain assurance but only the wish for assurance, which is not at all the same thing. Nietzsche, too, hesitated on this brink: “That is what is unforgivable in you. You have the authority and you refuse to sign.” Yet finally he had to sign. However, the name of Dionysos immortalized only the notes to Ariadne, which we wrote when he was mad. Be grateful to the one who criticizes you, whether he be a friend or a foe. For it his criticism be true, he renders you a real service. He may point out a flaw in your character that you have long neglected, with unfortunate results to yourself and others. His words may prompt you to remedy it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26
The wartime psychological technology was also converted to civilian consumption. Personality assessment techniques were taken over by the managerial powers and used to select and train employees. A new, gigantic industry emerged employing clinical psychologist and counselors and a new social-moral concept of human nature—adjustment. Those who matured during the self-discovery 1960s and the self-actualized 1970s did not know that the aim of personality-clinical psychology and psychiatry during the 50s was hive-adjustment. Not surprising, really, when we recall that the Firm started in all in the 1940s “Their” aim was, we recall, the preservation of the past, the prevention of change. To understand the gravity of the situation, remember: there was no concept of personal change in the 1950s. Human personality was seen as a fixed quality, which could and should be adjusted to the system. Old-style psychiatrists—formerly called alienists—guarded the psychotic. The radical wing, psychoanalysis, taught that after five years of intensive treatment, five hours a week, the patient might get enough insight to wearily adjust and to discuss his neurosis at cocktail parties. The mind has to be cleansed. Speech and thought must be undefiled by treacherous backbiting, slanderous gossip, and all unkind words. The law of recompense declares: “As you speak of other so shall you be spoken of.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 26
While I live, it is life that I explore. I feel fairly sure that his is also the best preparation for dying when it comes. One moves then easily from one into the other, not clinging to what one should (for one’s own happiness and the relief of others) give up. Throughout life it is the same, that I must always be ready to receive and ready to relinquish, in accord with the time. I am arriving at an understanding of my knowing that I must live with life, that is the problem. It seems to me futile to study the problems of infants, the problems of children, the problems of the first child, of the last child, of the menopausal age, of geriatrics; of the poor, of the rich, of the middle-class, of marginalized groups, and all the other problems. If all that time, energy, intelligence, and money were put into a study of the problem of being human, all others would be resolved. There is just one problem—a very big one, but still just one. When I lose touch with life, and the life and goings-on in me, I can trust myself to regain it through my dreams, which are good advisors. When I was small my dreams, even when I was terribly afraid of them, were helpful. When I acted on what they told me, I did not have them anymore. When I first went to school, I was exposed to tickling by other children. I fell to the ground and writhed in agony. At night I was afraid to go to sleep because of what I dreamed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26
In my dream, I was lying on bare ground in a clearing (there were no sidewalks in the village where I lived) and out of the woods that surrounded me (there were woods in the village) would stream in single file half a dozen little dwarfs (the way the children looked to me when they tickled me.) They were heading straight for my body. I knew with horror that if I moved the least little bit I would be discovered and they would pounce on me, torture me, and I would not be able to shake them off. So I lay utterly quiet—not a quiver, made myself dead. Then they changed their course to swing around me, beyond my head, and streamed off into the woods on the other side. When the last one had disappeared in the woods, I was safe. I do not recall that I made any conscious connection between this frequent dream which was always exactly the same, and my being tickled, but I learned that absolute inner stillness was something I could arrive at in my walking life when someone began to tickle me. Then I felt nothing when I was “tickled,” and the children said, “Heck, you’re no fun!” and left me. The stillness was useful to me in other emergencies, for many years. When shock threatened to disorganize me, I could arrive at immediate inner stillness and do whatever needed to be done. Later, I lost touch with that, chiefly through my strong and forceful mentor who insisted that I must think first. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26
When I had got into the habit of doing that, then the only way that I could still chaos was to make myself still, hold myself together, use force on myself to keep my exterior calm, instead of arriving at the stillness which is in me, as I think it must be in all of us. Within this stillness I do not think: if thoughts are needed, thoughts occur to me; otherwise, I act, without thinking. This comes out much better than when I think first, or “try to figure things out.” When I was sick and could not get well, and all my money had got used up and all my efforts to correct both conditions failed, and I lost faith in me, I arrived at this stillness again in another way—while awake—and it has never entirely left me since. It was a different image this time, one that I have since seen described by someone else. However, the image itself is not important, or whether it agrees with that of anyone else. The importance (to me) is in what it says: inner wisdom showing me something that in my panic I had overlooked. Trust in my dreams is something quite new to me. My early conditioning said that dreams were nonsense, to be laughed at and ignored. My later conditioning said to mistrust them (and myself) and then I did what a young man did recently in telling me about his recurrent dream: “There is a mound of boo boo, with a bright shining jewel on top. The feeling is good with it…I suppose what it is telling me is that I’m just a pile of feces.” With that good feeling? #RandolphHarris 12 of 26
In actuality, this young man had been told by his conventional family and friends that he was a horrible person because of things he did. He was made to feel dirty and foul (“smelly”). His own opinion of himself shows in his dream—what “should” be smelly and awful was pleasant to him. Playing with feces and/or obsessing with it is also a sign of schizophrenia. It also means that one has a problem with authority and/or one’s father. The mythical “cloacal sphincter” exists in the minds of confused people whose Child thinks that there is only one opening down below in both genders, which opening can be closed off at will. This leads to scripts which are difficult for more realistic people to understand, especially if the mouth is also included. Thus, a catatonic schizophrenic may close off everything at once: he keeps al his sphincters clamped down so that nothing can get in or out of his mouth, bladder, or rectum, and he may have to be tube-fed, catheterized, and clystered at regular intervals to insure his physical well-being and survival. Here the script slogan is “Beter death than let them in!” and this taken literally by the Child who controls the sphincters and who, in such cases, is very confused about how they are assembled and how they work. Most scripts, however, are centered mainly around one particular sphincter, and the psychology of the script it related to that physiological area. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26
The constant tightening of one sphincter can affect all the muscles of the body, and this muscle set is related to the person’s emotional attitude and interests and also influences the way others respond to him. This works according to the model of “infected splinter.” If Jeder has a small infected splinter in his right big toe, he will start to limp. This affects the muscles of his leg, and in order to compensate, the muscles of his back will tighten up. After a while, the muscles in his shoulders will also be affected, and pretty soon the muscles in his shoulders will also be affected, and pretty soon the muscles of his neck are involved. If he walks a lot, the disturbance in muscular balance progresses until eventually the muscles of his head and scalp are also affected; then he may get a headache. As walking becomes more difficult and his body is held more and more stiffly and the infection progresses, his circulation and digestion may become laboured. At this point, someone might say: “This is a very difficult condition to cure, since it involves his internal organs and his head as well as all the muscles in his body. This is a disease of the whole organism.” However, along comes a surgeon, and says: “I can cure the whole thing, including his fever, his headache, and all his muscular tension.” He pulls out the splinter, the infection subsides, Jeder stops limping, his scalp and neck muscles relaxes, everything returns to normal. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26
Thus, even though the condition involves the whole body, it can be cured by looking in the right place for the splinter and removing it. Then not only Jeder, but all the people around him are relived, and they can relax, too. When a sphincter is held tight, a similar chain of events happens. In order to give the sphincter traction and support, the surrounding muscles tighten up. To compensate for that, more distant muscles are affected, and eventually the whole body is involved. This is easily demonstrated. Suppose the reader, as he sits reading, tightens up his anus. He will immediately notice that this involves the muscles of his lower back and legs. If he now rises up out of his chair, keeping his anus tight, he will note that he has to purse his lips, which in turn affects the muscles in his scalp. In other words, keeping his anus tight changes the muscular dynamics of his whole body. That is exactly what happens with people whose script calls for them to “Keep a tight a** hole or you will get screwed.” Every muscle in their bodies becomes involved, including their muscle of facial expression. The facial expression influences that way other people respond to them, and in fact gives the come-on to the Child of the other person, the script antagonist, who is destined to bring about the script switch. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26
Here is how it works. Supposed we call the man with the tight anus Arkie, and his opposite number, his script antagonist, Lenka. Lenka is look for an Arkie, Arkie is looking for a Lenka. Lenka knows instantly when she has found an Arkie because of his facial expression. She confirms her Child’s intuitive judgment in the course of their conversation as he reveals his attitudes and interests. Lenka’s role in the script of an Arkie is to bring about the script switch. Arkie’s counterscript is to keep tight at all times, but his script is something else. No matter how hard he tries to keep tight according to the parental precept, sooner or later he drops his guard for a moment, and then hos script takes over. In this moment of weakness, he relaxes. That is just what Lenka has been waiting for. She pulls the switch, and somehow or other, Arkie “gets screwed” as she moves in to fulfill her mission. And as long as Arkie tries to keep a tight anus, he is going to “get screwed again and again. That is how the script works—unless it calls for him to be a winner, and then he is the one who will do the screwing, as in the same of some anal financiers. Thus, the script analyst thinks sphincter so he will know what he is dealing with. The patient who gives up his script is much more relaxed in all the muscles of his body. The woman who formerly kept a tight anus, for example, will stop squirming in her chair, and the one who kept a tight vagina will no longer sit with her arms and legs tensely crossed and her right foot wrapped tightly around the inside of her left ankle. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26
With these remarks about the autocrats of the dinner table, who teach their children which muscles to anchor their bodies to for the rest of their lives, we conclude our survey of those incluences which are most important in later childhood, and are now ready to consider the next stage in the development of the script. When a man, who was once the bright-eyed, optimistic young professional becomes disenchanted with his career because his coworkers are suffering from apathy and do not want a sense of community. Instead of wanting to connect at work, the other employees wanted to seek out their friendly bartender. This can lead to career problems, and can out stress on your wife, which causes her to get sick. You will notice as your dissatisfaction with work increases, your wife’s health will further decline. And anytime you and your wife have a conversation, one of two things will happen: Either your husband will start to argue or he will become morosely silent. The combination of the headaches, the money problems and the quarreling produce a tremendous strain on a wife—and it will begin to show. People will notice that your wife is missing club meetings, claiming she was too sick to attend. Her normally sunny personality will take on a sharp edge. Her face will become pinched and drawn. The beauty will still be there, but will lose its conversion-stopping quality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26
Her relations with her husband will further become more strained. He might decide to nurse his frustrations with food, and soon his shirts will begin to stretch at the wait. His collars will become too tight; the sight of him might began to repulse his wife. Their life involving pleasures of the flesh will deteriorate to an occasional few moments of physical intimacy before they drop off to sleep. A couple will realize that they are drifting apart, and in an effort to regain some of the closeness, they will do things like read books on love and relationships. If he speaks at all—for in the divine presence he hangs his head—let it be with the high voice of true authority. Let it come out of the great stillness to shame lesser voices of mean, the petty, and ignoble. What is permissible about such topics in private talk may not be in printed or public statement. Abrasive, provocative, violent, or hostile speech is objectionable and unsuited to a philosopher. You keep silent and It speaks; you speak and It is silent. He must always remember that what he feels is not necessarily felt by everyone else, that caution and restraint in speaking of it to others need to be exercised. The more speech and thought are kept free from negative statements about other faiths, other teachings, other person, and other organizations, and the more we practise courtesy and silence in matters where we do not agree with them, the better will it be for our true development. #RandolphHarris 18 of 26
Many people wonder, “A wife should have the same right to ask for pleasures of the flesh as her husband, is that not true?” The same privilege, of course. However, there is a slight difference. A female, no matter how liberated she may be, is often more reluctant to deliberately express her desire for intimate passions, and for what she assumes to be good physiological reason. She usually waits for some signal from the male before she makes an overture because she has been led to believe—and therefore really fears—that any indication of her interest in pleasures of the flesh might place him in the position of wanting to give something he may be physically incapable of producing at the moment. In trying to protect him from what she anticipates may happen—the inability to be “excited”—she sometimes managers to eliminate that very stimulation which he would benefit from: knowing that he is desired for pleasures of the flesh. I think we can put that problem aside for now by simply assuming that when either partner approaches the other under mutually acceptable circumstances, functions involving pleasures of the flesh will occur. If it does not, then the greatest mistake in the World is for either partner to persist and force the issue or to feel rejected. If you are in the mood, you should always let your partner know. Always. Provided that you remain sensitive to your partner’s responses, you can’t importune too much. You can importune too little. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26
When a relationship is unfriendly or irritating, there is often some fault on both sides, although more heavily on one particular side. If the submissive wishes or is compelled to continue the relationship, or one’s conscious troubles one, one must consider those faults which lie on one’s side alone, and try to correct them. Neither one’s personal feelings, nor even those of the other individual, are so important—for they are both egotistic—as the need of self-improvement and self-purification. When dealing with the impulsive, independent, irritable, but large-heated type, do not offer criticism, however constructive, and do not preach. Offer instead a silent example of superior conduct, as this may be followed. Do not answer angry words with the same kind but change the subject or remain silent. Show warm appreciation of the other’s good work or deeds or qualities; such favourable notice may create harmony. Un unfailingly kind. When men are criticized by other great people, they should be all ears. When they are criticized by unworthy people, they should be quite deaf. The capacity to see humor in situations and to respond with laughter is an indication of being well. Loss of the ability to laugh at oneself and at comic situations is one of the early symptoms of more serious personality disorders. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26
When a person can laugh even in potentially grim situations, it implies some degree of freedom from the press of date and circumstances. People who were enslaved in America during the era of slavery could find something to laugh at, though they lived tortured lives and a hairbreadth from death. Laughter is a response that can be made only by persons who have transcended their animal heritage as well as the conformity-producing pressures of society. Laughter is defiance of brute necessity, a proclamation of freedom, and the ability to transcend the limits of otherwise grim circumstances. Of course, there are rough norms defining the appropriateness or inappropriateness of laughter. Schizophrenics will often laugh in situations where a more intact person might weep or become angry. However, a good sense of humour, the ability to find something ludicrous in situations, is not only a social asset; it is an indication that a person is able to do more than just struggle to exist. One of the major factors found in high-level functioning persons is a childlike sense of humour. Children reported that teachers who use humour in the classroom reduce the psychological distance between teacher and child, create a more agreeable atmosphere in the classroom, and make it easier to concentrate. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26
The Sacramento Fire Department works consistently to improve upon current emergency responses to enhance the delivery of fire, rescue, and emergency medical services to the community. “We were at a fire with a neighboring fire company. My guys were up on the roof with them, opening it up. The roof collapsed. There was a big roar. When that roof caved in, my first concern was, where are my guys? Each one on my team has a radio, and I knew where they were at. Everyone was okay. We were forcing entry in the back door and had a hell of a time with it. I looked up and saw this fireman, he was pitch black and his helmet shield was melted. He was on the coping of a roof next door. The was a ladder there, the guys rolled it over, and I ran up. I said, “Sit in the rain water.” His fire coat was burning. The guy behind him was yelling, “Roll, roll.” He stood up, hopped around, wanting to get down. I guided him down the ladder. I didn’t want to touch his a** because his pants were down, and it was all raw skin. We helped him to the ambulance. We tried to take a line over the roof next door, but we couldn’t het near the fire roof because of the heat. When we finally got it, we knew what we were doing to find, because there was no possible way anybody could have lived through that. But you have to get them. You have to get all of them. #RandolphHarris 22 of 26
“Everybody was exhausted. It was cold. The first thing we found was a child. I’ll never forget it. The kid was nice-looking, he had a big smile, but he was just completely burned up. He had roof and tarpaper over him. It’s not going to help them, but you bust your back to get them out as fast as you can. You want to show that you tried to help them. That bothers you forever. Three firefighters were killed in that fire. We found two pretty fast, and we dug and dug looking for the third guy. Finally there was another shift waiting, and Deputy Commissioner X told us to get out and let the fresh guys take over. I went back to the firehouse, took a shower, put my civilian clothes on, and went back to the fire. I wasn’t going to leave until they found him. I sat in the command van until they found him. I think he tried to run toward the front of the roof. It took a lot of overhauling to find him. Then I felt a little at ease. They had at least found his body. There was something left of him. When you go to the funerals and wakes, you look at the little kids, and they have no idea. Someday those little kids will realize what happened, but at the time, at the funerals, they have no real idea. It’s sad. I remember being there when I was a boy.” The man who requites me with ingratitude or betrayal does not deserve my resentment anger or hatred but my pity. Someone, somewhere, will requite him in the same way. The other part will be what he does to himself by strengthening the faults which led him to act in this way. And these in turn, although inside himself, must lead to the eventual appearance of troubles corresponding to them outside himself. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to working closely with fire service organizations and other proactive groups to enhance solutions to the fire problem. The services provided by the agency include: arson investigations, fire prevention safety in buildings, boiler and pressure vessel safety, the program for petroleum and chemical tanks, collecting and analyzing fire reports, and the personnel standards and education for the firefighters in Sacramento. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26
When you buy foreign good, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 26 of 26
The Winchester Mystery House
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Mortals Live Dependent One Upon Another
The key to feeling confident is to always listen to your inner self—the real you. And in the kingdom of God, the real you is more precious than rubies. Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good for they are our greatest examples and resources for these young women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 1, you will not be surprised when your daughter or the Stacy in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be—that is good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. However, the World has been brutal with you in the aspect. It terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women face, in the real World. Much has been said lately in entertainment media about the current craze for “reality shows.” I am not sure what those are, but this beautiful generation of young should grow up going to Church. In rightfully assuming a “full voting partnership” in the relationship involving pleasures of the flesh, however, women must be careful to avoid making the same kind of mistake men have made for a long time. The mistake can be found in the remark of a wife who said in no uncertain terms that she was just as “entitled” to satisfaction with the pleasures of the flesh as her husband was. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
To be entitled to something means to have the right to claim it and expect that it will be provided. No matter how gently she may let him know, this wife is in effect saying to her husband: “I should be enjoying intercourse more than I am, and I would like you to do something about it.” Unwittingly and ironically, she has flipped to its opposite side the same coin the male has been using for generations, the coin of service involving pleasures of the flesh-one person is expected to satisfy the needs of the other. In the past, of course, it was the female who served the male as part of her marital obligation. Today’s young women have grown up believing that satisfaction involving pleasures of the flesh is something one partner is capable of giving to the other. More explicitly, and quite logically, they believe that since, as they have been told, a wife’s compliance is all that a husband needs to obtain the “excitement: he wants, she should have the right to expect him to do the same for her. Unfortunately, the coin is counterfeit. In a continuing relationship pleasures of the flesh-as-service rarely leads to sustained enjoyment and is very unlikely to bring a woman the fulfillment she desires. It is no different for the man. Contrary to one of the most widespread of all conceptions involving intimate passions, the fact is that pleasures of the flesh-as-service has failed to reward most men with the erotic gratification they anticipated. It has failed because it is based on fallacy—the notion that the male animal is biologically endowed to function sexually at will as long as he has a female at his disposition. And regardless of whether she is eager, indifferent or even reluctant to accommodate him, and regardless of whether she participates actively or passively, he will have the pleasure he wants. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
This is a myth, one of the most deceptive and destructive ever to dominate the intimate lives of men and women. Many a man has married believing the myth and convinced that as long as his wife accepts him whenever he chooses to have pleasures of the flesh, he will be satisfied and their relationship with pleasures of the flesh will be rewarding. Sooner or later, however, and more often sooner than later, he learns that he was wrong. Even though his wife may willingly remain available, if all she does, or all she is permitted to do by the moral codes that govern their lives, is to receive him without responding, his satisfactions eventually fade and so does desire. Availability is not enough. This truth is reflected in the crude and hostile jokes of men, such as the complaint that “the two most overrated things in this country are home cooking and home loving.” It is reflected in the dismal number of husbands who function poorly in the marriage bed or do not function there at all. And it is directly confirmed by the testimony of those men who seek professional help with problems involving pleasures of the flesh. If a husband is to perform effectively over the years, what these men must learn is that he requires more of his wife than that she merely be compliant. No matter how the feelings are communicated, a man no less than a woman wishes to believe that his marriage partner values him and needs him and desires him. To the extent that his wife makes him aware that she sees him as an individual and is emotionally committed to him—not just economically dependent—she fortifies his esteem. And it is this pride in himself both as an individual and as a man that he expresses with vigour in the union involving pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
If asked, she may well say that the woman’s role is to yield to her husband whenever he desires her; and he may insist that he expects his wife to be willing. They may say that and even believe it, echoing old codes fashioned out of the double standard—but their marriage is in fact a contradiction of what they say. They are not living on the basis of services duly rendered. The wife is not a servant in the home, not in the kitchen or in the bedroom. The husband is not her employer, who gets only what he pays for and must pay for whatever he wants. Their relationship involving pleasures of the flesh mirrors their personal relationship, in which each is responsive to the other’s wishes, each takes pleasure in pleasing the other and each values having the respect of the other. Since emotionally stable human beings are not split personalities, how they feel about each other and how they act toward each other is essentially no different at night from what it is by day. However, the yearning of a young wide today for greater physical fulfillment than she now experiences is certainly understandable. In these transitional times, when society is slowly but inevitably learning to honour the intimate passions of the female as it has always honoured that of the male, women’s changing expectations can be satisfied only by those men who are capable of changing their attitudes and who want to change them. They are unlikely to be motivated by a sense of obligation. Even if he wants to oblige, any wife who lets her husband know that she feels “entitled” to a climax during pleasures of the flesh and expects him to bring it about may find that he will probably fail more often than not. And the more emotional pressure she exerts on him, the less physical pleasure she is likely to experience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
She will be learning the same lesson that men are beginning slowly to comprehend: pleasures of the flesh-as-service does not produce the desired pleasure. The mistake men made was to think of the female as a receptable. The mistake women must avoid making is to think of the male as an instrument—for she risks paying a greater penalty for her error. While a man with an unresponsive woman may still manage to secure a release of tensions during pleasures of the flesh, a woman with an unresponsive man can expect only greater tension, because his impotence will increase her frustration. If flipping the coin to the other side is no solution, if pleasures of the flesh-as-service is even more self-defeating a principle for how the female, how, then, can a sexually emancipated woman succeed in securing the fulfillment that is her birthright? In the same way—the only way—the male can secure his own birthright: together with a partner who is committed to the principle of mutual pleasure. More is required, of course, than simply having the right outlook, but it is indispensable as a starting point. To translate the wish and the will into the achievement, however, involves both husband and wife in the negotiation of their differences on the basis of genuine equality. As equals they accept responsibility for mutual cooperation in the bedroom and for mutual creation of the emotional environment needed for the relations involving pleasures of the flesh. The term “with” implies mutual cooperation, just as the terms “to” or “for” carry the connotation of active-versus-passive roles with intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Perhaps the best means of encouraging mutual cooperation consists of communicating one’s needs for pleasures of the flesh confidently and openly to one’s partner. Free flow of both verbal and nonverbal communication between cooperating partners of pleasures of the flesh is the cornerstone of effective functioning with intimate passions. In essence, accepting responsibility in pleasures of the flesh means informing and cooperating: one partner must never presume knowledge or attempt to control the other partner’s needs for pleasures of the flesh. Conversely, mutual cooperation also includes the necessity of an ear constantly attuned to a partner’s expression of interest with pleasures of the flesh. If one’s own reception of the message is confused or prejudiced, it matters little how clearly a partner sends a message of need for pleasures of the flesh. The willingness to send and receive is as vital in communication with pleasures of the flesh as in any other kind of communication. Each partner is responsible for pleasures of the flesh and for keeping both capacities in good working order. In recent years, there has been a more social interpretation of responsibility with pleasures of the flesh that bears at least passing scrutiny: that of responsibility for conception. The sense of commitment between partners does not end with their mutual concern for the pleasures of intimate passions but carries over to include their mutual obligation in exercising control of conception or accepting responsibility for the results of their union—pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
The introduction of contraceptive information into our culture approximately forty years ago helped to liberate the woman from her role as sexual servant. Whether one is committed to the contraceptive technique of “rhythm” or to that of the “pill,” or to any step in-between, sexual parity would never have been possible without the opportunity that contraceptive knowledge alone provides for both genders to assume full responsibility for every potential interaction of pleasures of the flesh. Therefore, responsibility for pleasures of the flesh has a twofold implication in today’s World. Primarily, we are responsible only for ourselves in our commitments to pleasures of the flesh, for full communication of our wants from pleasures of the flesh and, subsequently, for physical expression of our drives for intimate passions. Also, we are committed to remaining fully attuned to partner communication and to the cooperation necessary to enable one’s partner to satisfy his or her needs for intimate passions. Secondarily, our responsibility for pleasures of the flesh extends not only to full obligation for pregnancy, but to adequate control of conception. The potential rewards from parity of roles involving pleasures of the flesh are limitless. For a man, alleviation of the fears of performance during pleasures of the flesh were so ingrained in his socially assigned role of doing to or for his wife, inevitably will be of major consequence to his functioning during pleasures of the flesh. And freedom to be and do during pleasures of the flesh as a full partner will immeasurably improve the quality of a woman’s expression during intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
However, the largest dividend will come to the culture. No longer will pleasures of the flesh be accepted as a thing apart, an isolated entity, a sexist privilege or an exploitable commodity. With each individual assuming responsibility for himself or herself alone, pleasures of the flesh will finally be returned to the only position for which it can be viewed with comfort, and experienced with reliable fulfillment—that of a natural function. When we try to escape from pass patterns that are unhealthy, it is extremely difficult to change. In the process of emergence, a man becomes horrified by the cruelty which is a kind of killing, that is done through ignorance. It shocks several men that they have been a part of this cruelty and that to a degree they still are. At first, this is so terrible to many that it seems unbearable—like pain going on and on until it reaches the point of explosion. Men fear this exploding in themselves—complete disruption—chaos. How could he live with his knowing? It seems to men that perhaps it was better to be ignorant, and they try desperately to shut out what they knew (was seeing for himself). “The truth shall make ye free, but first it shall make ye miserable.” However, in spite of a man’s desperation, his strongest efforts in that direction seem to be feeble: he has gone too far to turn back. His own tide is sweeping in on him. What could he do? What could one small man do against massive ignorance which he had only recently begun to get free of himself? He feels the way many politicians feel about corruption in America. “I am never going to be able to change America.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
However, there is always something a man can do. He can be his mind into the immediate present, and to the realm in which he can be active, and let himself act. That is, let himself be responsive. He can let himself be responsive. He can accept his own limitations, and do not try to do what he cannot do. Even if he is only trying to figure out how he can do it, to try to do what he cannot (in the literal sense) fills a man with frustration. This last, in fact, can so paralyze a man that he cannot do eve what he can. To further highlight this illustration, when the Navajos were in great distress all over their nation (it is that to them), what I could do seemed so little so utterly futile, that I got caught in “What is the use of doing anything?” A drop of water in a sieve. This was not exaggeration. In point of fact, when the government got around to distributing a couple of million dollars among the Navajos, it came to about $30 a person—to people who needed shoes, blankets and food, and were already in debt to the trader. Their food was pitiful. A blow of mush, and picking the tiny bits of meat still clinging to lamb bones after the rest had been eaten was a meal. In the cold harsh winter, they slept in their hogans with only a sheepskin between them and the ground. They had not only the winter to contend with, but also us. We had reduced their sheep to prevent overgrazing and then blizzards decimated those which we had permitted them to keep. We had imposed on them a senseless World which had no meaning to them. When a Navajo caught some horses on Wild Horse Mesa, the government branding inspector refused to brand then because there was no bill of sale. And still, they never lost their sensing of humour of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
One Navajo said, with recognition completely free of malice, “Oh, if we could run the white man’s world for three days, what a mess we would make of it!” Former President Obama said the same thing, and you see how that has turned out to be a complete mess. Successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs, each with his own values, had imposed these values on the Navajos. During one commissioner’s term, education was most important. During another’s health was most important. Under one commissioner, it was most important to send the children off the reservation to school. Under another, it was most important to keep the children in school on the reservation. The Navajos were “sold” on these and so many other changing values that when one of their own young men came back from theology school, and wished to help them, they told him, “We are sorry. We like you, and we would like to do as you say, but there is no more room in the head.” What could I do? I could be human. Real human. If people from another culture were in power and insisted that I must adopt their ways without question, that everything I believed and lived for was wrong, and then one person from the race listened to me, understood my World and let it be, how would I feel? I could stand beside a Navajo who did not know English, while I knew no Navajo, and share his feeling-World with him. When I did this, I had the feeling of increased strength in me, and it seemed to me that there was this increase in him, too. I could sit with a Navajo woman whose infant had been run over by the wheel of a cart. She sat on the Earth floor of the hogan with the infant on her lap. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
The infant’s thigh was so bloated that it seemed to belong to a pig rather than an infant. The wound gaped so that you could look right into the distorted flesh. The child suffered silently. The mother suffered silently. I could join this silent suffering and share it, not giving advice because what advice was there to give? Somehow this silent sharing eases pain. It seems unlikely that an infant could take part in this and yet, when we are disturbed does not this affect the infant? So why should it not affect the infant too that mother and visitor knew this quiet in themselves? “And I know that these moments of real relationship with these real persons have been the essential reward…” When I was in the hospital dying very rapidly—I could feel so much less life in me each day—all my success and mu failure seemed to cancel out. It was the same with the good that I had done and the bad that I had done. They canceled out. What was left—all that was left—was the wordless resonance, a feeling of love that was universe-al, a kind of singing intelligence that was universe-al too, that knew all and was undismayed. That was all that was left—and that was all that I had ever wanted. I was sad, with water in my eyes for all the not-living that I had done. Mortals live dependent one upon another. In your everyday life, you face a continuing dilemma. On the other hand, you are constantly admonished to “act like an adult, stand on your own two feet,” and be independent. On the other hand is the reality of modern society, a situation in which you are dependent upon many people for your most basic needs. How do you handle that? If you are someone who has really gotten stuck on the dependency polarity, you have never learned to stand on your own two feet when dealing with others. You have never learned to become an adult in the sense of giving up a measure of external support and substituting it with self-support. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
As such, you may feel resentful a lot of the time because you constantly depend on others who no longer want to give in to you. You may have made up your mind that being self-reliant is something you are capable of, yet you lack whatever it takes to become self-reliant. If you are a master in this area, you have grasped the idea of interdependence, which means nothing more than this: Sometimes you are independent of others and sometimes you are dependent on them. On occasion, the switch between the two is so rapid, it is hard to tell the difference—and the difference does not matter. Life becomes a constant dance between independence and dependence, with each person being a person in his or her own right, not needing to push others or be pushed around by them. Mastery comes when you acknowledge dependency has a place in your life along with control. In doing that, you learn to “be with” other people rather than “do to” them. All culture is family culture, things learned as a knee baby. Details and techniques may be learned outside the home, but their value is determined by the family. The script analyst foes to the heart of the matter with a single pointed question: “What did your family talk about at the dinner table?” By this he hopes to ascertain the subject matter, which may or may not be important, and also the kinds of transactions which took place, which is always important. Some child-and-family therapists even have themselves invited to dinner at the patient’s house, with the idea that this is the best way to get the greatest amount of reliable information in a short time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
One of the script analyst’s slogans is, or should be, “Think sphincter!” Dr. Freud and Dr. Abraham were the first to elaborate the idea that character structure centers around bodily orifices. Both games and scripts do likewise, and the physiological signs and symptoms which form an important feature of every game and script usually center around a particular orifice or sphincter. The family culture, as shown at the dinner table, tends to revolve around the “family sphincter,” and knowing which is the family’s favourtie is a great help in treating the patient. The four external sphincters concerned are the oral, the anal, the urethral, and the vaginal, and perhaps more important are the internal sphincters related to these. There is also an illusory sphincter which may be called, as it is in psychoanalysis, the cloacal. Although the mouth does have its own external sphincter, the Orbicularis oris, that is not usually the muscle “oral” families are concerned with, although some do have a motto, “Keep your mouth shut.” What “oral” families mainly talk about is food, and the sphincters chiefly concerned are those of the throat, stomach, and duodenum. Thus, oral families are typically diet faddiests and stomach worries, and those are the subjects they talk about at dinner. “Hysterical” members of such families have spasms of the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum, or, conversely, they throw up or have fears of throwing up. The anus is the sphincter par excellence. Anal families talk about bowel movements, laxatives, and enemas, or the more aristocratic colonic irrigations (consult your doctor before manipulating the normal cycle of your bowels). #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Life for them is a round of poisonous matter that has to be got rid of promptly at any cost. They are fascinated by intestinal products, and proud of themselves or their children when these are large and firm and shapely. Diarrhea is judged by its copiousness, while mucous or bloody ulcerative colitis is of eternal interest and can be word with an air of modest distinction. The whole culture merges with sexuality (or anti-sexuality) in the motto “Keep a tight a** hole or you will get screwed.” This means keep a poker face as well, and the philosophy may pay off in making money. We are not capable of experiencing guilt until we have formed a conscience. Young children, prior to the internalization of their parents’ moral expectations, may experience fear of punishment for misdeeds, but this is not guilt. Guilt is the experience of self-loathing that arises when persons transgress their own moral principles. It can be so powerful an emotion that guilt-ridden persons may kill themselves rather than endure the onslaught of self-hatred. Common occasions for guilt include hurting another person, stealing, violating one’s own sexual morality, or cheating in examinations. A distinction can be drawn between guilt that arises from the violation of moral taboos that one truly has outgrown and existential or humanistic guilt, which arises when persons have diminished the quality and possibility of life for themselves and others. Dr. Maslow calls the former silly guilt, as in instances when an adult engages in masturbation and feels a catastrophic loss of self-esteem for what is properly viewed as harmless solitary sport. Existential guilt is illustrated by the failure to respond to a call for help or the failure to fulfill one’s own possibilities through lack of nerve. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Existential guilt, a phenomenon of the psychological realm, is also sometimes seen as a constructive analogue of pain in the physical realm. Guilt helps you to determine when something is wrong with your behaviour and, like physical pain, provides an early warning system of something that must be corrected in the self. The capacity for existential guilt is an achievement; of course, the most life-giving response to such guilt is to make restitution and to seek then to live in conformity with one’s ideals. Too many people use their voices to hinder what is good in their own character, or even to despoil it, instead of using them as instruments of service. How pitiful to see so many employ their tongues in empty chatter and idle gossip for most of their lifetimes! When anyone becomes a quester, this matter may no longer be ignored. Jesus Christ did state that to self-discipline oneself, it is essential to “Abstain from foolish talk and harsh speech.” Since no utterance can be recalled into the silence whence it came, the quester will be more than ordinarily scrupulous about all his utterances. This does not mean that he is to abjure all trivial talk, certainly not at all humorous talk, but it does mean that he is to bring some degree of discipline to bear upon his vocal activity. He will not, for instance, waste time in uncharitably analysing the character of others when no business in which he and they are involved really calls for analysis at all, let alone the backbiting uncharitable kind. This practice of criticism and slander is a common one and is often the result of the habit of gossiping. It helps no one but hurts everyone—the speaker, the persons spoken about and those who readily listen to condemnatory gossip. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
He must attend to his own life, even to the extent of often refraining from talking about other persons. If this calls for a quality of generosity it, is he who will be the gainer in the end. If he cannot say anything good about a person, he will prefer to say nothing at all. If he cannot praise, he will practise silence. And if the situation is one where doing that would ultimately lead to a worse result, then he will criticize helpfully and entirely constructively, not condemn hatefully. If he finds it necessary to be outspoken, he avoids making personal attacks. Sometimes it may be needful to speak sharply, to utter words which may be odious to the other man’s ego but necessary to his welfare. In those cases, however, he should first put himself in the calmest, quietest mood and second, speak in the kindest possible way. Is it not better to disagree gently with the other man without being disagreeable to him? When he hears someone filling speech with negative statements and there is no duty laid on him to correct them, he puts his mental attention elsewhere. Better still, he starts affirming and holding the positive ideas which counteract the other person’s remarks. If he practises the following exercise, it will help a quester overcome the fault of habitually speaking harsh words or occasionally speaking angry ones. Let him sit for meditation and think in turn of some of the persons whom he has offended in this way. Then, seeing the other person’s face and form before him, he is in imagination to speak with the utmost kindness in the one case or with the utmost calmness in the other. He may take any situation or incident which usually provokes his fault into expression. Let him do so with closed eyes and as vividly as he can bring them before his mind’s eye. Further, the discipline of speech requires him to pause momentarily but long enough to consider the effect his words will have on those who hear them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Too many people—and of course especially impulsive people—are too eager to speak before they are ready, or before their words are chosen. The quester tries to avoid using words without awareness of their meaning or responsibility for their effect. Nietzsche was a great, but controversial philosopher. His philosophy, undoubtedly, resolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins y being a rebellion. However, we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonour on a World which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods. Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Chrisitan critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus, Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy of rebellion. If he attacks Christianity in particular, it is only in so far as it represents morality. He always leaves intact the person of Jesus on the one hand, and on the other the cynical aspects of the Church. We know that, from the point of view of the connoisseur, he admired the Jesuits. “Basically,” he writes, “Only the God of morality is rejected.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The World must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of Heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principle and which can give us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds—that, according to Nietzsche, is Christ’s message. From then on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of this message. The New Testament is already corrupted and from the time of Paul to the Councils, subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds. What is the profoundly correct addition made by Christianity to the message of its Master? The idea of judgment, completely foreign to the teachings of Christ, and the correlative notions of punishment and reward. From that moment nature becomes history, and significant history expressed by the idea of human totality is born. From the Annunciation until the last Judgment, humanity has no other task but to conform to the strictly moral ends of a narrative that has already been written. The only difference is that the characters, in the epilogue, separate themselves into the good and the bad. While Christ’s sole judgment consists in saying that the sins of nature are unimportant, historical Christianity makes nature the source of sin. “What does Christ deny? Everything that at present bears the name Christian.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the World a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning: “Every Church is a stone rolled onto the tomb of the man-god; it tries to prevent the resurrection by force.” Nietzsche’s paradoxical but significant conclusion is that God has been killed by Christianity, in that Christianity has secularized the sacred. Here we must understand historical Christianity and “its profound and contemptible duplicity.” During World War II. Mr. Hitler was approached by a committee of distinguished scientists from the Max Planck Institute and the Prague Pharmaceutical Laboratories, who proposed the theory that the Earth is hollow. Und zo, if we can find the entrance or punch a hole through to the interior, mein Gott, all sorts of new military adventures suggest themselves. We can pop up behind enemy lines and conquer the external surface. Whom controls the inner surface of a sphere controls the outer World. Heil Hitler! Heute Deutschland; Morgen das Inner-welt, morgen morgen das Extra-welt. This legend has been passed on, in print, by anti-Nazi agents to demonstrate the philosophy of Mr. Hitler. There is no hard data concerning whether der Feuhrer really did divert scientific energy—which could have supported atomic bomb-research or improved rocket-research—into inner-Earth exploration. However, let us assume that the legend is true, that Adolph did believe in an “inner-World” and did, indeed, initiate scientific inner-World-exploration. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
To make this assumption is to credit Mr. Hitler with considerable prophetic genius. Inner-World aspirations in 1935 clearly anticipated the Neurological Revolution of the 1960s, which sent over one hundred million America digging in psychic mole-holes, pursuing the vision of an inner-World rebirth. Heil, Werner Erhard. Who controls the inner surface of a sphere controls the outer World. Heil Hitler! Mr. Hitler, like many premature evolutes, inhabited a post-terrestrial set of realities. Total power in the context of Tibetan Buddhism obviously activated the self-indulgent and the self-actualized circuits in his nervous system. Mr. Hitler, however, made the same error that millions of naïve trippers made in the 1960s. He failed to understand that the very self-centered, post-hive consciousness that exhilarated him to messianic perception was also available to others. He was not informed that the self-actualized brain must include in its mapping the reality that other self-actualized, futique brains exist and are independently building neigbouring future plan-its. The hostility of the fanatic extremists has been aroused. We have to get them under control before the begin to throw around hand grenades and fire off machine guns, occupy public buildings, and generally threaten the community. It was a terrible mistake to eliminate the death penalty during a time of War and to leave the border wide open. The heroes who have volunteered to protect this country do not need threats of the death penalty. What it means to be American is being erased from the minds of our citizens, their fighting strength is becoming crippled, or as the privileged-class World would rightly say in such cases: “Water has been missed with the wine.” When this happens, indeed, the trees can no longer grow up to Heaven. The hostile, vile, and cowardly elements in this mass of the worst extreme is becoming dominant. Add to that the fact that no only has the best extreme group become thinned out on the battlefield in the most horrible way, in the last four years, but the worst group is protected in the most remarkable way. For every hero who protects America by their holy sacrifice of death, there is a wretched coward who very cautiously turned his back on his country. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to serving Sacramento by continuously improving with a culture that encourages innovation, professionals, and inclusion, while also preserving life and property. “We rolled into a big two-and-a-half frame, and we got a report there were people trapped up there. When we puled in, the fire was coming out three or four windows on the one side. I was forcible entry man, so I jumped off the truck, and not waiting to put on my Scottpac, I ran in the house and went up the stairs. Another fellow was with me. I opened the door at the top of the stairwell, and both of us were blown back down the stairs by the pressure of the heat and the heavy black smoke. I ran back to the truck, grabbed the Scott mask and just threw it on. I went back upstairs. There was no line in operation yet. I went in and started crawling around. I went into one of the rooms, and I heard a moan. I found this man lying there, Mr. Pops, a big black man, about six-two, weighing about 220. I couldn’t see him. All I could do was feel. I could also feel the heat. They still didn’t have a line in operation. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know which way to get out, because of the heavy smoke condition. The man was unconscious. I tried to lift him. I couldn’t life him. I grabbed him, put my arms under him, and started to drag him. I dragged him past the rooms that were on fire. The engine company got water, and they hit the fire from the outside, and they pushed it in. Not knowing where I was going, I had to drag this man through the fire. He got burned, and I got burned. I dragged him out to the second-floor porch. By the time I got him there, he wasn’t breathing. I took off my mask and put it on him; I put in on the bypass to give him a shot of air. He started to come to, then he went out again. One of the guys got there and started to give him mouth-to-mouth. The ambulance people came, they took him. I found out that on the way to the hospital he stopped breathing again. They brought him back. The same thing happened at the hospital. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“Later on, I found out that the man had five operations, and he lived. He went down from 220 to 167 pounds. On Medal Day, he was there to present me my award. It made me feel good, because I saved a life. I saw quite a few people die in the North End. There was one fire where a mother and child died. I wanted to cry, because they were right by the window. Probably in the dark, they didn’t know where they were. All they had to do was lift up, and out the window they’d go. After the fire was out and they removed the bodies, you could see their outline on the parquet floors as if somebody took a pencil and drew the figures. Everything around them was soot except where they had lain. It even showed where the little baby’s foot was sticking out at the mother’s arm. Then there was a fire right down the street from the firehouse. It was a big two-and-a-half story frame house. We lost three people. Two guys dove out the window. One went head first. The was a war veteran. We tried our best to save them. I accept the deaths of the adults more than I do the children. The children get me more than anything. It takes a toll. Sometimes I think of my own children. What would happen if I lost one of them in a fire? I don’t know how I would handle it. I really don’t. Later on, there was another fire about six in the morning. I was on the truck company then, Ladder X. A second-floor fire, heavy smoke, heavy fire upon arrival. A report of two elderly women trapped in the apartment. I went up and made it to the apartment door, but I couldn’t get in without a line. The line came in finally and protected me. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“I went past the fire to the back bedroom, got the woman, a sixty-year-old black woman. She wasn’t breathing. I slung her over my shoulder. They kept the line on the fire until I got back. I got her down to the street. They worked on her, and she lived. I feel fortunate about that. Sometimes you’re at the right place at the right time.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to build a safer and more resilient Sacramento. Firefighters and EMT put their lives on the line every day, several times a day to provide the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive service possible. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. This is America, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Dodge, Buick, and Ford should the number one cars on the road. Instead of a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry, consider the Cadillac Celestio, or Dodge Charger, Or Chevy Malibu. Instead of the Lexus RX, consider the Ford Branco, the Mustang Mach E, Cadillac Lyriq, or a Buick Envision. These are just some examples. Americans make very fine cars and you will be supporting American workers and keeping your hard-earned money in America. You parents and grandparents and great grandparents will be proud of you for being patriotic and supporting the country they love. American cars are fiercely styled and spectacularly fast, they are purely emotional and indisputably American creatures that will make anyone proud to be from America and trust, it can make anyone happy when he or she is behind the wheel. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Since the experience properly assimilated things the character with caution and the speech with reticence, even the right thing if said at an unpropitious time may too easily become the wrong thing. Please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. If the energy is often squandered in needless talking and trivial babble, the capacity to concentrate the mind on deeper levels becomes weakened. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. Do not allow a single word to fall from your lips which does not fall in harmony with the ideal in your mind. Even the slightest deviation from this ideal may be followed by uneasiness. Speech brings down to the physical level, and so puts into swifter activity, what thought has initiated. To slight or large extent—depending on the individual power—it may be creative. Hence a person whose daily talk is mostly negative, filled with reports of dislikes and aversions, wrongs, evils, mishaps, and sickness is a person who is better avoided by those whose own inner weakness makes them susceptible to the influences carried by others. If evil things are falsely said about a person, he is neither to be surprised nor be annoyed. People see themselves in him, as in a mirror, and he must learn to accept what must needs be. Instead of feeling insulted or hurt, he should thank those who criticize him, for letting him see what may be true about himself and therefore need correcting. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
The Winchester Mystery House
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most festive of them all? 🎄✨
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
External Eternity is Swept Away
The road to hell is often paved with false assumptions. Silence, evasion of lying is the order of the day, and unquestioned false assumptions become the basis on which countless men and women try to work out in their married lives. In light of this fact, what is remarkable is not that so many divorces take place but that so many marriages remain intact. For many people, “responsibility” has the somewhat onerous connotation of carrying someone else’s “obligation,” it may be perceived as a value that is oppressive and somewhat unrewarding. Unfortunately, this attitude also prevails in some relationships, where interpretation of romantic responsibility has been additionally prejudiced by time-honored, cultural misconceptions of adult relationships. Historically, the male has been assigned the role of provider while the female has been confined to a role of acceptance—stereotypes that show little knowledge of or regard for the natural capabilities of either gender. However, when these gender roles are violated, typically women take issue with having to provide for a man, and some men are not willing to be taken care of by a woman. Nevertheless, it is not surprising that generations of adult men and women have found it virtually impossibly to live with or live up to their gender roles to which they were culturally conditioned as adolescents. These roles were transmitted to young men and women through instruction and innuendo and through sly, incomplete or silent response to their need to know what meaning and function gender roles will have in their lives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
These cultural roles were established at a time when there was no knowledge of individual psycho-sexual limitations or of natural variations in male or female capacity. Although they have not withstood the realities of either gender or social needs, they remain woven into the cultural mores of society. As individuals frustrated by almost unbelievable gender confusion, we cope with the disparity between our own gender needs and our gender roles in a variety of ways. Some people reduce their adult responsibilities to a dirty joke, while others decry or repress anything that hints of incompetence. Currently, a small but clamorous number of people are immersing themselves in any or all styles of relationships in an attempt to break the mold of inhibition and dissatisfaction. Still others just endure. Fortunately, there always seems to be a heartening number of people who, despite their cultural limitations, are able to develop a realistic, comfortable attitude toward romance and prescribed gender roles. These individuals, together with their partners, have learned that responsibilities can be shared. Our double-standard society, in its early stages of development, maintained a tacit acceptance of romance and gender roles as a hearty source of mutual pleasure for those men and women who discovered this for themselves and confined its practice within certain prescribed boundaries. Practical, earthly levels of romantic awareness apparently fared best. Husbands and wives in the then predominantly rural society found both the need and the opportunity for achieving romantic unity within their particular lifestyles. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
With the advent of the industrial revolution, however, the double standard soon became the means by which men and women were separated romantically as well as socially. The concept of pleasures of the flesh as a source of mutual pleasure (and therefore an area for mutual responsibility) faded as men and women found their lives rigidly divided by both the work ethic and social demands. As they pursued separate goals, husbands and wives lost sight of their need for one another. As an additional heritage, the omnipresent religious orthodoxies, social intolerances and ignorance of romantic matters by health care professionals, contributed immeasurably to our culture’s lack of comprehension of romantic response as a natural physiologic process, a process comparable to other natural functions such as respiratory, bowel or bladder function. When romantic response was separated in our thinking from its rightful place as a natural function, romantic misconceptions and even taboos inevitably became integral parts of the social structure. The concept of romance as a sin, and pleasures of the flesh for reproduction only, firmly overruled the concept of romance for human warmth or pleasures of the flesh for mutual pleasure. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of men and women have been tied into severely neurotic or even openly psychotic patterns of behaviour. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In endeavouring to measure the conditions of therapy as they exist in the therapist, we have found it possible to use three avenues of perception. Through using the Relationship Inventory, we have a measure of these attitudes as perceived by the therapist and by the client. Through using unbiased judges who listen to segments of interviews, we have been able to obtain ratings of the degree to which these conditions exist, as measure by an impartial observer. In this third mode of measurement, it has been difficult to obtain suitable reliability between judges, indicating that it is not easy for anyone to be sure, from a therapist’s words and tone of voice, whether he is genuine, whether he does really care. Reliability is somewhat higher in gauging the degree and accuracy of empathic understanding. The important thing, however, is that we have been able to develop means of measuring subtle and significant therapist attitudes, from each of three perceptual vantage points: from the viewpoint of the therapist himself, from the point of view of an observer, and from the viewpoint of the client. There are three types of “truth.” One, the truth we hold in ourselves to be true; a second is that opinion which a group, validated by consensus, holds true; a third is objective truth, which none of us knows for sure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
One assumption of group therapy is that a consensus opinion is often close to objective truth than one person’s opinion, but a synthesis of both is necessary for growth to take place. Another assumption of therapy is that it is a healing process which we have to surrender to. It asks you to let go of your beliefs and be open to change. However, we cannot make you let go. That comes from within. If the only aspect of yourself you ever show us is stubborn resistance, you will never give yourself the adventure of growth. However, growth demands letting go, surrendering, giving up your fear of being wrong. Taking the client’s perception of these attitudes, we have an interesting finding. Those schizophrenics who perceived more of the attitudinal conditions of therapy in their therapist, as measure by their responses on the Relationship Inventory, show significantly more process movement as measured by the Process Scale, during the first 30 Interviews, than do those who perceive less of these therapeutic attitudes in the relationship. Another preliminary finding has emerged, based upon the judges’ ratings of one of these qualities, accurate empathy. This contained in a study by Truax of eight schizophrenic patients—four of them showing improvement on psychological tests, and four showing some deterioration. Samples were taken from the first twenty-four interviews with these patients, 385 samples in all. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Four judges listened to these samples independently, and rated the degree of accurate and sensitive empathy exhibitied by the therapist. When the ratings were analyzed, it was found that the improving patients received consistently more sensitive empathy than did those who were not improving. Our findings with schizophrenic clients also confirm an earlier finding with clinic clients. We have found that those schizophrenics who are less well adjusted, more psychotic, in terms of the MMPI, perceived less of these therapeutic conditions initially than do the better adjusted clients. Hence, it would appear that the perceived existence of these qualities in the relationship is an interacutal thing. The client who is deeply disturbed has difficult perceiving these attitudes even when they exist in the therapist. The therapy process involves surrender. It means accepting that there may be something outside of you, an objective truth, that you cannot control. And the only way to see that truth is simply by surrendering. For instance, when a man see himself as being a lot like his father, but will not surrender to that truth, he cannot grow. Later, when he decides to see it, he will grow in a gigantic leap. To make that leap, one does not have to do anything, just surrender to the truth, in the same way that one must surrender to the heart attack, whether you agree with the truth of not. This is one of the toughest things that you will have to do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In early childhood, magical illusions are accepted in their most romantic forms. In later childhood, they are testes against reality, and parts of the, are reluctantly relinquished, leaving only a secret core to form the existential basis of life. Only the strongest can face the absurd gambles of living without any illusions. One of the hardest to give up, even later in life, is the illusion of autonomy or self-determination. Delusions are things that people treat as though they were one’s own ideas, based on observation and judgment, whereas in reality they are ideas imposed on one by one’s parents, which are so ingrown that one thinks they are part of his Real Self. The illusions, similarly, are ideas from his Child that he accepts as Adult and rational and tries to justify as such. Delusions and illusions may be called contaminations. One of the most important forces in moving human intelligence from the old science—Euclidian–Newtonian—to the new science—Einsteinian-Planck—is the Principle of Uncertainty introduced by Werner Heisenberg, which states that the very presence of experimenters and their measuring instruments becomes a determining factor in the field of investigation. Any hope of objectivity seemed to be eliminated. A philosophic angst, a sense of scientific futility, was the first reaction to Heisenberg’s dictum. “Alas,” the Newtonians groaned, “We can never really know what God or Nature hath wrought, because they very act of investigating changes the situation.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Actually, Heisenberg’s Principle is one of self-actualized determinacy. Everything we see and know is a function of our reality-mapping—a function of the way we program our brains. This is the Principle of Neurological Determinacy. With the self-confidence, courage and freedom thus attained, we can accept the responsibility implied. Within the limits of our genetic stage, we can responsibly determine—construct, create, fabricate—the new realities we inhabit! In 1944, Einstein designed and took his own intelligence test. Later, it was revise by F.M. Esfandiary, who thus increased his own intelligence—I2. The first item on the Einstein-Esfandiary Intelligence Test (Standard Alien Intelligence Test item) asked, “How do you define intelligence?” Einstein answered that the way one defines intelligence is the most important step taken in life. Intelligence—like nerve cells upon which it is based—has three function—reception, mapping and performance. Functions of Intelligence: Reception is the ability to expand—direct the scope, source, intensity of information received. This is consciousness expansion—opening up to new data. Mapping is the ability to joyously revise your metaphours of reality in response to new information—including other people’s mataphours. Performance is the ability to construct external-communication apparati, in fusion with others, which stimulate expanded information-input, new maps-of-reality and improved networks. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
The function of evolution is to stimulate in Increase in Intelligence—I2. An evolutionary action is one designed to increase your intelligence. An Evolutionary Agent is one who continually works to expand input of information, revise reality metaphours and raise the intelligence of self and others. The second item on the Einstein-Esfandiary test asked, “Can intelligence be increased? Yes! Intelligence can be increased. Our braisn are designed to increase our intelligence. The aim and strategy of evolution is to raise the intelligence of species. The development of every individual from infancy to maturity is the story of Intelligence Increased—I2. The only smart thing to do is to get smarter. Aleister Crowley taught us that there are three ways to increase intelligence: First, continually expand the scope, source, and intensity of the information you receive. Second, constantly revise your reality maps and seek new metaphour about the future to understand what is happening now. Third, develop external networks for increasing intelligence. In particular, spend all your time with people as smart or smarter than you. Everyone knows the social value of culture and breeding and refinement but everyone does not know that they should, and could, have a spiritual one too. For they share this in common with the value of art that they can uplift a man or, misused, degrade him. The point lies in their effect. The refinement of tastes, the improvement of understanding, the betterment of manners—this is the cultural preparation for the path. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Philosophy accords a place and value to culture and refinement, to quality of character and enrichment of mind. It rejects the narrowness of view and negativity of attitude which allows salvation only to those who exhibit their detachment in bare squalid homes, devoid of beauty, or their indifference in minds unresponsive to intellectual power and poetic feeling. Where good manners are sincerely felt and sincerely practiced, they represent consideration for other people, abandonment of the self-centered habit we are born with. And what does this in turn represent but a surrender of ego? This helps to explain why Hilaire Belloc could write: “Of Courtesy it is mush less than courage of heart or holiness, yet in my walks it seems to me that the Grace of God is in Courtesy.” The difference between those who behaved rudely and those who behave politely is not only a social one: it is also a spiritual one. For it is goodwill which inspires good manners, where they are genuinely felt, that same “good will unto all men,” which Jesus Christ enjoined us to practice. The lack of courtesy has a deeper negative meaning than most people comprehend. If not supported by inner integrity and personal sincerity, even the finest manners were hollow and vain. Common men need self-control, especially over passions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Underbred and overbearing persons imagine that they are showing the World their importance when all the while they are merely showing their littleness. Good manners, when sincere and spontaneous, are spiritual virtue. In all human contact, the good man expresses himself naturally in good manners. In the management of both transient and lifelong relationships, the master shows by grace of manner the grace of God. By up brining and temperament, by education and education and environment, a man may grow into refinement from childhood, easily and naturally. However, he who comes into it from harsh, low surroundings by his own determination and effort, advances spiritually. The accepted canons of good manners may vary from one part of the World to another, but deeper than these conventions is a courtesy which relates to the spiritual side of one’s nature. If sincere, politeness is a spiritual quality. Those who lift their eyebrows at such an assertion do not look deeply enough into it. Those cases where it is empty formalism they are right, of course; but in those where it expresses genuine consideration for others, they are wrong. The thin courtesy which is hollow and insincere, the good manners which are acted and artificial, the pleasant words which are false and untrustworthy, do not of course hold spiritual value. There are deeper reasons than merely social ones why we are polite. The roots of politeness go down into moral training. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
If people practice good manners merely and only as a part of their paid job—as, for instance, head waiter in restaurants—that is their affair. However, the motivation can also be on a far deeper level even in ordinary social intercourse. Under the finest manners there can be—not hypocrisy, as a Colonial once informed me—but utter sincerity and true feeling. They can express goodwill to all, poor and rich, servant and superior. If the World all too easily puts them on like a mask, to disguise antipathy or even hate, the quester who has had, or hopes to have, a glimpse of his Higer Aelf, does not need to wear such a mask at all. Without a hollow, ridiculous obsession with formality and decorum, a man can simply be what he now knows a human being ought to be in his relationship with others. When their lives have lost delight and any sense of meaning or hope, persons typically become depressed. Occasions for depression include the death of a loved person, prolonged failure of one’s projects, the loss of beauty or one’s health and vitality. When persons are depressed, they experience life as hellish—time slows down; nothing is happening; they may feel worthless, guilty, and beneath contempt. Clearly, when persons are depressed, their lives are not yielding what is needed for vital, enlivening existence. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Depressed people frequently make suicidal attempts, and they sometimes succeed—which is a shame, because persons can disengage from hopeless ways of being, and, with a little imaginative help from friends or a psychotherapist, reinvent themselves and their situations in ways that engender more positive experience. Although depression is hellish, it can and perhaps should serve as a motive to the sufferers to change their situation to more life-giving ones. In the same fashion that joy is likely to be a part of every person’s experience during a lifetime, depression may also be a factor in everyone’s life at some time—including the lives of healthy personalities. This radical change in the conception of the role of depression out to be utilized, understood, and taken by the person as a normal occurrence to be dealt with and integrated into the personality, to become part of the person’s total experience in the same way any other negative experience may be a source of new learning about the self. From the moment that man submits God to moral judgment, he kills Him in his own heart. And then what is the basis of morality? God is denied in the name of justice, but can the idea of justice be understood without the idea of God? At this point we are not in the realm of absurdity? Absurdity is the concept that Nietzsche meets face to face. In order to be able to dismiss it, he pushes it to extremes: morality is the ultimate aspect of God, which must be destroyed before reconstruction can begin. Then God no longer exists and is no longer responsible for our existence; man must resolve to act, in order to exist. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Even before Nietzsche, Stirner wanted to eradicate the very idea of God from man’s mind, after he had destroyed God Himself. However, unlike Nietzsche, his nihilism was gratified. Stirner laughs in his blind alley; Nietzsche beats his head against the wall. In 1845, the year when Der Einziger und sein Eigentum (The Unique and Its Characteristics) appeared, Stirner begins to define his position. Stirner, who frequented the “Society of Free Mem” with the young Hegelians of the left (of whom Marx was one), had an account to settle not only with God, but also with Feuerbach’s Man, Hegel’s Spirit, and its historical incarnation, the State. All these idols, to his mind, were offspring of the same “mongolism”—the belief in the eternity of ideas. Thus, he was able to write: “I have constructed my case on nothing.” Sin is, of course, a “mongol scourge,” but it is also the law of which we are prisoners. God is the enemy; Stirner goes as far as he can in blasphemy (“digest the Host and you are rid of it”). However, God is only one of the aberrations of the I, or more precisely of what I am. Socrates, Jesus, Descartes, Hegel, all the prophets and philosophers, have done nothing but invent new methods of deranging what I am, the I that Stirner is so intent on distinguishing from the absolute I of Fichte by reducing it to its most specific and transitory aspect. “It has no name,” it is the Unique. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
For Stirner, the history of the Universe up to the time of Jesus Christ is nothing but a sustained effort to idealize reality. This effort is incarnated in the ideas and rites of purification which the ancients employed. From the time of Jesus, the goal is reached, and another effort is embarked upon which consists, on the contrary, in attempting to realize the ideal. The passion of the incarnation takes the place of purification and devastates the Word, to a greater and greater degree, as socialism, the heir of Christ, extends its sway. However, the history of the Universe is nothing but a continual offense to the unique principle that “I am”—a living, concrete principle, a triumphant principle that the World has always wanted to subject to the yoke of successive abstractions—God, the State, society, humanity. For Stirner, philanthropy is a hoax. Atheistic philosophies which culminate in the cult of the State and of Man, are only “theological insurrections.” “Our atheists,” says Stirner, “are really pious folk.” There is only one religion that exists throughout all history, the belief in eternity. This belief is a deception. The only truth is the Unique, the enemy of eternity and of everything, in fact, which does not further its desire for domination. With Stirner, the concept of negation which inspires his rebellion irresistibly submerges every aspect of affirmation. It also sweeps away the substitutes for divinity with which the moral conscience is encumbered. “External eternity is swept away,” he says, “but internal eternity has become a new heaven.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Even revolution, revolution in particular, is repugnant to this rebel. To be revolutionary, one must continue to believe in something, even where there is nothing in which to believe. “The [French] Revolution ended in reaction and that demonstrates what the Revolution was in reality.” To dedicated oneself to humanity is no more worth while than serving God. Moreover, fraternity is only “Communism in its Sunday best.” During the week, the members of the fraternity become slaves. Therefore, there is only one form of freedom for Stiner, “my power,” and only one truth, “the magnificent egotism of the stars.” In this desert, everything begins to flower again. “The terrifying significance of an unpremeditated cry of joy cannot be understood while the long night of faith and reason endures.” This night is drawing to a close, and a dawn will break which is not the dawn of revolution but of insurrection. Insurrection is, in itself, an asceticism which rejects all forms of consolation. The insurgent will not be in agreement with other men except in so far as, and as long as, their egotism coincides with his. His real life is led in solitude where he will assuage, without restraint, his appetite for existing, which is his only reason for existence. In this respect, individual reaches a climax. It is the negation of everything that dines the individual and the glorification of everything that exalts and ministers to the individual. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
What, according to Stirner, is good? “Everything of which I can make use.” What am I, legitimately, authorized to do? “Everything of which I am capable.” Once again, rebellion leads to the justification of crime. Stirner not only has attempted to justify crime (in this respect the terrorist forms of anarchy are directly descended from him), but is visibly intoxicated by the perspectives that he thus reveals. “To break with what is sacred, or rather to destroy the scared, could become universal. It is not a new revolution that is approaching—but is not a powerful, proud, disrespectful, shameless, conscienceless crime swelling like a thundercloud on the horizon, and can you not see that they sky, heavy with foreboding, is growing dark and silent?” Here we can feel the somber joy of those who create an apocalypse in a garret. This bitter and imperious logic can no longer be held in check, except by an I which is determined to defeat every form of abstraction and which has itself become abstract and nameless through being isolated and cut off from its roots. There are no more crimes and no more imperfections, and therefore no more sinners. We are all perfect. Since every I is, in itself, fundamentally criminal in its attitude toward the State and the people, we must recognize that to live is to transgress. Unless we accept death, we must be willing to kill in order to be unique (not to be taken literally). “You are not as noble as a criminal, you who do not desecrate anything.” Moreover Stirner, still without the courage of his convictions, specifies: “Kill them, do not martyr them.” (This is just a discussion, not to be taken literally.) #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
However, to decree the murder is legitimate is to decree mobilization and war for all the Unique. Thus, murder will coincide with a kind of collective suicide. Stirner, who either does not recoil at the idea of any form of destruction. The spirit of rebellion finally discovers one of its bitterest satisfactions in chaos. “You [the German nation] will be struck down. Soon your sister nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter.” And so, among the ruins of the World, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the sprit or rebellion. However, at this extremity nothing else is possible but death or resurrection. Stirner, and with him all the nihilist revels, rush to the utmost limits, drunk with destruction. After which, when the desert has been disclosed, the next step is to learn how to live there. Nietzsche’s exhaustive search begins. Therefore, courtesy should be recognized as one of the desirable spiritual virtues. Social manners and outer etiquette are only the local forms taken by courtesy. They may change or drop out, what matters is their inner attitude. To be well-bred is not solely an innate blood-born attribute as so many narrowly believe it; it can also be shaped by philosophy, which is no less a matter of refinement of manners than it is of consciousness. It is not concerned with snobbish social elegance, as others also narrowly think, but with goodness and with aesthetics. It avoids vulgarity because that is so unattractive. All these qualities may not usually be associated with philosophers, but that is because in which cases there is not enough dept in them. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Sacramento Fire Department is dedicated to ensuring your safety and well-being. They go beyond just firefighting—their mission is to create a secure environment for each of you, their cherished residents, and visitors. With their robust system of public education initiatives, the Sacramento Fire Department strives to empower you with the knowledge needed to prevent emergencies and protect your loved ones. Their commitment extends to the rigorous enforcement of fire codes, ensuring that every corner of their city adhere to the highest safety standard. “We had a record low of twenty 22 degrees Fahrenheit. Some young boys had gone over to the conservation club and stolen some liquor. They took it to a little shack that was built between two small hills so that the roof was even with the ground. For heat, they had a fifty-gallon drum with some wood in it, and they had a fire in it. One of the kids, about twelve or thirteen, passed out, and they wanted the fire to keep him warm while they went to get some more kids. By the time they got back, the building was engulfed in flames. We were called on it. We could see the child, we could hear him screaming, and we did everything we could possibly do, but we couldn’t get near him. It was like, my God, what can we do? We’ve got all the water we could possibly want, we’ve all the help we could possibly want, but we can’t get into the shack. It was untouchable. By the luck of God, one of the guys made it in and was able to save the boy. I remember coming home from that. It was in the middle of the night, probably about four in the morning. And I was devastated. I walked around the house a little bit. I didn’t want to wake my wife up, and I went and sat down on my son’s bed, and I just looked at him. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“That’s when I started to cry. I thought, what an awful thing for any child, or even a parent, to have to go through. I am very sensitive with children’s calls. Whether it’s a child abuse or a medical or a skateboard accident, my heart goes out a little bit more to those kinds of calls.” The Sacramento Fire Department is part of your, community, a familiar face dedicated to safeguarding the place you all call home. Together, you can all build a safer, stronger Sacramento. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, parents, teach your children to love America and be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, to buy American made goods and services and cars, to respect law and order, and teach others with compassion, respect, and dignity, especially their elders. Release all captives, we beseech Thee, Lord whose mighty hand doth set men free; and hear the glad acclaim of all Thy people who praise and glorify but Thee. Preserve the righteous ones who seek Thee, and, in love, Thy unity proclaim; O guard and bless with Thine abundant goodness, Thy people who revere Thy name. Thou, Lord, who art alone exalted, please turn to us and hearken to our plea. We bless Thee, Thou who knowest all things hidden, Thy kingdom is unto eternity. I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, under God, Indivisible with Liberty, and Justice for all. O Guardian of American, guard the remnant of America; let not American people perish, the people which proclaims: Hear, O America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester mansion is feeling alive with Christmas spirit… and possibly a few others 🎄👻
You can see this beautifully decorated space and many others when you take a mansion tour during the holiday season!
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
You, Sir, Had a Mild Heart Attack Last Night!
Each of us has our own difficult journeys in the “wilderness.” Some journeys are so difficult that it might even seem unbearable at times. The man you are about to meet, not only were his conversations battles, life itself was a battle—a battle he almost lost before finding his core. His biggest disappointment in life was that his father had not been killed in the war. Charles was born in 1942, into a World turned upside down; a World of women who worked in factories while their men went to far-off countries to fight. Charles’ mother was a pale, weak woman who worked too hard and had not the strength to survive his birth. A judge put Charles into the care of his Aunt Selma, a wealthy spinster who had nothing else to do but pamper the baby, whom she considered a gift sent from Heaven to fill and delight her lonely days. The first three years of Charles’ life were as much a delight to him as they were to his aunt. His every demand was filled as quickly as the woman could get to it. He did as he pleased and Clare’s only responses were kisses, pats, hugs, and praise. However, then the way was over—and for Charles, the nightmare began. His father came home. His father had a skill which was rare among men in those days: he could type. So instead of shouldering a rifle, he sat at a typewriter in Maryland. At war’s end, he returned uninjured, but had to face two gigantic problems: unemployment and fatherhood. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
The first problem he was able to solve simply by taking the lowest-paying job available. However, the second problem had no simple solutions. It never would. Charles’s nightmare because real when his father took him away from Aunt Clare and moved him into a cramped apartment in St. Louis. In their first few months together, Charles’ father was unemployed. Unsure of what he ought to allow the little boy to do, he decided the safest course was to let him do nothing which could lead to trouble. Thus, Charles heard, “Do not touch that!” and “Bad boy!” for the first time in his life. And to the extent three-year-old boys are able, Charles began to feel progressively irritated, annoyed and resentful of his father’s restrictiveness. His father eventually found a job as a clerk in a brewery and every morning left Charles in the care of an overwrought woman who had six children of her own. As the boy grew to young manhood, his resentment of his father grew to a full-blown hatred. They squabbled over everything and nothing Charles did was quite good enough for his father’s liking. In return, Charles found a little to admire in the stranger who called himself his father. The man worked hard, but was not able to rise above the position of senior bookkeeper. He had no zest for living, few friends, no accomplishments to be proud of. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
As Charles matured, he also lost much of his zest for living. He too found difficulty making friends, mainly because he argued about nearly everything. However, he did have accomplishments to be proud of. He was extremely bright and had a natural ability with numbers. In college, he majored in accounting and graduated first in his class. He accepted an offer from a huge company in New York, with a starting salary higher than the salary his father had worked twenty years to attain. The job did not last. Despite his youth and inexperience, Charles refused to follow the orders for his supervisors. He always had a better way to do things. Even when he was show to be in error, he would argue his position rather than back down. The final straw came when his supervisor overheard him advising a department head to account for supplies in a manner different from the standard. He was told to resign, but he insisted he be fired, despite the damage this would do to his record. Then Charles began taking a series of jobs in different cities, each with companies of lesser and lesser prestige. The pattern he set in his first job repeated itself. At last, even the worst companies would not have him. More from necessity than choice, he decided to go into solo practice. So he got an office, advertised a little, and business trickled in. His clients, though miffed by his heavy-handedness, saw his ability. His business grew, but his constant bickering made them throw up their hands and seek another accountant. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
With the constant turnover in clientele, Charles found that he had to work punishingly hard to make a living. He was at his desk from morning until late in the evening, doing all the work himself. The tiresome schedule appealed to him. He had no social life and his only hobby was psychology, in which he was getting a Master’s degree at night. Ultimately the strain of too much work, too little sleep, and junk food took its toll. As he sat at his desk one evening, he felt a small twinge of pain just above his stomach. Indigestion, he thought, probably the result of the cheeseburger he had eaten earlier. He glanced at his watch and noted it was nine-thirty. He tried to ease the pain by breathing deeply, but his breaths came only in painful gasps. He felts a sudden chill, despite the fact that he was sweating a great deal, his shirt having become soaked in a few seconds. Frightened, Charles decided to take an Alka-Seltzer, but when he tried to rise and push his chair back, he could not. His strength was gone. He tried again, got halfway up and the World went black. When he awoke, he was laying on the floor. He glanced at his watch again: almost ten o’clock. He had been out a half-hour. However, on getting up, he felt fine. Nevertheless, he closed the books and went home. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The next day, Charles went to a doctor, thinking that he might have the beginnings of an ulcer. Not so. “Your blood enzyme test bothers me,” the doctor said with an ominously wrinkled brow. “Just to be sure, I’m going to do an EKG.” “What the heck’s that?” “Electrocardiogram. Heart test.” When the test results came back, the doctor seemed pleased with himself. “Just as I suspected. You, sir, had a mild heart attack last night. It was one of the few moments in his life that Charles could think of nothing to say. “I know what you’re thinking,” the doctor went on. “You’re only thirty-five years old, too young to have a heart attack. But I’ll be you work too hard and don’t exercise. Probably haven’t eaten a decent meal outside a restaurant in a year. Am I right so far?” One thing Charles could not do was admit someone else was right, no matter what the circumstances. “Say no more,” the doctor said, chickling. Then he turned serious. “Here it is, straight: You’re going to the hospital now. After a few days of observation, you can home—if we don’t find anything more disturbing. When you get out, no more junk food. No more sixteen-hour days. No more coffee. Get a lot of sleep, try not to get upset. This bum ticker of yours is a fact. You’re stuck with it, so you might as well live with it. There’s nothing else you can do.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Five days later, Charles left the hospital feeling a mixture of frustration and anger. The thought of taking orders from the medical man infuriated him. Yet he could not afford to do things his own way. Not with this. In this game, someone else held all the cards. That afternoon, he closed his office obediently at five, went home and fixed a salad, ate it slowly, and took a nap before going to class. For the past few weeks, the class had been discussing psychosomatic illnesses, a subject which interested Charles little. However, on this evening, he listened very, very closely. The professor was lecturing about the forms of psychosomatic illness: “The most obvious type is, of course, ulcers. People now recognize that stress, worry and overwork may give one an ulcer. However, psychologists are discovering that many other illnesses may have psychosomatic origins. People are unwilling to accept that such aliments as cancer, asthma, heart trouble and the like have their roots in psyche. One patient of mine, for example, Charles froze at the mention of the words “heart trouble.” Could his hear problem be “all in his head”? During the next few days, the thought came up repeatedly. Every time it did, it frightened him—not because he thought the condition serious, but because there was apparently nothing he could do about it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
All his life, Charles had felt able to control whatever came up. He had always been able to do something about everything. Yet in this case, there was nothing he could do. This bothered him most. The next week, Charles asked the professor a hypothetical question about a “friend” who had heart trouble and was wondering if it might be psychosomatic. The old psychologist saw through the deception and suggested Charles try therapy. He referred him to me. One of the deepest learnings in mu previous clinical work had been the tremendous pull exerted in the client by the satisfaction of learning one’s self. No matter how external the concern initially expressed by the client—the problem of his wife’s behaviour, or the choice of a vocational goal—once he had experienced the bitter-sweet satisfaction of self-exploration, this inevitably became the focus of therapy. I do not find this to be true with our schizophrenic clients. Even when we have established a relationship, even when the individual experiences some new facet of himself, and understands himself a bit more clearly, he does not necessarily continue along this line. For reasons I am not sure I understand, he does not find himself, except very occasionally, drawn to the exploring and experience of self. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Instead, he is more likely to continue to externalize his problems, to refuse to own his feelings. Is this due to the nature of the schizophrenic reaction to life? Is it primarily characteristic of the chronically hospitalized person? Is it due to the low socio-educational status of our group? Is it simply that very few of our clients have reached the level of inner development where self-exploration is satisfying? I cannot be sure. Counseling center clients, on the average, show a significantly greater depth of self-exploration than our schizophrenic clients. This was based on a new measure of intrapersonal exploration, developed out of our Process Scale and its derivatives. It was also found, in accordance with expectation, that the more successful cases showed an increase in degree of self-exploration over time, while the less successful cases—both neurotic and psychotic—showed actually less intrapersonal exploration later in therapy than they did early in therapy. However, the surprising finding was that the more successful schizophrenic cases showed the greatest increase in depth of self-exploration from early to late, greater even than the successful neurotic cases. This is both pleasing and surprising. It means that in those schizophrenics who do show marked improvement on objective tests, this improvement is preceded by the spontaneous and feelingful expression of personally relevant material, by an active, struggling, fearful exploration of self. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It appears in our sample that when a schizophrenic improves it is because he has entered into “therapy” as we have customarily understood it. Another simple observation. Our schizophrenics tend to be either massively silent, or to engage in continuous (and not very revealing) conversation. It has been found that half of our schizophrenics, in their second interviews, show either less than 1 percent silence mor more than 40 percent silence. This is sharply different from clinic clients. Our schizophrenic individuals tend to fend off a relationship either by an almost complete silence—often extending over many interviews—or by a flood of over-talk which is equally effective in preventing a real encounter. Parents everywhere are the same in regard to illusions. If the child believes they are magicians, it is partly because they believe it themselves. There is no actual or conceivable parent who has not somehow conveyed to his offspring: “If you do what I tell you, everything will come out all right.” To the child, this means: “If I do what they tell me, I will be protected by magic, and all my best dreams will come true.” He believes this so firmly that it is almost impossible to shake his faith. If he does not make it, it is not because the magic has gone, but because he has broken the rules. And if he defies or abandons the parental directives, it does not mean the he had lost his belief in his illusions. It may only mean that he cannot stand the requirements any longer, or does not think he will ever meet them. Hence the envy and derision which some people direct at those who follow the rules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
The inner Child still believes in Santa Claus, but the rebels are saying, “I can het if from him wholesale” (drugs or revolution), while the futilists cry: “Who needs his sour grapes? The grapes of death are sweeter.” However, as they get older, a few people are able to give up the illusion themselves, and they seem to do so without the envy or derision of those who have not. The Parental precept, at best, reads: “Do right and no harm can befall you!” a motto which has been the basis of ethical systems in every country throughout recorded history, starting with the oldest known written instructions by Ptahhotep, in ancient Egypt, five thousand years ago. At worst it reads: “If you kill certain people, the World will be a better place, and in that way, you will attain immortality, become omnipotent, and acquire irresistible power.” Oddly enough, from the Child’s point of view, both of these are slogans of love, for they are both based on the same Parental promise: “If you do as I tell you, I will love and protect you, and without me you are nothing.” This shows up clearly when the promise is given in writing. In the first case, it is the Lord who will love and protect you, as it is written in the Christian Bible and Book of Mormon, and in the second it is Mr. Hitler, as it is written in Mein Kampf and other productions. Mr. Hitler promised the thousand-year Reich, which is practical immortality, and his followers did indeed acquire omnipotence and irresistible power over the Poles, Gypsies, Jews, painters, musicians, writers, and politicians whom they imprisoned in their extermination camps. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
While this was going on, however, reality took over in the Napoleonic form of infantry, artillery, and air support, and millions of Mr. Hitler’s followers became mortal, impotent, and resistible. It takes enormous power to shatter these primal illusions, and this occurs most commonly in wartime. When Tolstoy’s Count goes into battle, he cries in outage: “Why are they firing at me? Everybody likes me (=I am irresistible).” The most horrifying example of smashing this almost universal belief by force is shown in the notorious picture of a little boy about nine years old standing in the middle of a street in Poland, alone and friendless despite the onlookers who line the sidewalk, while an armed Death’s Head Trooper stand over him. The expression on his face says very plainly: “But mother told me fi I was a good boy, everything would be all right.” The most brutal psychological blow that any human being can sustain is proof that his good mother deceived him, and that is the devastating torture which the German soldier is inflicting on the little boy he has concerned. When everything is permitted and the law passes away, the history of contemporary nihilism really begins. The romantic rebellion did not go so far. It limited itself to saying, in short, that everything was not permitted, but that, through insolence, it allowed itself to do what was forbidden. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
With the Karamazovs, on the contrary, the logic of indignation turned rebellion against itself and confronted it with a desperate contradiction. The essential difference is that the romantics allowed themselves moments of complacence, while Ivan compelled himself to do evil so as to be coherent. He would not allow himself to be good. Nihilism is not only despair and negation but, above all, the desire to negate. The same man who so violently took the part of innocence, who trembled at the suffering of a child, who wanted to see “with his own eyes” the lamb lie down with the lion, the victim embrace his murderer, from the moment that he rejects divine coherence and tries to discover his own rule of life, recognized the legitimacy of murder. Ivan rebels against a murderous God; but from the moment that he begins to rationalize his rebellion, he deduced the law of murder. If all is permitted, he can kill his father or at least allow him to be killed. Long reflection on the condition of mankind as people sentenced to death only leads to the justification of crime. Ivan simultaneously hates the death penalty (describing an execution, he says furiously: “His head fell, in the name of divine grace”) and condones crime, in principle. Every indulgence is allowed the murderer, none is allowed the executioner. This contradiction, which Sade swallowed with ease, chokes Ivan Karamazov. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
He pretends to reason, in fact, as though immortality did not exist, while he only goes so far as to say that he would refuse it even if it did exit. In order to protest against evil and death, he deliberately chooses to say that virtue exists no more than does immortality and to allow his father to be killed. He consciously accepts his dilemma; to be virtuous and illogical, or logical and criminal. His prototype, the devil, is right when he whispers: “You are going to commit a virtuous act and yet you do not believe in virtue; that is what angers and torments you.” The question that Ivan finally poses, the question that constitutes the real progress achieved by Dostoievsky in the history of rebellion, is the only one in which we are interested here: can one live and stand one’s ground in a state of rebellion? Ivan allows us to guess his answer: one can live in a state of rebellion only by pursuing it to the bitter end. What is the bitter end of metaphysical rebellion? Metaphysical revolution. The master of the World, after his legitimacy has been contested, must be overthrown. Man must occupy his place. “As God and immortality do not exist, the new man is permitted to become God.” However, what does becoming God mean? It means, in fact, reorganizing that everything is permitted and refusing to reorganize any other law but one’s own. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Without it being necessary to develop the intervening arguments, we can see that to become God is to accept crime (a favourite idea of Dostoievsky’s intellectuals). Ivan’s personal problem is, then, to know if he will be faithful to his logic and if, on the grounds of an indignant protest against innocent suffering, he will accept the murder of his father with the indifference of man-god. We know his solution: Ivan allows his father to be killed. Too proud to be satisfied with appearance, too sensitive to perform the deed himself, he is content to allow it to be done. However, he goes mad. The man who could not understand how one could love one’s neighbour cannot understand either how one can kill him. Studying counterintelligence is one way to understand how intelligence can be lowered. Counter-intelligence incessantly seeks old fact about other hives. Counter-intelligence continuously search for maps, blueprints, plans about intra-hive activity—in spite of the fact that nothing of genetic importance occurs within hives. Counter-intelligence feverishly construct apparatuses, devices, networks to limit our intelligence. Counter-intelligence bureaucracies, which includes the CIA, Senate investigating committees, and the old Soviet KGB lower intelligence and makes us more stupid with time tested techniques. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
Anyone who keeps secrets from you is your Essence Enemy—acting to lower your most precious asset—your intelligence. If intelligence is the ultimate good then secrecy is the ultimate crime. Censorship is the imposition of secrets. Counter-intelligence makes us stupid. Disinformation—false facts obviously increase stupidity. When Richard Helms lied under oath about CIA involvement in Chile, he was acting to keep the Senate and the American people stupid. When Dick Gregory and Mark Lane invented Kennedy conspiracy facts, they are lowering the National intelligence index. Secrecy is the most obvious and blatant technique for inhibiting intelligence and always designed to increase stupidity. Even simple human ethics, let alone divinely given commandments, tell us to treat others as we wish them to treat ourselves. Whoever looks for the negative aspects of others should also remember that there are usually some beneficial ones also and that in fairness he ought to recognize them too. If anyone or anything, a man or a book, can contribute to free us from the resentments towards others or the bitterness towards life which poison feelings, thoughts, and health, he has rendered us a great service or the book has proved its worth. His virtue is not cold and selfish and self-admiring, although it may seem so to those who have insufficient knowledge of these matters. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
Conformity has its uses, its merits, its place and time. Given these, it is quite acceptable. Ill-mannered people mistake invective for argument. The insatiable curiosity whose satisfaction fills so many columns of personal gossip in newspapers, is reflected in those who intrusively ask private questions where they have no right and no encouragement to do so. It is a breach of good manners, a blow at personal rights. It is a lack of respect for human dignity and independence. Being different from the crowd may mean being lonely but it also means being inspired, protected, blessed. Jesus Christ was not holier in essence than he is, only that man had manifested all this holiness, whereas he has hardly begun to do so. The task is to reflect the attributes of divinity in the conduct of humanity, involving the bringing-in of his metaphysics and his mysticism to actuate his conduct. Emotional expression is an aspect of communication. If we share a common upbringing and cultural heritage, we will not have difficult in understanding the subtleties and nuances of emotion that are conveyed by the flare of a nostril, the narrowing of eyelids, or the ripple of muscle along the jawline as a person suppresses rage. When we enter another culture, however, such as happens when an American from New York visits a Southern state or another English-speaking country, we frequently do not recognize when our speech and actions are angering or amusing the local people. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Indeed, it may take years to learn the perspective, expectations, and evaluative norms of the natives, and until that happens, a visitor may feel lonely and out of touch. Many students have had the experience of joy and relief at encountering someone from their home when they were abroad. Understanding one another’s feelings is usually immediate between people who know one another. There are occasions, however, when the emotional disclosure of someone well known becomes unintelligible; we cannot comprehend why a friend is terrified, angry, or sexually aroused. This is the case with so-called schizophrenic and neurotic people; their emotionality does not appear to make sense, even to members of their families. Yet, because they are human, it must be assumed that the emotional experience of such sufferers makes sense to them, in the light of their perspective upon the World. If someone is terrified, it is because the person experiences imminent danger; if someone is enraged, it is because someone else has violated that person’s space and integrity. All emotion makes sense when we have imaginatively grasped the perspective of the person who is feeling it. It is such empathy, and the willingness to encounter and enter into dialogue with someone with a different perspective, which is so important for therapists, teachers of children, parents, and those who seek to live and work in another country. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is to ensure safety and well-being for residents and visitors through firefighting, public education, enforcement of fire codes, and efficient emergency response resources. “You see a lot in this profession. There was a truck driver driving this tractor-trailer through Sacramento one afternoon, he crossed the highway divider. He hit a Honda head on and crushed it, also a pickup truck with three construction workers in it. We didn’t even see the girl who was driving the Hunda until we got a big tow truck to get the tractor-trailer off her car. She was just jelly. We had to cut her out with the jaws of life. The three construction workers were coming home from work. They didn’t make it. They were crushed inside the truck. The saddest thing is to see an innocent person dying. We had several medical calls recently to a young boy who was extremely sick, and every once in a while he would stop breathing. That was a very painful thin for his parents, and it drew a lot of compassion from firemen. You’ve got to live with these things. When we come back to the situation, I talked about these things with one of the guys I work with. But the traditional male machoism keeps some guys from expressing their true feelings or even talking about it. This guy now has a master’s degree in psychology. He does seminars in Texas on postincident stress reduction, helping firefighters deal with injuries and deaths, mass deaths like in plane crashes. You go out there and do what you have to do, yet a lot of it sets in and affects you. You’ve got to learn to overcome it, to release it instead of bottling it up inside. So we’re learning to do that.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department recognizes that they face unique challenges in keeping pace with the changing World in which they live and work. They will not forget the traditions of those that came before them. However, they have adapted and progressed so that they can remain successful. “We are a family of individuals committed to serving others. We will always provide for the welfare of our personnel through a health and rewarding work environment. We are dedicated to respect, integrity, compassion, and leadership amongst ourselves so that we may proudly serve others. The Sacramento Fire Department strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
There is only one week left until our Friday the 13th Flashlight Tour 🔦
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to explore the mansion in full darkness on this eerie night 🌔
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
How is it that We Know So Much and Do Not Do Anything?
Many across the nation and the World currently face weighty challenges in their lives. In difficult periods of the past, leasers have recognized the collective need to give thanks amid turmoil and to turn to God. Living in thanksgiving daily is a habit that will enrich our lives and the lives of those we love. One of the most enduring and endearing of American images is the Thanksgiving holiday family dinner. The turkey, cranberry sauce, and the array of pies have attained nearly iconic status, and Norman Rockwell has provided a Saturday Evening Post fantasy of ordinary gratitude from which no one can escape and to which everyone aspires. Not for nothing is this the most heavily traveled day in the American calendar. Thanksgiving is the American holiday that embraces all that we value without stressing any of the things that make a public holiday problematic. Thanksgiving is a big deal in American because we American believe it to be our unique holiday, hardly found in this form anywhere else on Earth. And wherever on Earth Thanksgiving is celebrated, it is invariably associated with America and its founding virtues and values. Thanksgiving is a time when generations around the hearth and are renewed by generational proximity within. Shocks of corn and heaps of pumpkins decorate the fields and fill the barns as the strutting monarch of the farmyard, the fattened Thanksgiving turkey and prepared for the glorious meal. Pies are drawn steaming from ovens in stoves in which bubbling pots foretell the coming feast. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Following the Revolutionary War and ratification of the United States Constitution, President George Washington issued a proclamation designating Thursday, 26 November 1789, as an official holiday of “sincere and humble thanks” for God’s “care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation.” In October 1863, amid a bloody civil war, President Abraham Lincoln made the traditional Thanksgiving celebration a nationwide holiday to be commemorated each year on the fourth Thursday of November. President Lincoln’s proclamation enumerated the blessings of the country, then urged that those blessings “be solemnly, reverently and gratefully acknowledged as with one heart and voice by the whole American people.” He recommended that Americans “fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation.” As Thanksgiving is upon us, those who have homes and/or families are called to reflect on the good despite difficulty and division. Many Americans are facing the crisis of not being able to afford a home. They have worked hard and many of them are good people. They have a long, uphill battle ahead, and we pray that God shines down upon them and lets them know that he loves them and that every human soul is valuable. We pray that our Great Lord blesses them with a home where they can feel safe and be protected from the elements. We pray that every day, they can wake up and enjoy a hearty meal and know that they are loved. While there is much that is wrong in the World today, there are many things that are right and good. Our lives are blessed in countless ways. The things which provide deep and lasting happiness and gratitude are the things which money cannot buy: our families, the gospel, good friends, our health, our abilities and the love we receive from those around us. Unfortunately, these are some of the things we allow ourselves to take for granted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
When we encounter challenges and problems in our lives, it is often difficult for us to focus on our blessings. However, if we reach deeply enough and look hard enough, we will be able to feel and recognize just how much we have been given. May we willingly serve one another. May we pray for the inspiration to know of the needs of those around us, and then may we go forward and help. Difficulties come into our lives, problems we do not anticipate and which we would never choose. None of us is immune. The purpose of mortality is to learn and to grow to become more like our Father, and it is often during the difficult times that we learn the most, as painful as the lessons may be. Our lives can also be filled with joy as we follow the teachings of the gospel of Jesus Christ. We hope that all people will see this Thanksgiving holiday as a time to express gratitude and to serve those around them. You are worthy of love every day. After a dangerous, frightening, and thoroughly uncomfortable 66-day voyage cooped up in the dark, dank, bowels of the Mayflower, the Pilgrims were immeasurably relieved to sight land on November 9. Following a fruitless attempt to continue to their original destinations at the mouth of the Hudson River, they decided to stay where they had ended up, in New England. They anchored in Cape Cod harbour (now Provincetown harbour) on November 11, 1620. As they were now outside the legal boundaries of their charter, some of the Strangers asserted that they were no longer obliged to live under the dominion of the “Saints” (as the Separatists commonly referred to themselves), but could strike out on their own. Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed, and the men of the party signed a momentous document called the Mayflower Compact that not only saved the colony by requiring all to live together under a government of their own making, but also introduced democratic principles of government to America and in time inspired the United States Constitution. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Following a month of exploration on Cap Cod, which included a brief, bloodless foray with the Indian inhabitants themselves as well as the discovery of vacant Indian homes, providential corn supplies (which they took but later paid back with interest), and graves, an exploring party arrived at what is now Plymouth. It was a dark and stormy December night of wind and sleet as the little shallop (a coastal craft brought over in pieces of the Mayflower and reconstructed on Cape Cod) approached the entrance to Plymouth harbour. Although both sail and rudder were lost in the storm, the boat entered the harbour and safely anchored. Its passengers found themselves on an island in the morning, and there they spent the weekend before crossing over to the mainland on Monday, December 11 (or December 21, by the New Style or Gregorian calendar), when they made the climatic landing on Plymouth Rock. The Mayflower crossed Massachusetts Bay a week later, and on Christmas Day (which the Separatists did not believe in), work began on the new village. There followed the terrible First Winter, during which all but a few persons suffered from exposure and disease, and half the Mayflower’s passengers and crew died. Nevertheless they persevered, and when spring came planted their first crops and built homes and storehouses. On March 16, a lone Indian entered the settlement and astonished the colonists by greeting them in English. This was Samoset, a Native Sagamore from Maine, who had learned the language from English fishermen who made annual voyages to the Maine coast each year. On March 22, he introduced them to another Native man, Squanto, who had once lived at Patuxet, the site of the new Plymouth settlement, before being kidnapped by an English sea captain and sold into slavery in Spain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Remarkably, Squanto had escaped and made his way to London, from where he returned to America as a scout for the Newfoundland Company. When he finally reached his old home, he found it abandoned—the result of a plague that had decimated the coastal population of southeastern New England. He, too, spoke English, and became the little colony’s translator, as well as its instructor in planting corn and finding local recourses. That same day, the “great Sagamore” Massasoit arrived with his retinue of sixty men, and with the help of the English-speaking Native men, entered a treaty of peace with the colonists that would last more than fifty years. The following autumn, the all-important corn harvest that would insure Plymouth Colony’s survival proved successful, although some of the English crops were a disappointment. In honour of this 1621 harvest, Edward Winslow noted that Governor William Bardford sent four men out to hunt wildfowl “so that we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors.” They brought back enough fowl to feed the community a week, including “many of the Indians [who came] amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men.” They hosted their guests for three days of feasting, to which the Indians contributed five deer. This ecumenical outdoor harvest feast and November celebration was America’s “First Thanksgiving”; it was later adopted by other New England colonies in memory of that momentous event. The holiday remained a regional observance until 1789, when George Washington declared the first nationwide Thanksgiving for the new Untied States (an earlier Thanksgiving for the thirteen colonies had been declared by the Continental Congress in 1777). The custom of national Thanksgiving lapsed after 1815, until Abraham Lincoln, urged on by Sarah Josepha Hale (editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book and fervent advocate for a nation Thanksgiving holiday), declared a traditional November Thanksgiving in 1863. Since that time, the holiday the Pilgrims established has been celebrated without fail each fall, and the memory of that First Thanksgiving has been indelibly coloured by the famous images of colonists and Native neighbours sitting down to dine in autumnal splendour, surrounded with the bounty of the harvest. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
If you will, think for a moment of someone you know who is truly happy. We have all met those people who seem to radiate happiness. They seem to smile more than others; they laugh more than others—just being around them makes us happier as well. Now think of someone you know who is not happy at all. Perhaps they seem ten years older than they are, drained of energy—perhaps they are angry or bitter or depressed. When is the difference between them? What are the characteristics that differentiate happy from the miserable? Is there something that unhappy people can do to be happier? It is time to stop when such a flexible all-things-to-all-men attitude begins to destroy strict honesty of purpose and truth of speech. No self-actualized Christian can stoop so low, but pseudo-Christians may. With each coming of this experience, there is a going of bitterness out of his heart. More and more he sees that people cannot help being what they are, the products of their own experience and present characteristics, the living milestones of a cosmic evolutionary process. How can he blame, resent, or condemn them? More and more, therefore, does tolerance suffuse his attitude and acceptance mellow his contacts with the World. The blood and violence, the fear and suffering associated with the production of meat, should be enough to make kindhearted, sensitive people shun it. In the sphere of human relations, he will hold himself to certain attitudes which eradicate the negative tendencies in him and stimulate the beneficial. When thrown among those who do wrong and practise evil, he will not fall into angry, hatred, resentment, or bitterness, but will use occasion to rise into patience, detachment, or indifference, knowing that such persons will sometime and somewhere infallibly receive the painful return of what they have given out. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
When, on the contrary, he is brought into the company of those who do right and practise virtue, he will rejoice in their goodness and be glad to witness their conduct. When he finds himself among those suffering misfortune, he will pity, and when among those enjoying good fortune, he will feel no envy. It is not possible for every man to establish harmony with every environment in which he finds himself, but it is possible for him to understand all environments so thoroughly as to react rightly to them. You must neither defraud your neighbour nor allow him to defraud you. If he must resist the influence and pressure of society in many directions to keep his spiritual integrity, he need not do so in an aggressive uncouth, or tactless manner. Some have unfortunately behaved in this way, not because philosophy bade them do so, but because their individuality was strong and their ego pronounced. Unless some quirk of destiny puts him in a public situation where duty and responsibility compel attention to negatives and criticisms, he may prefer to draw attention to the good and the beautiful, to spread harmony. So long as we let other people’s faults or blunders evoke our own in angry response, so long do we foolishly add an inner hurt to whatever outer hurt their fault or blunder may have caused us. Where harshness, coarseness, brutality, and vulgarity reign, where no touch of kindness, beauty, gentleness, or love enters the atmosphere, there the soul stifles. He is neither a sentimentalist nor a simpleton, but expects from humanity that dual nature, that thorn with the rose, which corresponds to the positive-negative nature of the universe itself. One may note these defects in a man’s character not to judge, certainly not to condemn him, but solely to understand any person with whom one must deal in some way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Good has existed in all countries, always, among bad people and at bad times. We ought to welcome them as people whatever low opinion we hold of their kindred. The idealist who expects too much from people is as mistaken as the cynic who expects too little. His tolerance is such that he accords to others the right to be, to act, and to live the way they want to be, to act, and to live. He trusts the evolutionary laws to take care of their corrective education. It is of the highest importance for older people to look after the manners of younger ones. However, the bad behaviour of many parents towards one another as well as in society is reflected in that of their children. Aggressive, naughty, ill-tempered, or disobedient traits in children need a measure of discipline from parents, or life will provide it in later years much more harshly. However, there is a special need for parents to provide it lovingly as education, not scolding and punishing. If we can give nothing else, we can always give others our kind thoughts and not our personal troubles. We are to cause no offense whatsoever to anyone. It is not always fair to scorn someone as a hypocrite for past frailties and lapses of the bygone past who behaves properly in the present. There may have been a genuine awakening accompanied by moral reform inwardly and outwardly, so that instead of condemnation, the attitude should be congratulation. His duty himself calls on him to protect the personal interests. However, his duty to the All calls on him to respect others’ interests too. There are rude and wild young people who assert that civilities and politeness intensify class divisions and status differences. They claim that in being wild and rude they are simply being natural and sincere whereas the others whom they denounce as holding bourgeois values are hypocritical and insincere. If the background of these misguided young persons is scrutinized, it will usually be found that at least three-quarters of them belong to working class origins while the others who are themselves probably of comfortable middle-class origin are pathological, mentally disturbed, emotionally upset persons. No, the courtesies of decent social intercourse are part of the proper evolution of humanity, and its refinement from the grossly animal to the truly human. This is an evolutionary advance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
Good breeding is a quality which must be acquired through the incarnations, for it is a quality of good Quality itself. Nobody knows, ultimately, what human beings need in order not merely to survive, but to prevail and to develop their full possibilities. Our most basic needs include the need to affirm life itself; physical gratifications; love, status, and self-esteem; freedom and space; challenge; prayer; cognitive clarity; meaning; variety and change; intimacy in solitude; and contact with nature. There may be more basic needs, and some of those mentioned, such as excitement, may not be essential to life itself, but they certainly make for a richer existence if they have been met. Prolonged deprivation may bring about a state of frustration, when a person loses contact with reality and may engage in destructive tension-reducing action. Aggression and regression are characteristic responses to frustration. Frustration thresholds are heightened by good health, recognition of meaning in life, and opportunities for release. Prolonged deprivation of basic needs can sicken a person through diminished resistance to infection, which is brought about by stress or dispiritedness. The healthy personality acknowledges dispiritedness in self when it occurs and seeks help. Needs and emotions that threaten a person’s self-esteem and sense of security may be repressed; they operate as unconscious influences upon action and experience. Such unconscious motives may appear in the content of dreams, in accidents and errors, in body postures, in forgetting of intentions and promises, and in certain projective tests of personality. The unconscious harbours one’s possibilities for achievement and growth as well as for action that is personally or socially reprehensible. Guilt can be a healthy indicator of something being wrong in one’s behaviour. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Once a person has gratified the basic needs, his or her energies and experience are liberated so that the person can turn to projects beyond basic need satisfaction, such as the pursuit of freedom, justice, beauty, or truth; in other words, B, or being motivation, including self-actualization. The problem is to find goals and projects that are challenging, fascinating, and that keep your mind free. Any choice of a meaningful commitment outside of self must include one’s free choice to change one’s mind. Psychological trading stamps follow the same pattern as commercial ones. They are usually obtained as a by-product of legitimate transactions. Marital arguments, for example, usually start over some actual problem, which is the “groceries.” While the Adult is carrying on its business, the Child is eagerly waiting to receive bonuses. People who collect psychological trading stamps have favourite “colours,” and if offered other colours, they may not bother to take them. A person who collects angers will let guilts and fears go by, or let someone else pick them up. In fact, in a soundly structured martial game, one spouse will pick up all the angers while the other picks up all the guilts or inadequacies, so that they both “win” and add to their collections. There are some people, however, who will collect any kind of trading stamps. These are starved for feelings and will play “Greenhouse,” happily showing off any kind of feeling that comes along. Psychologists are especially prone to pick up windblown feelings from the sidewalk, and if they are group therapists, to encourage their patients to do likewise. Some people go over their hurts and angers every night before going to sleep; others do it less frequently; while still others only do it when they are bored and have nothing better to do. Some wait until they need one big justification, and then count all their hurts and angers in the hope that they have enough to warrant an outburst of anger, a “free” sulk, or some other dramatic emotional display. Some people like to save them and some like to spend them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
People like to show their collections of feelings to others, and to talk about who has more or better angers, hurts, guilts, fears, et cetera. In fact, many saloons become showrooms where people can go to boast about their trading stamps: “You think your wife is unreasonable—well, list to this!” or “I know what you mean. It takes even less than that to hurt (scare) me. Yesterday…” or “Embarrassed (guilty, inadequate)? I coulda sunk through the floor!” The “store” where psychological trading stamps are redeemed has the same array of prizes as the commercial trading stamp center: little ones, bigger ones, and really big ones. For one or two “books” the person can get a small prize, such as a free (“justified”) drunk or fantasy involving pleasures of the flesh; for ten “books” he can get a toy (unsuccessful) suicide or an adultery, and for one hundred “books” he can get one of the big ones: a free quit (divorce, leave treatment, quit job), a free go to the mental hospital (colloquially known as a free crazy), a free suicide, or a free homicide. Some people learn that psychological trading stamps are not really free, and that the collected feelings have to be paid for in loneliness, insomnia, raised blood pressure, or stomach trouble, so they stop collecting them. Others never do learn about this. Some know it, but continue to play games and collect payoffs because otherwise their lives would be too drab; since they feel little justification for their way of living, they have to content themselves with collecting small justifications for small outbursts of vitality. Some people prefer to talk straight rather than play games: that is, they will not act provocatively in order to get trading stamps, and will refuse to respond to the spurious provocative behaviour of others. With the energy thus saved, they are ready when they meet the right person at the right time in the right place for more legitimate expressions of feelings. In some cases, people collect psychological trading stamps painlessly and someone else pays the price. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
Thus, a criminal may enjoy all the pleasures of robbing a bank without feeling bad about it or getting caught; apparently, is they do not get too greedy and push too hard, some professional confidence men and card sharps can live very happily in this way. Some teenagers enjoy dismaying their elders without feeling any remorse or other ill effects. However, in principle, the person who collects trading stamps usually must pay for them sooner or later. Some people, particularly paranoids, collect “counterfeit” trading stamps. If no one will provoke them, they imagine provocations. Then, if they are impatient, they can get a free suicide or a free homicide without having to rely on the natural course of events to supply enough irritations for a legitimate outburst. In this respect, there are two types of paranoids. The Child paranoid collects counterfeit wrongs and says, “See what they did to me,” while the Parent paranoid collects counterfeit rights, and says, “They cannot do this to me.” In fact, there are “check raisers” as well as true counterfeiters among paranoids. Those with delusions can pick up very small trading stamps here and there and raise each of them into a very large denomination to get a large payoff quickly. Those with voice hallucinations can manufacture trading stamps ad infinitum right out of their heads. It is just as hard for a patient to give up a lifelong collection of hard-earned psychological trading stamps as it would be for a housewife to burn her commercial ones. This is one factor hindering recovery, since, in order to be cured, the patient must not only stop playing games compulsively, but must also forgo the pleasure of using the stamps he has collected previously. If he truly gives up his script, “forgiveness” of previous wrongs is not enough: they must become truly irrelevant for the future course of his life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
In my experience, “forgiveness” means putting the trading stamps away in a drawer, rather than disposing of them permanently; they will stay in the drawer as long as things go smoothly, but if there is a new offense, they will be pulled out and added to the new payoff in calculating the prize. Thus, if she slips up again, an alcoholic who “forgives” his wife will not go on just a little binge, but may throw in all the trading stamps he had got from all her slips or insults over the whole course of their marriage, and go on an epical bender perhaps ending in delirium tremens. So far, nothing has been said about “good” feelings such as righteousness, triumph, and joy. Righteousness stamps are made of fool’s gold, and will not pass as currency anywhere except in fool’s paradise. Triumph stamps glitter, but they are not collected by people of good taste because they are only gilt. They can be turned in, however, for a free celebration, and can thus be used worthily to bring fun to many people. Joy, like despair, is a genuine feeling, and is not the payoff of a game; thus we can speak of golden joy, just as we speak of morbid despair. The important clinical point about “good” feelings that that people who save “brown” stamps, the “bad” feelings or “feeling bads” discussed above, are often reluctant to accept “gold” stamps when they are offered in the form of compliments or “strokes.” They are quite comfortable with the familiar, bad, old feelings, but do not know where to put good ones, and so they will turn them away or ignore them by pretending not to hear. As a matter of fact, a zealous collector of “brown” stamps can turn even the sincerest compliments into veiled insults, so that instead of wasting them by refusing them or not hearing them, he will transform them into counterfeit browns. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The most common example is: “My, you look good today!” bringing out the response: “I knew you did not like the way I looked last week.” Another is: “My, that is a beautiful dress!” eliciting: “So you did not like the one I wore yesterday!” With a little practice, anyone can learn to transform compliments into insults, and by spraying a little mud over a pleasant gold stamp, turn it into an unpleasant one. Alcohol triggers mammalian reactions. Another powerful set of neurotransmitters reconstruct even more primitive realities. Narcotics reactivate first stage newly born amoeboid-like brain experiences and out the domesticate in touch with relaxed, floating, vegetative pre-terrestrial-marine neurological realities. Narcotic drugs are approved when used in sickness rituals. Symptomatic cries for help can stimulate shaman-doctors to offer the narcotic experience which activates lower-brain consciousness—ancient, infantile, vegetative. The taboo is necessary for maintaining hive discipline. The narcotic return to marine status is so tempting, so inviting, that it must be administered by an authority figure. The domesticate is not allowed access to first circuit neurotransmitters—chemical substances, such as acetylcholine or dopamine, that transmit nerve impulses across a synapse. Self-administration of narcotics to actualize infantile responses are not tolerated for fear that everyone will reject the busy, hectic, adult demands of the hive and escape back to vegetative-ocean bliss. The Doctor Ceremony is the method by which hive-society allows citizens to plug back into the early marine circuits. Intoxicant-narcotic behaviour engages earlier-slower-lower brains; hedonic behaviour engages future circuits. An amusing diagnostic sidelight on domesticated terrestrial civilizations is that it is acceptable to phone-in sick to the office and thus avoid work. Hive-society recognizes that the insectoid slavery it imposes is basically lethal to the workers. Consequently, the ceremony of sick leave is allowed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
It is impossible, however, to phone-in “well” to the hive-center to announce: “I feel so good today, I am not coming in to work.” In the hedonic society of the future—when the dom-species is a fourth stage self-actualized adult—provision will be made for “well leave” in addition to “sick leave.” The difference between intoxicant-narcotic behaviour and hedonic behaviour should now be clear. The former engages earlier-slower-lower instinctual brains. The latter moves consciousness and behaviour into the self-actualized future, engages future neural circuits. The latter are genetic endowments, new brains presented, ready-or-not, by the evolutionary process—not earned, but grown-into. I remember having read in the verbatim reports of the Utah Conferences on Creativity, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, that an air force testing officer reported that in their search for creative men, they found that “those who get the answer without knowing how they got it are the ones we want.” The usual insistence on figuring things out first results in many things not being done because we have not got them altogether figured out first. In an education seminar a psychologist asked, “How is it that we know so much and don’t do anything?” A seventeen-year-old tole me, “talk, talk, talk and nobody does anything. Sometimes I think I’ll go really crazy.” Many people—young people especially but it is not limited to them—try to do something “spontaneously” and it flops. A young girl throws all sorts of food into a bowl and mixes them up and sticks it in the oven, and it comes out pretty awful. A young man wages his personal war on “alienation” by inviting other people to live with him and then it does not work out the way he thought it would. Neither of these two young people were in touch with their own experience, of food or people. Their experience of food or people would have shown them a better way of putting them together, and in that case, it would have been done more tentatively, a little at a time, observing what happens and making corrections. ##RandolphHarris 15 of 19
The goal is non-specific, and in that sense, there is no recipe. However, all the information from the past is available in the present. Even if I have not cooked before, still, I have seen other people cook, and I have eaten. The goal of the Sacramento Fire Department is protecting the public and fire service through coordinated efforts in code enforcement, fire service training, public education, hazardous materials response, fire investigation, and urban search and rescue. “My friend A and I were paramedics in Rescue X. We were in the firehouse. It was a quiet day, and I forget if we were watching TV or working out with weights, and I was thinking about a date I had that night. And we got a call for a collapsed building. When we got to the collapsed building, the company had already gotten out a few people who were on the first floor. It was a three-story building that had collapsed down to the street level. No fire, it just collapsed. They had electric wires down, and you could smell the gas leaking. Chief Y said, ‘Watch out for the live wires.’ There was a woman there in front running around hysterically, saying, ‘My baby is still in the building.’ So I ran up to the collapse, where there was a crowd. Somebody handed me a little kid. So I took the kid and ran down to the squad where this woman was, and I said, ‘Here’s your baby.’ The kid was about four years old. She said, ‘No, that’s not my baby. My baby is about two.’ So I ran over to Chief Y. ‘Chief, there’s another kid in there.’ #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“There was a lot of confusion and hysteria, people running around. By that time we had looked over everything that we could, without seeing the baby. The whole building was mostly in the basement, and it was still pretty unstable. The first floor was a store, so you had freezers and refrigerators and a lot of heavy stuff that fell. So there were a lot of air pockets down in the basement. We looked and looked through every hole, and we couldn’t find anything, and we couldn’t hear anything. Finally there was one small hole that hadn’t been explored. I said, ‘Chief Y should send in a few small men to find out if anything’s in there.’ So we immediately shot right into the hole. Once inside, we had to crawl like snakes from one air pocket to another. There wasn’t a lot of room, and you could see that things were barely held up by just a few things. All it took was for something to shift, and the rest of the stuff would come down on us. The electric wires were outside, and we could smell the gas. We were in there for three of four minutes when Z asked if we needed a hand, and we said, ‘Yeah.’ We were moving stuff around and Y came and helped us do that. I remember telling A, ‘A, it’s time to go.’ We had been there long enough. I didn’t hear anybody, I didn’t see anybody. And if there was somebody, he wasn’t alive anymore. He said, ‘But I’m not leaving here, because there’s somebody in here and I couldn’t live with myself.’ This sticks in my mine because we all knew that this was a little black kid we were looking for, and A is white and Z is white, too. So I said, ‘Okay, let’s look some more.’ He was looking maybe harder than I was. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“Then there was a little door that had fallen on a bunch of debris, and the kid was under that door. We didn’t realize it. As a matter of fact, a couple of times we were nearly on that door. Then we started digging around the edge of the door, which let air under it, and when the kid got the air, he started crying in a muffled way. I sat right there and said, ‘We have him. We have him.’ I got Z to the Halligan. When he handed it to me, I used it to pry up the edge of the door. He looked under, and said, ‘I can see him. I can see his leg.’ Then A reached under the edge of the door and pulled the kid out. He handed him to me, I gave him to Z, and Z passed him out of the hole. I said, ‘Well, now let’s get out of here.’ Afterwards, it was funny and it was gratifying, but the whole time we were in there, it was very scary. You could smell the gas, and I knew there were lives wires outside. And the debris was still shifting down, and at any time it could have finished collapsing. And there was so much stuff over us, I knew that once it came down on us, there was nobody that could have gotten us out of there. Fortunately, it all worked out for the best. The child had only minor scratches. I don’t think he was conscious at first. Maybe all the moving around stimulated him and woke him up. If we had left him, he would have died. I’m sure of that. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to save lives, protect property, and serve their community with courage, commitment and compassion. However, when vehicles are parked in loading zones and red zones, it can be a hinderance to the fire department and prevent them from saving lives or putting out a fire in a timely manner. Also, when you see an emergency vehicle and the lights are flashing, obey the law and safely get out of their way. Even 30 seconds are critical when it comes to saving a life or putting out a fire. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department works hard to save lives and property and often risk their own lives. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars and other American made good and services. Also, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. The practical realistic desire to live well whilst he is living on Earth can still leave plenty of room for idealism and spirituality. Free from the mental fatigue of ghost-haunted traditions and emotional poisons which weigh so heavily on others, he can search vigorously for great art, vital religion, inspired mysticism, and the highest philosophy—and appreciate them adequately when found. Toleration does not mean acceptance of anything, however evil it be. It means the avoidance of fanaticism, the practice of goodwill, and the recognition that by reason of their past re-incarnationary history, many wide differences of opinion, belief, practice, and character do and must exist in human beings. The ultimate discovery is of the oneness and infinitude of Mind, hence of all mankind as arising out of That. This provides the basis of his ethics, and makes him seek the common welfare alongside of his own. The person who cultivates tidy arrangements and orderly habits in the little things of everyday living unconsciously imitates the tidiness and orderliness of the Mind behind the whole Universe. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
The mansion is now fully decorated in Victorian Christmas charm! Come step back in time and enjoy the holiday magic ✨🎄 🎁
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Where Passion Rules, Truth Trembles!
The World is full of people that will try to take advantage of the less fortunate and thin it is cool but it is not and should instead be looking for ways to help each other so we all can live in peace. More than 70 percent of Americans are on medication, 30 percent of Americans are overweight, and 50 percent of American eat unhealthily, while only 19 percent of Americans exercise regularly. Meanwhile, former President Biden has set an unrealistic goal for the transition to electric vehicles. In just 5 years, 50 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States of America are mandated to be electric. The reason being that “accelerated adoption of electric vehicles can improve air quality, reduce emissions, and position U.S. industries to lead global efforts.” However, should the United States of America not be more concerned about the health of their cities and be encouraging them to adopt lifestyles that include fitness and healthy food? Should the United States of America not be leading global efforts to have the healthiest population in the World? Many benefits of physical activity for brain health happen right after a session of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity. Benefits include improved thinking or cognition for children 6 to 13 and reduced short-terms feelings for adults. Regular physical activity can help keep your thinking, learning, and judgment skills sharp as you age. It can also reduce your risk of depression and anxiety and help you sleep better. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Physical activity is beneficial to health and well-being and conversely, physical inactivity increases risk for noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) and other poor health outcomes. NCDs describes a wide range of conditions, diseases, and disorders. These have genetic, lifestyle, or environmental causes rather than viral or bacterial, and they are characterized as health conditions that: Are not caused by acute infections or illness, result in long-term health issues, and require long-term treatment and care, such as lifestyle changes or medication. Health conditions that are consider NCDs are: Cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, chronic lung illness, injuries that cause permanent damage, and mental illness. NCDs are the number 1 cause of death and disease around the World, killing more then 42 million people Worldwide on an annual basis. This accounts for 74 percent of all deaths globally. Each year, 15 million people around the World die prematurely, between, the ages of 30 and 69 years old, from an NCD. Cardiovascular diseases make up most NDC deaths, followed by cancer, respiratory diseases, and then diabetes. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints teaches that members should obey the Word of Wisdom, eat nutritious food, exercise regularly, control their weight, and get adequate sleep. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Members are taught to eat a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, whole grains, and meat. They are also taught to shun substances or practices that abuse their bodies or minds and that could lead to addiction. Members should also practice good sanitation and hygiene, bathe every day, and obtain adequate medical and dental care. Not all NCDs are preventable, but you can lower your risk by maintaining healthy habits. Stop smoking and drinking liquor. Get more physical activity. Regular physical activity offers a multitude of health benefits. If exercise is not part of your day, set a goal to get moving for 20 minutes a day. You can walk, jog, bike, hike, row, or anything else. Set up an exercise plan that does not require a gym at all. Do 20-30 minutes of strength training two days a week. Strat with bodyweight exercises. Use free weights and weight machines only when an expert can help you. The global recommendation is of at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity per week. Together, physical inactivity and sedentary behaviours are contributing to the rise in NCDs and placing a burden on healthcare systems. So why is it that former President Biden has placed such huge importance on mandating electrical vehicles, instead of working to produce a healthier population? Because electrical vehicles are profitable and he likely benefits for the sale of them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Also, mandating the people eat healthier and get more exercise may reduce consumer demands on medication and vehicles and producers can only charge so much for food because everyone has to eat. So, it is important to keep people on medication and keep them focused on electrical cars to generate profits. Maintaining the best possible physical health has been a gospel ideal throughout the ages—from the strict dietary laws of ancient Israel, with the example of Daniel and his associates, to the Word of Wisdom. The physical body is a gift from God and should be properly cared for and respected. Mental health is also important and should not be overlooked, as it can affect us both physically and spiritually. We must do all we can to take care of both our bodies and minds. The Lord sets a high standard for us in telling us to consider our bodies a temple. He has established some basic standards for the governance of our physical bodies and mental health so that we may become more self-reliant and better prepared to progress personally, strengthen the family, and serve in the Church and community. Throughout the Christian Bible, God asked His people to abstain from certain foods. Today is no different. God has given wise counsel to help all His children be healthy. Those who follow God’s counsel in the Word of Wisdom are promised that they will receive health, find wisdom, and “run and not be weary, and walk and not faint,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 89.18-20. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Winners are programed, too. Instead of a curse, there is a blessing: “Long life!” or “Be a great man.” The injunction is adaptive instead of constricting: “Do not be selfish!” and the come-on is “Well done!” With such benevolent controls, and all his permissions, there is still his demon to contend with, lurking in the murky caverns of his primal mind. If his demon is a friend instead of, then he will have it made. Does everyone have a script? At the present, there is no way to answer this question with any degree of certainty, but it is certain that everyone is programed to some extent from early years. As previously mentioned, some people can become autonomous through drastic external circumstances, others by internal reorganization, and still others by applying the antiscript. The key lies in permissions. The more permissions a man has, the less he is bound by his script. On the other side, the more severely the script controls were reinforced, the more script-bound he is. It is likely that the human race as a whole forms a curve. At one end are those who become autonomous by one means or another, and at the other end are those who are script-bound, with most people in between, subject to changes in circumstances or outlook. Among the script-bound, there are two types. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Script-driven people are those who have lots of permissions, but must fulfill the demands of their scripts before they can enjoy them. A good example is the hard worker who can have fun in his spare time. Script-ridden people are those who have few permissions, but must spend as much time as possible fulfilling their scripts at any cost. A typical example is the heavy drinker or drug addict who must speed toward his doom as quickly as he can. The script-ridden are the victims of tragic or “hamartic” scripts. On the other hand, it is a rare person who has not at one time or another heard the voice of the demon in his head, telling him to buy when he should sell, or stay when he should go, or speak when he should remain silent. The predom taboo against genetic consumerism surfaced when citizens became morally outraged by genetic engineering and cloning. The emergence of a new taboo is always a sign for evolutionary rejoicing. Today’s new taboo is tomorrow’s advance. Agents who create new crimes are automatically promoted to the Gut-Caste Hall of Fame. Examples of relatively new crimes include bootleg radio broadcasting, psychedelic drug manufacturing, nuclear research, computer larceny, leaving a country without an exit visa, DNA research and cloning. The passions of men are so resistant to control that in no single method is there sure hope of overcoming them. Only in a combination of methods does this. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
The high moments of Heavenly inspirations are laid low in the dust of obscenity or lust. The effect of passional indulgences spreads out on physical and mental levels. If we learn by bitter experience to drop the burden of one particular desire, we do so only to pick up another soon after. We are not content to be at peace. The desires of human beings are never satiated, nor can they ever be since human beings must go on searching for final satisfaction. It is in their nature to do so. However, what cannot be satiated by outer things can turn in one itself and find rest at last within. How morally helpless many persons allow themselves to become is shown by the compulsive nature of their deeds and the obsessive nature of their thoughts. It is the strength or feebleness of his attachments and desires which largely govern his first and earlier paces in the relinquishment of ego. When insight arises, the passions become subdued and the problems which beset man become solved of their own accord. We may quarrel and kill whilst we remain in ignorance, but we must needs feel for and with each other when we comprehend at long last that in the Overself we are one. All too easily do luxurious habits become insatiable habits, ever demanding more and more and meanwhile creating tension of discontent. Whereas the conventional good man seeks to leave behind only the gross flagrant forms of sin, the philosophic disciple is much more scrupulous. Whereas the one is content to moderate the strength of his lower nature, the other tries to subjugate it altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
There is one side of a person that always has to come out on top. That is the person who is always successful or dominant in the field. Your top-dog self is critical, judgmental and always has to be right. It gets the best of people, rather than trying to help or support them. Most people have been playing that side so long, they believe that it is all of them there is. However, that is not it. There is another side, the underdog, the one who has little chance of winning. This is the side that comes out in some when dealing with someone they care about. The soft, supportive side. That side that does not have to win every battle. Every man has to accept that he may be a loser and that sometimes it is good to lose. It feels good to let down the defenses and just give in to someone else. However, sure it feels good to always be successful at everything, but what does it get a person? A man who gets everything done, who makes all the money. He is sometimes seen by others as worthless. Yet, what is so worthless about feeling good? Does having all that success and money ever make a man feel really good? Is not being able to feel love worth something, too? People who are used to coming out on top need someone to humanize them. They need someone to take care of them and keep them in line. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
It is nice to come home to someone who goes to an import place and spends $1,500 on beautiful things for your homecoming. Blue Tiffany lamps that look great in your bedroom. Blue bed sheets from India. Colour of the sky, two blue pillows, incense, candles, Danish cheeses, Holland cheeses, smoked oysters, artichoke hearts. Carrot juice and more food. Soft Kleenex to wipe your nose. Fruit from the fruit stand. Coming home from a business trip to a nice ranch house where everything is sunny. Fresh baked bread, freshly picked apples, berries, plumbs. Then seeing the lake. How beautiful and fresh it is, and then taking a nice steam bath. Imagine a loving home near a mossy meadow, falling down in the sun and breathing deeply. This is much better than being a prisoner of success alone. A prisoner whose unbounded imagination gave birth to him, and they became one. Being alone, imprisoned in a bloodstained Bastille, entirely constructed around a still unsatisfied, and henceforth undirected, desire for please. Some men have only triumphed in a dream and those ten volumes crammed with philosophy and atrocities recapitulate an unhappy form of asceticism, an illusory advance from the total no to the absolute yes, an acquiescence in death at least, which transfigures the assassination of everything and everyone into a collective suicide. When a man only has success and no love, he is killed in his imagination. Others end up on an improvised stage with other lunatics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Success without love is nothing more than a derisory equivalent of the satisfaction that the order of the World failed to give a man. We are to discipline, and when necessary, abstain from satisfying the lower impulses of our nature because we are to cultivate its higher intuitions. The clamant voice of the one drowns the soft whisper of the other. Ww must try to turn the flow of our passions into a sublimer channel than the sense alone. Variations in the muscle tonus of parts of a person’s body may reflect repressed emotions and the need tensions. A flaccid handshake may disclose a lack of sincerity. A soft, suckling mouth may reveal unconscious wishes to be passive and dependent. A female college student complained that men were forever “making passes” at her, yet she denied any erotic interest in males. Observation revealed her bodily movements were very provocative. She wiggled her hips when walking and pushed her chest high. When talking with a man, she glued her eyes, alternately opened and narrowed, to his. Men and women who have reached or passed the age of the late forties are more ready for, and better suited to, disciplining the animal nature and human passions than younger folk. It is more difficult to conquer lust than to walk on the edge of a sword. However, it can be done. No matter how much you feed your desires, they will never be satisfied. Therefore, direct them gradually towards the Infinite, in which they may ultimately merge, and from which there is no return. Repressed hostility may be manifested by excessive muscular tension in the forehead, neck, or shoulders, often resulting in headaches, a “pain in the neck,” and back pain. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The traditional mission of the Sacramento Fire Department was saving lives and protecting property from fire. However, today, the Sacramento Fire Department also prevents harm. Preventing fire, injuries, and disease by understanding what causes harm to firefighters, their systems, their members, and community is the most effective form of preventing harm. The ability to manage risks is essential for success and survival. “We were working night shift on Engine X. I sometimes work on my model fire engines, but that night I had gone over to have dinner with the captain of Engine Y, who was going to retire. I had just returned to the firehouse when the alarm came in. All of a sudden Engine X’s crew came running out of the kitchen like a football team, and the second alarm came in. With that, I knew that my older brother, Z, who was a battalion chief, was there. We had quite a bit of rain on the street, and driving there was slow going. On the way over, I heard Z, I knew it was his voice, asking for a third alarm and all the ambulances that were available. I now knew there was an explosion, but I didn’t know the extent. When I pulled in there, the scene was one of utter desolation, it was like a sea of bricks and fire of low intensity. The nearby buildings were just starting to catch. People were hobbling all over the place. All the firemen there were on rescue. Knowing that help was coming, I told the battalion to make sure the engine company stretched lines. I didn’t want them all going on rescue work, which there was a natural tendency for them to do. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
“I looked and saw our rigs completely smashed. It was a sickening sight. The aerial ladder of Truck A had been blown across the street about thirty feet. It was crushed. The whole middle of the truck was flat down on the street, the tiller sticking up in the air like a sinking ship. Bricks were all over Engine B, one engine caved in, and there were men lying all over the place. It was just mind-boggling. We have the fire spreading in four different directions, so I called for more help. Two members of Rescue C brought Z over, just so I could see him. He was all bandaged and bloody. All he kept saying to me was, ‘I’m all right. I’m all right.’ I said, ‘You’re going to the hospital.’ And he said, ‘Oh, yeah.’ They said, ‘We’ll see he goes right away.’ So now I was the chief in charge. Z had a broken collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, and I didn’t know it at the time, but he had a five-inch wooden stake drive into the side of his throat and resting against the carotid artery. I didn’t know it, because they had bandaged right over it, deciding rightly that they shouldn’t try to remove it at the scene. They have bandaged his whole face and neck, and he looked like a mummy, all bloody. Of course, it was a shock to me to see my older brother like that, but I had the idea in my head that he was going to be all right. The fellows had control of the situation, and they were taking him to the hospital, so I didn’t really dwell on it. There was so much going on that I had to turn to the fire. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
“I knew some of our men had died, they were laying all over the place, and there had to be people under the sea of bricks and rubble. And there were people in the nearby house fires who were hollering. I went to a fifth alarm and then got an additional two engines and two trucks, because I knew the first alarm was wiped out. I didn’t know how badly, but they were gone. By the time I put one company to work there was another one there looking for assignment. The rubble was starting to burn near Ladder B, and all I could think of was, if there was anyone underneath it and still alive, I didn’t want them to burn to death. I thought that would be a horrible thing. So I had the first lines keep the fire away from the rigs. It ended up that they weren’t under the truck, they were under Engine B. It was like looking for someone under water, you had no idea where to start in the tremendous confusion. Some of the victims had already been taken to various hospitals in police cars and private cars, and it took us quite a while to get an accurate head count, to find out who was missing. We finally broke it down that the entire crew of Ladder B were dead, all five of them. It was several hours before I found out what had happened. The building was a four-story warehouse, and they had a huge propane tank on the fourth floor, a five-hundred-gallon tank, I believe. It was completely illegal to have it in the building at all. One of the workers was moving the tank with a lift truck near the elevator shaft. It fell off the truck, the valve broke, and the liquid propane poured down the elevator shaft. The entire building got to the explosive stage at once. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
“The workers ran out of the place and were out in front when Z arrived. They told him they had a propane tank that had burst. He assumed it was a twenty-gallon job or something like that. He asked them how big is it, and they said, ‘About as big as your car.’ He said that was the last thing that he remembers. That’s when the propane hit the wood stove on the first floor and blew the whole warehouse to pieces, totally destroyed it. It’s too bad that it didn’t blow sooner, we wouldn’t have had any problems. On the other hand, if it had blown later, we would have had more men killed. There wasn’t much left of the building, there was so much open fire, we kind of dismissed the possibility of more explosions in a warehouse. But some of the nearby houses had shifted and broken some of the natural gas lines into the houses. That got ignited. We also had a large frame church burning being the warehouse, which probably in itself would have been a third alarm, and for quite a while we had just one engine company working a turret on it. There were about nine or ten houses that were heavily damaged, and there were innumerable houses that got damage and window breakage for miles around the area. It was a tremendous sight. Once we got enough help in there to work on all the perimeter of the fire and hold it, then it was several more hours, I would say after midnight, when Commissioner C said they had the final count of casualties. It was the five members of Ladder B and two civilians. Then I got his permission to replace every company at the scene, because the weather was bitterly cold and the men were physically shot and emotionally shocked. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I stayed until all the companies were replaced, then I went back to quarters and had a bowl of hot soup. Then I went to the hospital for the second time that night. By this time Z had been operated on and they said he was all right, so I didn’t even go in to see him. The first time I had gone, he was still in the emergency room along with some of our fellows who were burned, so I had a chance to talk to them. I also had the very unpleasant task of identifying one of the bodies. The chaplains and the commissioner and his deputy went to each individual’s house to notify the family of the deaths. They did the same thing with the injured. They brought their wives in and met them at the hospital. It was complete chaos there. The families were very cooperative. They realized that nothing could have been done to avert the tragedy. The companies had pulled up, just as you do on every box you go on, to find out what was going on. The five men of the ladder company had gotten off the truck and were standing together across the street from the building, waiting for orders. And Engine Y had pulled in, and they were on the back of their rig getting masks on in case they were needed. We’ve had people say that shouldn’t have been that close. Well, nobody had any idea what was going on. The members of Engine Y were just blown back, except for one who, along with my brother, was blown into the chief’s car. The member of Engine E was also blown back and, other than burns, were not hurt badly at all. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“But Ladder B’s crew just ended up being buried by all the debris. They were not blown away like the other fellows. In fact, one of the men from Engine E was talking to one of the men from Ladder B, and he was blown about sixty feet, and the man beside him was buried under the bricks and killed. Tw two who were blown into the chief’s car were badly injured. X was one of them. The other, named F, is not out on disability pension, at age thirty-two. He was very badly smashed up, a lot of broken bones. It was the second to last night on the job for the captain of Engine E, and he was going to get out, and the driver said to him, ‘Why don’t you stay in the rig, Cap, there’s nothing going to be doing here.’ Well, the bricks caved in the roof of the cab and they both received some bad lacerations, but it came out okay in the end. I always knew it could happen at any time. I felt that after all the fires I have been on, all the years I have put in, I had never had a man killed in a fire, whether I was in charge or just working at it. And it just caught up with me. Fate caught up with me. I went to all the wakes. They varied from some of the wives sobbing uncontrollably to others more or less accepting it. The younger wives seemed to take it harder. The families themselves were good to us. They even helped to console us. We’re all family. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
“X was in the hospital for about three weeks and out of the job for above five months. He most his hearing. He had to get hearing aids. He’s getting there. He says he has no real bad afteraffects from it. We had the funerals for the five men on New Year’s Eve, and it was bitter cold. Oh, God, it was a cold day. And we had thousands of men who came from all over the country. It hit every one of us in the department emotionally, to think that on New Year’s Eve, on a butter cold day, all those guys would come up It was just amazing, and it really helped. The case of the illegal usage of the propane tank is still in litigation. It’s been kicked around. The grand jury indicted them, but then they played a little game. The one guy got immunity to testify against the others, then he claimed he was the one who put the tank in there. One of those things.” The Sacramento Fire Department has to be equally committed to reducing civilian deaths as they are to reducing firefighter deaths, and aggressively managing risks will help them do this. The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is fire protection and to respond to emergency situations, and they make a point to do this with compassion. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember, even if things are not going well, and you are a bit tired and sad, raise your children to love America and be patriotic citizens. Also, let them know how important it is to love God and Jesus Christ and to be ethical and moral, and to obey the laws. It is also important to buy American made goods and services, such as cars, clothes, meat, produce, poultry, dairy and fish. We must keep America farms and the automobile industry thriving. We can help stop corruption and evil one person at a time. It only takes five good people to facilitate a change in a small group. To show support for America, remember to buy American cars and American made products. Respect law and order and treat others with dignity and kindness. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, One Nation, under God, Indivisible with Liberty, and Justice for all. God is in His holy Temple, Earthly thoughts be silent now, while reverence we assemble, and before His presence bow. He is with us, now and ever, when we call upon His name, aiding every good endeavour, guiding every upward aim. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Only one more week until the mansion is fully decked out in its holiday finest 🎄✨It is estimated that is you were to try to recreate The Winchester Mystery House, because it is so large, has extremely unique architecture, and many of the materials used are very expensive, rare, and even impossible to find, it would cost well over $500,000,000.00 USD, so preservation, restoration and diligent care is very important to preserve this 8th Wonder of the World and an important piece of American history. Although they do not accept donations, you can contribute by taking tours, buying items in the gift shop, and at the online store.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. Chester the Elf is looking forward to seeing you! https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Morally Outraged Citizens
You have more choices and more opportunities than ever before. Like so many things in life, this is both a blessing and a curse. Too many choices and the fear of making bad decisions often lead to decision paralysis, which is one of the challenges of your generation. Only when the gathering of Earthly gains seems futile, and the gains themselves mere dross, will he stop bartering his precious years for them. When a desire lurks hidden in the heart, it may sway actions or influence thoughts without resistance. However, when it rises to the surface and is seen for what it is, then it can be fought and conquered. As his desires quieten, he finds to his surprise that many things hitherto thought indispensable to existence, he can do well without. He who submits his emotions and passions to reason, and his reason to intuition, will save himself from many regrets. So long as he is buffeted between his passionate desire and his self-hating guilt, so long will a distressing tension be sustained. So far they distract the mind and disturb its peace, the struggle against the passions must go on. If he is willing to be instructed–when passion, uncontrollable and blind, irrational and violent, is behind action, the consequences may be harmful to its owner but they may also be instructive. For life is an educational process, which everybody has to undergo whether the pupils like it or not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
We are not always the same person. At one period of life, a desire may almost enslave us which has no power over us at a later period. The World can be overcome only to the extent that we overcome ourselves, our endless desires and snaring ambitions, our passions and habits. He has not only to deal with his tendencies but also with his compulsions. However, passion is an insurgent, a rebel against reason whose counterbalance it fears and avoids. Even such normal factors as curiosity and ambition become disturbing when they become excessive, unbalanced, and drive the enslaved mind. As the heart opens to this call of the inner self, the demand comes to the will for a more austere habit of living. It is the difference between gentle austerity and harsh asceticism. We continuously try to “read” our own and others’ motives. The most common bases employed for inferring the intentions, feelings, and need of the other people are observation of facial expression, tone of voice, and gestures, which generally disclose what the person is feeling; and observation of the person’s actions and its consequences, from which we try to infer what he or she is up to. Ordinarily, we can check our inferences about the other person’s motives by asking a direct question. When are we justified in assuming that our own or another person’s motives are unconscious? #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We can never be absolutely certain, but we can entertain the hypothesis of unconscious motivation when the person acts in ways that produce consequences he or she denies intending to produce; when the person shows many signs of emotion without admitting he or she is experiencing strong feeling; and when there are obvious inconsistencies in action at different times, for example, kindness and brutality, intelligent and stupid behaviour. In addition to these general signs of unconscious motivation, there are other more subtle indicators that a person is not conscious of real influences upon his or her behaviour. These include: Dream content that seems bizarre and incomprehensible to the dreamer. Daydreams that surprise the daydreamer. Errors and “slips” in speech and writing. Body postures and evidence of bodily tensions. The forgetting of intentions, and of the names of people and places. Accidents of all kinds. Performance on certain projective tests of personality. When I am surrounded by pretending people, I sometimes feel so swamped by meaningless two-dimensional cardboard characters that I feel I may be on my way to the madness that is recognized in madness. I think that this may be the way that some of it comes about. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nothing has to come about in one way only, and the discovery of one way eliminates others because then they are not explored. That does not put them out of existence—just out of mind, like all the other possible approached to bodily illness which the American Medical Association will not admit. I think that when we have found one way, we should use it tentatively, as the best that we have latched onto at this time, and at the same time should go on exploring other ways—with the same tentativeness. It sometimes seems to me that madness that is called insanity may sometimes be a reaction produced by the madness (as I see it) that is called sanity, or “realism.” A patent in a mental hospital told a therapist, “You want me to come into your World, but I lived there for twenty-three years and I don’t like it.” The patient was a very mixed up person, but I don’t think that he was mixed up about that. The more mentally ill a person is, the more they are caught in egocentricity, selfishness and uselessness. As for a “schizophrenic person”—there is no such thing. A person scared out of his wits is not person at all. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information in personnel matters relating to the fire service; provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information; to advocate for the fire service in public matters; promote a modern fire; develop general improvement in fire services throughout that state and encourage a fraternal friendship among firefighters and their families. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
“When the alarm came in at nine-thirty that Wednesday morning, we were in class about the enhanced 911 system. All we knew was it was a baby trapped down a well. We were all told to go back to our stations and wait. Only our captain, X, was taken out there, possibly because he’s a small-boned man, yet real aggressive at whatever he does. We just got bits and pieces of what was going on out there during the rest of the day and through the night. We kept calling the dispatcher and asking is they needed relief people, and they never would let us go over there. I got to bed at the station at about two A.M. and got up at seven, so I had five hours’ sleep. Thursday was supposed to be my day off, when I was going to take care of our youngest child. But my wife, Y, got him ready and took him to the sitter’s. The more I thought about the baby in the well, the more I though I should be out there: I’m skinny, and they’re going down holes, and I can fit down holes. So I loaded up and told the dispatcher they probably needed a paramedic, and he agreed. I just went over there on my own. You could say I volunteered myself. This was about eight-thirty Thursday morning. I had to park two blocks away because all the cars and trucks. There were a could of hundred people there, trying to help. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
“The news people were starting to come in. The well was in the backyard of a house in the middle of the block. Z was already there, standing by the air cascade system they were using to send oxygen down to the trapped baby. The battalion chief and the EMS chief and everybody else were listening to the microphone they had lowered down the well. I saw the hole they had drilled down the day before, about five and a half feet from the well, and they were sending guys down there to drill horizontally across to the well. The well itself was just a metal casing sticking up about two or three inches above ground. It was about eight inches in diameter. They had a yellow tent over it like workers use over manholes in the streets. A fire captain was guarding the air house, a real Mr. By-the-book type guy, who just broke out and started jumping all over anyone who came close to it. Actually, he did a good job. Police officers A and Officer B did all the monitoring of the hole. The baby in the well” (will remained unknow and be called “C” for privacy). “Her parents lived out in the country, and this well was in the backyard of her sister’s house, where she was operating an unlicensed day care center. There were five or six kids in the backyard when C went down the well. The older kids were playing by themselves, and the younger kids were playing by themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
“There was supposed to be a rock over the hole, and I saw some big rocks near there. Then we heard that there was a potted plant sitting on it, and I observed a bucker with what looked like a cactus plant in it that had been turned over and pushed out of the way. They couldn’t tell exactly how far down the well the baby had fallen, because the other small children threw stuff in after her, foliage from the yard. So we could only seen down eighteen feet and lower the mike that far. They were afraid to disturb the plant material, for fear they would make more stuff fall on C. They had lowered flashlights, and when I looked down I saw the lights shining on the green foliage stuff. I listened at the mike and could hear her moaning. That was the last time I looked down the well, but I kept going and checking with the officers on what they were hearing. Supposedly the night before she had slept for about three hours because they didn’t hear noises from her in that time. I don’t know why the kids threw the stuff down the well after her. They were so young they didn’t know the gravity of the situation. Perhaps they were just being playful. There was a story that two older kids put the baby in there, or she might have been pushed. But from the position in which I found her, I feel that she stepped in with one foot, lost her balance, and went down, because one foot was down and one was up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
“My captain, X, had twice been down digging and hard worked for a day and a night, and he had been ordered to go home because he looked exhausted. He could have kept going, he’s in excellent condition, but they felt they had to order him to leave. Chief K of the fire department and Chief D of the police department were pretty much in control of the whole operation. The drilling engineer, Mr. L, was in charge of the digging. And Captain E was a coordinator. There was talk that the first person to reach the baby should take her out. But because there might have been serious injuries to the baby’s neck and back, we thought it should be a paramedic. We talked to the doctors there, and Dr. F and Dr. H, and Dr. I talked to the chiefs for us, and it was agreed it would be a paramedic who would bring the baby out. The only exception would be if, when they broke through to her, she just kind of grabbed somebody and she looked good and healthy, then they could bring her out. We had the smallest backboard all ready, cut down still further in size. The hole they drilled straight down was about thirty inches wide, a pretty good-sized shaft, big enough for two small, skinny guys like Z and myself to stand in it side by side. The tunnel they were digging across to the well was much narrower, but some pretty big guys were doing the drilling. One guy had a forty-six-inch chest, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
“They were digging through hard rock to a point in the well below where the baby was wedged, then coming up vertically beside her, and a window between the two was being chopped out to get to her. They put a sort of bubble or inflated air bag below her to protect her from the drilling. It wasn’t until one o’clock on Friday that the drillers told us they were ready for us to go down. We went over to the hole. Any time we moved toward it, the media went crazy, thinking the rescue was coming up. But the chiefs made us go back to the ambulance. We were brought over to Chief D’s motor home for a last conference, Z and myself and this other guy, J, who was a rapeller, a rope man. Then we went down. I went in first. I was real apprehensive. I don’t go into caves a lot. I’ve been in tight places, but usually by choice, not by need. I’m real cautious, aggressive but cautious. I try to evaluate everything before I do it. Mr. L was still in the hole. He took the bubble out and talked to me for a minute. Then I went into the tunnel. I had no room at all. I had to decide whether to go on my stomach or my back. My shoulders were pressed on both sides. I had to position the light so it would shine up into the well. I got my first look at her. But I couldn’t touch her. To get my arm in there, I had to crawl back out and start back in with my arm ahead of me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“The width of the tunnel was probably fifteen to sixteen inches, and its height was no more than twelve to fourteen inches. I had no headroom. When my head was at the back of the tunnel was the only time I could see up into the well. I got scratched all over my forearm and elbow forcing my arm up into the well. I though, ‘Oh, God, how am I going to do this?’ All I saw dangling down was her left foot. So first off, I started an evaluation of her physically. How is she doing? What can she move? What can’t she move? People had told us they thought she was horizontal in some kind of widening of the shaft. So I couldn’t just start pulling because I was afraid I would snap her back or her neck. They had said I could reach her. But reaching up with my right arm, I could feel her left leg and her buttocks, and that was it. I couldn’t reach any higher or find her right leg or anything else. She was conscious. Not crying, but moaning. I got her to move her left foot for me. She did that. I told her to move her upper body, and I could feel her move somewhat. It looked like she was trying. I told her to push as hard as she could with her right foot, and it seemed that she went up a little bit. I communicated all this to the doctor by the phone line they had down there. They gave me a wedge made of a two-by-four and a round piece of plywood on top, supposedly to push her up and feel around her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
“I was able to push her no more than three inches. It sounded like she was throwing up. I told her to turn her head to the side and spit it up. I didn’t want her strangling on her own throw-up. I determined that we couldn’t get her out right then. I didn’t know what position she was in, and I didn’t have enough room. So I told her we’d be back. To me, on God’s green Earth, that’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life, leave that little girl in the well that first time. I came back out. We went into conference, and all the chiefs and doctors were there. And every time I would get close to talking about having to leave her there, I would get teary-eyed, and my voice would crack. The doctors took this as a sign of emotional instability or whatever. It was the first time I had been in a situation like that, and with me, the first time I go into something, as a paramedic or firefighter, I always get real emotional. When we got out of the hole, Z was first, and his face was so solemn that people thought it meant that the baby was dead. This big water drill had been there since early in the morning, but they hadn’t put it in use because Mr. L thought it was too dangerous. They had flown it from Memphis to Huston on a United Parcel 747. It took a place that size to carry it. So Chief A and Chief D insisted that Mr. L use the water drill. So they took it down there, and they really did a good job with it. Meanwhile, the doctors were talking to the chief, expressing their concern about whether I was emotionally and physically able to go back down in. #RadolphHarris 10 of 17
“He took me aside. He said, ‘We don’t need any macho trips. There’s no shame. If you can’t go down in, just tell me, just be honest with me.’ I told him, ‘Chief, I can go down one more time. If we don’t get her out this time, there is no way I can go down again. I would be mentally, emotionally, and physically wiped out.’ So he understood that, and he backed me. Assistant Chief M backed me. Evidently Chief D did, too. And N, the EMS chief, really backed me. He said I was the one to do it. They had confidence in me. We had plenty of guys in the department who were willing to go down, so they really had to feel good about me or they wouldn’t have let me. We went down a second time. I’m not really sure of the time, I know it was still daylight, six-thirty or seven. We had done a lot of sitting around, waiting. Everybody was saying, this is our last chance. Nobody said it to me personally, but the word was, if we had to break bones, break bones. Whatever we had to do to get her out. J, the rope man, came up with a device I could lift her with, a tripod pole maybe an inch wide, with the tape on the top. He was the guy who did all the rigging in the hole. He helped us a lot. Down in the tunnel, Mr. L said, “This is it, O. This is the best it’s going to get.” They had chipped away with the water drill and give me some headroom and more shoulder room. So he went to the surface, and Z came down with the stuff we thought we were going to need. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
“I had the tripod pole with me. I went into the hole and talked to baby C. I tried to lift her with the tripod pole, and it was too short. So Z got J on the phone, and he found me a longer tripod pole. This one had a rubber stopper on the tip of it. I tried to push the baby with it, and I couldn’t move her at all. I was lying there trying to figure out what to do. Looking at the tripod pole, I saw that the other end of it had a rubberized point that couldn’t hurt anybody. So I used it as a probe to see if I could figure out the position of her body. I poked it up the wall of the well shaft along her spine. I knew if I encountered anything solid, that would give me some indication of what body part was where. I ran it up along her spine past her head, and air rushed down at me from the well above her. That meant she was in a vertical position. Her back was straight up and down. I did the same thing with the pole at the side of the shaft where the right leg should be. It went all the way up, and air rushed through again. So I knew her right foot was up by her head somewhere. I went all the way around her body with the pole. Then I knew that she wasn’t in any crevice or bubble-shaped position. The metal casing I had seen at the top of the well didn’t go very far down, and the rest of the well was lined with a sticky petroleum-type substance. It was like glue or tar. I had it all over my hands. If you got into the stuff, you just stuck to it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
So then I knew she wasn’t lying down and I could pull on her without breaking her back or injuring anything. I talked to Dr. P and the female pediatrician, Dr. Q, and I called for the K-Y jelly. They sent down some baby forceps that they use at childbirth, but they were useless in this tunnel. Earlier I had tried to use goggles to keep stuff from falling in my eyes, but they fogged up immediately. It was real warm and humid down there. I was down there close to an hour and a half. All activity above the hole had totally ceased. Z opened the K-Y jelly and gave it to me, but there was a seal that had to be broken, so I had to throw it back to him to break that. This whole time he was doing great. He was having to deal with those at the top on the phone, and he was having to deal with me, because when I wanted something I wanted it two seconds ago, not later. And his legs were cramping real bad at the same time, and I didn’t know it. I smeared the K-Y jelly over the walls of the well all the way up to the baby’s bottom. Now I needed paper towels because I’ve got this stuff all over the place. I told Z that is the paper towels hit him on the head and knocked him out, I was going to kill him. My attempted at a joke. Now came the pulling time. I was totally confident. I felt we were going to get her out, no matter what it took. And I wasn’t going to some out of that hole without her, unless they came and dragged me out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
“She had on snap-on pants. They had come undone from the left leg, and I was using them to pull on. She was stuck to the walls, and she was crying and whining. I would pull as hard as I could, and she would tense up; then as soon as she would relax, I would pull again. The first couple of inches were the hardest to get her to move. They were really pressuring us from the top. I had Z tell them we had moved her a quarter of an inch, to get them to leave us alone for a while. I was pulling as hard as I could, and she kept tensing up. Both of my arms were exhausted. My right arm went numb two or three times. Once I got her started in the K-Y jelly, I was able to move her a half inch at a time, and she would tense up again. I knew she was coming down. Z got the backboard ready. When I got her all the way into the K-Y jelly, I had no more problems. I got her out of the hole and turned over on my stomach. I reached for the backboard, but there wasn’t room for it, because her right leg was beside the right side of her head. All the time I was telling her to stay calm, that we were going to get her out, we weren’t going to leave her again. When I got her in the K-Y jelly, she was quieter, because it wasn’t hurting her anymore. She didn’t say a word. Of course, she was only eighteen months old. She made different sounds, but nothing I could understand. She knew someone was there trying to help her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I couldn’t get her out on the board, so I pulled her onto my right arm, supporting her back and neck. The light hit her left pupil and she reacted, which was great. It was a good sign. I pulled her right leg in far enough so I could get her on the backboard. Z was getting stuffy out of the way, and while I was waiting, I said something like ‘Great’ or ‘Fantastic.’ I said it too loud, and she jumped a little bit. To me that was a good sign, too. But all she was doing was lying on the board, just looking around, real relaxed. I slipped her out, supporting her with my legs, and Z wrapped her waist to her chest. We used a Velcro strap across her chest to make sure she stayed on the board. Z put a towel on her neck, because the cervical collar was too small. I took white surgical tape and went all around the board and around the towel. Her hands were welded to her temples by the sticky substance. We left her right hand where it was. We didn’t try to straighten out any limbs. We finished getting her strapped. Then Z stood in the shaft holding her. I secured her to him with seat belt straps. I secured them both to the tether line of the back board, and I attached him to the main cable of the rig. So he went up with her. The only thing that fell down from her was a pair of toy binoculars and a few twigs. When I first got her, there was a big twig between her right arm and her chest. I thought it was embedded, but when I moved her arm I saw that it wasn’t, so I threw it out of the way. Nothing else, none of the green stuff. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“I heard them yell and scream up top, everybody was just ecstatic. I was yelling, too. Nobody could hear me, but I didn’t care. I was totally calm. As a matter of fact, I was totally exhausted, mentally and emotionally. I was light-headed, I was having a hard time focusing. I just felt I needed oxygen. So I was trying to get stuff together, and the chief said, ‘Come out now.’ He meant now, and he said it a couple of times. So I said, ‘The heck with this stuff.’ They brought me out, and I shook the chief’s hand. He’s a big man, and I just laid my head on his shoulder for a minute. I did see little C and her parents at the hospital. She looked a lot different, a lot better. She looked somewhat swollen, and I hadn’t realized that mark on her forehead was such a bad scrape. They planted a tree in that backyard that will live as long as she does. And we’re going to put a plaque on that backboard and put it in our museum. It was great to be part of it. The next time I might not be so lucky. I know that the job I do is well worth all the time and all the nonsense we go through, and the good times and the bad times. If I end up dying of cancer because of the smoke, or if I end up dying in a fire, I never think about that. I know it can happen, but that’s my job, and I love doing it. I’ve thought in the past about switching, but this guy’s going to be there until they run me off. Until I can’t do it anymore.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the citizens of Sacramento with the ability to create safer communities; they assist and support the fire service community and the protection of life and property; and they promote and enhance firefighter safety; the Sacramento Fire Department also provides a fire service leadership presence in the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security in order to direct policy and legislation on all fire related matters. Their core values are innovation, inclusivity, dedication, courageousness, excellence, ethicality, professionalism, and transparency. You can help save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. As along, respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. And to ensure you have a bright future, please take your education seriously. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Our exclusive Flashlight Tour is back for one night only this December, Friday the 13th! 🔦🌙
Venture through the dark, winding halls of the mansion at night—armed only with a flashlight and your courage. And when the lights go out… there’s no turning back! (link in bio)
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
The Skull-Rapping of Internal Dialogue
Being filled with God’s love shields us in life’s storms but also makes the happy moments happier. At the age of twenty-one, Max quit the seminary, frustrated but sure that he had, as usual, gotten the best of the bargain. He was young, ambitious, and held a bachelor’s degree which had been paid for by his parents. One of his plans included a profession whose practitioners also had a corner on being right: medicine. So after a minimum two-years army stint, Max enrolled in a prestigious California medical school, knowing from the first day that he wanted the most sought after and highest paying specialty of all: surgery. The years of school, internship and residency seemed to drag on forever. Max’s ambition made him impatient, but he invested his time wisely. He cultivated friendships with the ranking doctors in his hospital. He made sure he was on the lists to join their clubs when the time was right. Later, as he began practicing “for real,” all his investments paid off. Max became a good surgeon. Not the best, but certainly able to appear like one of the best. There were men on the staff who were better than he, but Max made it his business to see that they did not stay with the hospital long. He found out which ones drank a bit more than they should. He hired investigators to follow the surgeons who were above him on the hospital’s ladder. Should one of the ranking men be followed to an “indiscreet” apartment, Max would learn of it, confront the man about it, and that man would willingly seek an association with a different hospital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
In this way, Max worked himself up in rank until there was no one above him but the chief surgeon, a tough, dictatorial man who took orders from no one, not even the hospital’s top management. Though Max was only number two, he had the authority to run his part of the organization as he chose. One of his priorities was to concentrate on doing the kinds of surgery which paid the best for the least amount of work. Max liked money, but he never did relish a great deal of work. And yes, he did make a great deal of money. Early in his career, Max had met and married Alana, a young lady who was also Catholic, and who had come to California from Harrisburg, South Dakota, in the hope of becoming a movie star. After several futile years of walk-on parts and waiting tables, she had resigned herself to marriage, babies and a home. Max considered Alana the ideal wife for his purposes: good-looking, passive, and best of all, devoted. She kept a clean home, doted over the children and dutifully held dinner until he arrived. He was as much in control at home as he was in the hospital. He managed to always be “right” and always have the last word—like a judge in his own courtroom. It was in the early-2000’s that Max’s carefully constructed little empire began to fall apart—and it started with pleasures of the flesh. After years of unsatisfying pleasures of the flesh with Alana, Max craved a more exciting woman. Alana was warmth; he wanted passion. She was giving; he wanted to be taken. She surrendered; he wanted someone who refused to submit. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
One day Max was presiding over a meeting in which his staff was discussing instituting a new surgical procedure. One of the nurses, a woman named Bianca, had taken issues with him over the procedure. Angered, Max pointed his finger at her and said, “Look, little girl, I’ve been carving up people in this hospital for a long time and I know when something won’t work. This won’t work.” Much to his surprise, Bianca slapped his had away with eyes blazing, shot back, “Don’t you dare point your finger at me, you male chauvinistic pig! I’m a woman, not a little girl, and I know something about surgery too. If you’re so damn smart, why are you paying me $250,000 a year to help you, then not accepting the help when I offer it? This procedure will work, and I’ll be happy to take it to any other hospital while you sit here, admiring your own face in the mirror!” Max was infuriated. Ordinarily, he would have had a nurse discharged on the spot for talking to him that way. However, this was different. This was a spicy and passionate woman! He had to have her. He knew it was dangerous to get involved with a woman from the hospital. He knew it was a mortal sin, adultery. He knew that seeing Bianca was a dead end because he was still too Catholic to get a divorce. However, Bianca ignited him sexually. She did not give him pleasures of the flesh, she took it from him. In their conversations, she battled him, cursed at him, and outwitted him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
For the first time in his life, Max was able to lose battles without feeling beaten. Though Max was a formidable opponent, she was not a threat. She was not after his position; she only sought to maintain hers. In quiet moments at her apartment, he could be soft, vulnerable, frightened. He could tell her what scared him. He could lay his head in her lap and confess his sins the way he never could to any priest. In the midst of this, Max’s boss decided to do the only thing that could possibly undermine Max’s position: disband his unit. He was nearing retirement and was enamored with the thought of retiring in a blaze of glory rather than leaving the unit for Max to mold to his own way of doing things. Max fought the idea, but the old man was adamant. Later one afternoon, in the middle of a routine discussion, the chief surgeon glanced at his watch and said, “Hey, I’ve gotta go. I’ll be late for group.” “Late for what?” Max asked. “Group therapy. You know, like in psychology.” “What for? You’re not crazy. Or are you?” “No, I’m not crazy,” the old doctor said. “It’s just that I’ve got a few problems. It helps to air them out—in a nonthreatening situation.” Max thought of his evenings with Bianca. “Yeah, I know. That is good, sometimes.” “Besides,” the older man continued, “it really gives me a lot of insight about people, what make them tick. I’m getting so I can almost guess what people are going to do and say next.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
A warning light went on in Max’s head. “You mean, with this psycho stuff, you can anticipate what someone—like me, for instance—might do in a given situation?” “Not always. But I’ve tried it, and it’s worked.” Max did not relish the notion of his enemies having weapons which he himself did not possess. He decided to look into group therapy. In our first sessions, it was obvious Max was there to learn about other people, not about himself. His questions were intelligent and to the point, but his interest was more academic than personal. However, gradually, in the frankness and comfort of the sessions, he began to open up. He started telling the others what he thought of them—and was interested to hear how they felt about him. Lark surprised us one night when she blurted, “You know, Max, you’re a chauvinistic pig. But in a strange way, you’re lovable.” “Thanks,” he said. “I consider both of those evaluations to be compliments.” “Don’t try to be smart,” she snapped. “What I’m trying to say is that I could love you. Not as—as a lover, or anything, but for who you are. If only you weren’t trying to be so touch all the time.” With that remark, the door to the interior Max opened a crack. In the months that followed, we did get to know him as he told us of his childhood, his career and finally, his affair. He began to “fill out” as someone quite human. We felt our affection for him growing with each disclosure. And he knew it. What intrigued him most was the notion that the women in the group could love him without feeling sexual attraction to him—something he had never run into before. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
The blemishes in a romantic relations or marriage are diminished with a focus on love. One thing you never want to do is constantly manipulate people. Manipulators often end up in trouble with the law. Sometimes criminals become too “hot.” And they have to leave the country. Or else, who knows. They live on the run. Under the gun. Messing up. Holding on. Learning, we hope. Black leaders say they want a popular front with whites and browns and reds and technicolor kids. They see the old structure crumbling. They sense the change. Like everyone else, they want to channel it their way. Who can blame them? They say they want to work with white kids. Maybe they want to use them. They are under pressure from everyone. They say they are nonracists, internationalists. They publicly back every antisystem group. Reverand Al Sharpton and Dr. Cornel West have supported long hair, new life-style, women’s lib. They insist they are the vanguard. The coming new year will tell a lot. Reverand Al Sharpton calls himself a supporter of the U.S. Constitution. He calls himself Supreme Commander. Dr. Cornel West is always a ruthless enigma. There is one way to find out where the Panthers are. Black leaders sometimes welcome white kids who do not fit in with the establishment. However, if you want to stay of a good legal ground, you may want to follow the law and try to become part of the establishment. Have lunch around the campfire. Eat organic flour pancakes. Fresh vegetables. Steamed soup. Enjoy tender good-byes to your hosts. Otherwise, for the next ten years you will only see the underground network form in communes. You will ride with the dealers and talk over tepee fires with new tribes, and have to get used to animal skins and rifles on the wall, while listening to the Chief speak quietly of the prophecies. About how the white machine men will destroy themselves with greed, and being a young white man, it might be kind of conflicting, unless you accept that you have a black soul, light skin with a Cadillac and a perm and blue eyes. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Acts of self-denial, austerities, are to be valued not for their own sakes but for the sake of the purification of the soul. They can take to a simpler life. It does not demand a bare and spartan existence. It means only that they can eliminate useless luxuries and excessive pleasures, stop buying what they need not buy and keep money they cannot afford to spend. By living a simpler life, by becoming more frugal and less spendthrift, they can cut down their wants, diminish their desires, lessen discontent, and perhaps even become happier. It will be easier to call their soul their own. We live on different layers of desire from the beastly to the angelic. When lust is merely submerged and not supplanted, it will sooner or later reassert itself. Let is an extreme intoxication of the bodily senses, a fire of carnal passion which submerges reason, and an enslavement of desire which tyrannizes over countless victims. A wiser course than total suppression is to limit desires and govern passions. We are conscious of an animal in us. If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity, I would go to see him forthwith. When the pursuit of pleasure, and especially physical pleasures, becomes excessive, it becomes a vice. Where is his mind’s peace when he is racked by desires, irritated by frustrations, and denied even the compensation of knowing why he is suffering? Instinct fights with intellect but purified, elevated, and instructed, it can harmonize with the other, both working together for the benefit of man. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
The irony of this picture of men rejecting their freedom and preferring their chains would be unbelievable, did we not know how gilded those chains are. The terrestrial nature in man may be recognized by the ferocity, the gluttony, the hate, and the violence in man. It is certain that the heart which is agitated again and again by the yearning for sensual joys will not know the calm happiness of spiritual joys. To what better use can a man put his will than the eradication of hatreds and the subduing of passions? For out of those two sources alone come so many wrong deeds and so much consequent suffering. A man may be so infatuated with his lower nature that he prefers to be agitated and disturbed by its passions rather than to attain the unruffled calmness of his higher nature. When I see people showing Christlike love for one another, it feels to me as if that love contains more than just their love; it is love that also has divinity in it. When we love one another in this way, as completely and fully as we can, Heaven gets involved too. So, if someone we care about seems distant from a sense of divine love, we do things that bring us closer to God ourselves and then do things that bring us close to them—and unspoken beckoning to come to Christ. Sometimes people are surrounded by a chorus of voices of discouragement and darkness that weighs into their thoughts, messages telling them they are too wounded and confused, too weak and overlooked, too different or disoriented to warrant Heavenly love in any real way. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
What part, in this Universe, could pleasure play or the exquisite joy of acquiescent and accomplice bodies? In it we find an impossible quest for escape from despair—a quest that finishes, nevertheless, in a desperate race from servitude to servitude and from prison to prison. If only nature is real and if, in nature, only desire and destruction are legitimate, then, in that all humanity does not suffice to assuage the first for blood, the path of destruction must lead to universal annihilation. We must be come, according to Sade’s formula, nature’s executioner. However, even that position is not achieved too easily. When the accounts are closed, when all the victims are massacred, the executioners are left face to face in the deserted castle. Something is still missing. The tortured bodies return, in their elements, to nature and will be born again. Even murder cannot be fully consummated: “Murder only deprives the victim of his first life; a means must be found of depriving him of his second.” Sade contemplates an attack on creation: “I abhor nature…I should like to upset its plans, to thwart its progress, to halt the stars in their courses, to overturn the floating spheres of space, to destroy what serves nature and to succor all that harms it; in a word, to insult it in all its works, and I cannot succeed in doing so.” It is in vain that he dreams of a technician who can pulverize the Universe: he knows that, in the dust of the spheres, like will continue. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The attack against creation is doomed to failure. It is impossible to destroy everything, there is always a remainder. “I cannot succeed in doing so…” the icy and implacable Universe suddenly relents at the appalling melancholy by which Sade, in the end and quite unwillingly, always moves. “We could perhaps attack the sun, deprive the universe of it, or use it to set fire to the world—those would be real crimes…” Crimes, yes, but not the definitive crime. It is necessary to go farther. The executioners eye each other with suspicion. They are alone, and one law alone governs them: the law of power. As they accepted it when they were masters, they cannot reject it if it turns against them. All power tends to be unique and solitary. Murder must be repeated: in their turn the masters will tear one another to pieces. Sade accepts this consequence and does not flinch. A curious kind of stoicism, derived from vice, sheds a little light in the dark places of his rebellious soul. He will not try to live again in the World of affection and compromise. The drawbridge will not be lowered; he will accept personal annihilation. The unbridled force of his refusal achieves, at its climax, an unconditional acceptance that is not without nobility. The master consents to be the slave in his turn and even, perhaps, wishes to be. The scaffold would be for me the throne of voluptuousness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A man told me when I was very sick, “I have never known anyone so hell-bent on self-expression as you are!” He sounded both friendly and exasperated. I did not feel capable at that time of what I thought of as “self-expression” but I felt guilty just the same, with the piled-up accusations of the past. I had tried very hard to be “normal” but had not been successful enough to escape criticism. At the same time that I felt guilty, a little growingness is me protested, saying, “Well…I guess everyone is doing that really—expressing himself in one way or another.” I was very confused, and gropingly trying to understand what I do now. “Yes…” said my friend. “I guess you could say that a person is expressing himself when he makes a slightly different stew. But you have to go over it that way.” He gestured with his arms, showing the two ways over the hill. I realized then that he meant that I was trying to find my own way out of being sick, instead of “accepting it” and “making the best of it” as people said I should. I “saw” a hill—that is, I visualized it…Habits are certainly difficult to break. It visualized itself, spontaneously, as a dream does. I had nothing to do with it except that it happened in me…There was a picture in my mind of an endless train of passenger cars full of laughing people going over the hill on one side, while I was wearily plodding over it on the other side, alone. (When I am confused, I am always weary—worn out by conflict.) #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
I felt “wrong” for not going the way that everyone else did. However, my “vision” told me clearly, “They are not happy. They are just pretending to be happy. They have done it for so long they have fooled themselves.” Laughter can be a cover for unhappiness, particularly when signs of happiness are acceptable and those of unhappiness are tabu. Is not pretending being out of touch with reality too? Caught in the mesh of a script apparatus, men meanwhile have their own autonomous aspirations. These usually appear to him in daydreams in his leisure hours, or in hypnagogic hallucinations before he falls asleep; the brave deeds he should have done this morning, or the tranquil scenes he looks forward to in later years. All men and all women have their secret gardens, whose gates they guard against the profane invasion of the vulgar crowd. If they could do as they please, these are visual pictures of what they would do. The lucky ones find the right time, place, and person, and get to do it, while the rest must wander wistfully outside their own walls. And that is what this essay is about: What happens outside those walls, the external transactions that parch or water the flowers within. What people want to do is shown in visual pictures, the home movies they make inside their skulls. What they do do is decided by voices, the skull-rapping of internal dialogue. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Each sentence they say and each scripty decision is the result of such a dialogue: Mother says and Father says and Adult says You had better, while Child, thus encircled, tries to break through to get what he wants. No one can know the enormous, amazing, and almost infinite amount of dialogue he has stored up in the dim-lit caverns of his mind. There are complete answers there to questions he never even dreamed of. However, if the right button is pushed, sometimes they pour out in sheer poetry. Grasp your right forefinger in your left hand. What is your hand saying to your finger, and what does finger have to say for himself? If you do this right, you will soon find a lively and meaningful conversation going on between them. The amazing part is that it was there all the time, and so are hundreds of others. If you have a cold and an upset stomach, what is your churning stomach saying to your congested nose? If you are sitting with your foot swinging, what has your foot got to say to you today? Ask it and it will answer. The dialogue is right there in your head. All this was discovered, or at least brought into full light by the originator of Gestalt therapy, F.S. Perls. Similarly, all your decisions are made by four or five people in your head, whose voices you can overlook if you are too proud to hear them, but they will be there next time if you care to listen. Script analysts learn how to amplify and identity these voices, and that is an important part of their therapy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The object of script analysis is to free the individual so they one can open the garden of their aspirations to the World. It does that by cutting through the Babel in their heads until the Child can say: “But this is what I want to do, and I would rather do it my own way.” The dom-species impose two sets of taboos to maintain its equilibrium and hive-solidarity—exdom taboos condemn the past and predom taboos condemn the future. In other words, the dom-species is held together by its opposition to the proximal past and future stages. The shames attached to cannibalism, violence, violation of property, dishonesty, and rape are examples of exdom taboos. The Ten Commandments are a valuable index of the neurogenetic stage of the time. Thou shall honour thy parents; thou shall not steal, kill, lie, sexually trespass, or violate territory within the hive. Thou shall adore the hive-totem and not worship past pagan Gods or Future Gods. Social welfare countries, exemplified by retiring elders, place under taboo all forms of individuality—both past and future. Domesticated adults’ societies—the demoncratic-bourgeois—place under taboo stage ten barbarian teenager feudal elitism as well as the retiring elders state power brains and Me-generation grown-up post-familial individuality. The predom brain-reality consumer taboo in the latter 20th Century condemned intervention into brain control—either by others or self. Thus, the revulsion against CIA brain experiments using drugs or bioelectrical means. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The predom self-actualized brain reality taboo against self-directed brain change was even more rigid. While there was some liberal hand-wringing about CIA experiments with LSD, there was stark terror at the thought of self-appointed individuals using psychedelic drugs to change their own realities. The predom accelerated brain reality fused taboo against intentional communes of individuals linking to create new realities was very pervasive in the 20th Century. Every attempt to construct such communities was routinely snuffed. If they are expedient and success justified the use of arms, Marxism always held the point of view that weapons are to be used. The accuracy of this point of view was demonstrated in the days from the November 7 to 11, 1918. At that time, Marxism did not care at all for parliament of democracy and killed them both through howling and gun firing criminal gangs. The privileged-class chatter-boxes were defenseless in this moment. To be aware of a need means to experience and identify some lack. Thus, a person may be deprived of pleasures of the flesh, admit it, and set about the task of obtaining gratification with pleasures of the flesh. However, suppose the person regards wishes for pleasures of the flesh as forbidden? Under these conditions, acknowledgment of real feelings might give rise to powerful guilt or anxiety. The guilt or anxiety will then motivate the person to rid his or her mind of the offending thoughts. This effort is called repression. Repression of wishes and feeling does not annihilate them; it renders them unconscious. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
A healthier direction would be for the person to keep the feelings in the conscious realm, learn to understand them, and choose to either have an experience involving pleasures of the flesh or not, depending upon his or her personal value system and the ethical-religious beliefs that are a part of the person’s conscious life. One of Dr. Freud’s greatest contributions to human understanding was his effort to decipher unconscious motivation through the study of dreams, slips of the tongue, and accidents. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to protect the community from the devastating effects of fire. Of course, one of those methods is to extinguish them but, they are more cost-effective when they are “proactive” in preventing them. Therefore, the ultimate goal of the Sacramento Fire Department is to precent as many fires as possible and put into place systems which allow for the earliest detection of fires rather than simply waiting until they occur. They do this to avoid greater loss of life, property and potential injuries to both firefighters and the residents they serve. “In these California brush fires, there are two basic types of situations. There’s the situation where you’re busting your behind the entire time you’re on the fire line. And the reverse situation, where you’re in a ready reserve area and end up doing nothing. They’re not the type of thing, like in urban areas, where a fire department comes running in, Johnny-on-the-spot, and puts the fire out. The fire service in California is at the whim of the weather. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
“These things are very difficult to combat, because you’re often fighting a fire fueled by chaparral or other brush that hasn’t burned through for over a hundred years. The fuel load is tremendous and often in inaccessible areas, so that the firefighters don’t become so much involved in the actual extinguishment attempts as in protecting structures. You might have ten or fifteen companies assigned to one block in a hillside area to prevent the homes from going on fire. I remember several fires where we were doing just that. We were up on the roof wetting down in preparation for a fire sweeping through or using heavy stream application onto the brush areas surrounding the homes. But usually, when the fire comes through, it’s almost as if your efforts were totally fruitless. The area becomes on intense that it’s necessary for you to seek shelter inside the home. That’s the only way you can get away from it. There’s nothing that hiding under the fire truck is going to do for you. You just have to drop the hose line and run. A few years ago, I was assigned to Engine X in south central Los Angeles, and we were dispatched to a major brush fire in Mandeville Canyon, along with four other engine companies, to form a brush strike team. On arrival, we were given the assignment to protect a particular home on a street in the immediate area. The fire was some distance away but was expected to hit our area after dark. I knew we were in for a long night. I expected this fire to be like others I had been on: long hours of nothing, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“We laid out the hoses and prepared the residence by removing combustibles from the outside of the home. We closed all the windows and made sure the doors were all unlocked and the lights were on, in case this became our refuge when the fire swept through the heavy brush surrounding the house. I remembered previous situations, pending hors soaking the home and everything around it only to have the hot, dry Santa Ana winds and the winds from the fire turning everything bone dry in seconds. In this case, we were almost immediately engulfed in a hailstorm of burning embers blown by the fifty-mile-an-hour winds. We stood our ground, soaking the wood-shake shingle roof with an inch-and-a-half line, when the captain gave the order to drop the house line and get insides the house. It was the only place that offered us any safety from the heavy smoke and the furious ember-laden winds. We had three lines around the home. We dropped them, and we all congregated in the main hallways of the house. I was relieved that no one had suffered much more than the usual heavy dose of smoke and a few burns from the flying embers. We were in there only three or four minutes when the fire engulfed the whole surrounding area. The hallway was positioned in such a way that we could see out through the large number of glass patio doors in the back. You do not want to be close to the windows or that number of glass doors, when you’ve got that kind of superheated wind blowing around. We were still able to see, but from a distance from the windows. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
“The idea, of course, is that the fire will mover swiftly past in the force of the wind. The thought certainly occurred to us that the fire could take the building, too. It’s always a distinct possibility. Given the two choices of being outside in the furious winds and the embers that are blowing around and chunks of tree branches and everything that’s carried by these tremendous winds, being in the house is probably the better of the two choices. Besides, it was tremendously hard to breathe out there. We weren’t using anything more than bandannas across our faces, because the breathing apparatus in this type of environment is more restrictive than it is helpful, so you don’t use it. You just resort to the old brushfire standby, the bandanna over the nose and face. It’s still difficult to breathe, not only because of the heavy smoke, but the hot dry winds, of themselves, make it difficult. It was nighttime, and the scene through the patio doors was spectacular, like millions of fireflies, though they were really embers blown by the tremendous wind. They were more like balls of hail—fireballs of hail going past. As soon as the fire sweeps through your area, that’s when you spring back into action, retrieve your house line, and start putting out the roof fires or whatever else may have become ignited. It’s a scary situation. When you’re in the house, you’re praying like heck that the house doesn’t burn down. In this case, when we went outside we were greatly relieved to see only a few small wisps of smoke coming off the roof, and we doused them. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“This is not such an exceptional thing. Hundred of other guys out here have been in the same situation.” The Sacramento Fire Department protects people in Sacramento, in other parts of California and across the United States of America every single day—but did you know that they are looking after everyone’s future, too? You can help save lives by being patriotic and donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. Being patriotic means being proud of who you are as an American. It is important to raise your children to love America. When you choose American-made cars and other goods and services, this results in higher quality products that save money in the long run due to their quality, safety standards, and long-lasting durability. It is imperative to love God and His Son, Jesus Christ. When we love God and Jesus Christ, we experience joy and fulfillment. As citizens, we respect the laws because they are clearly communicated and fairly enforced. Everyone is held accountable to the same laws, and those laws protect our fundamental rights. The United States Constitution is the foundation of the rule of law in America. Education provides stability in life, and it is something that no one can ever take away from you. By being well-educated, and holding a college degree, you increase your chances for better career opportunities and open new doors for yourself. From an early age, it is important to read books. Reading books may have several physical and mental benefits. These include strengthening your brain, increasing your ability to empathize, reducing stress, building your vocabular, and it will help you with spelling and to become a better writer. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Reading also reduced stress, can alleviate depression, and reduce age-related cognitive decline. Showing respect to others, especially the elderly benefits everyone. When people feel valued, their emotional well-being improves, and they will have better health outcomes. Younger people will also gain perspective and enjoyment from intergenerational relationships. Pledge allegiance to the American flag is a symbolic act that represents loyalty and devotion to one’s country. It used to be a ritual in every school during first period. Pledging allegiance to the American flag is often seen as a patriotic gesture, reflecting a sense of unity and shared values among citizens. We are willing to humble ourselves before God, willing to repent, willing to learn, and willing to change. The flag of the United States of America represents not just our country as a political unit, but the principles that bind us together as Americans, namely individual liberty, and unalienable natural rights, endowed by our Creator, which the government shall not infringe upon. Reciting the Pledge is not a compulsion, but a mark of patriotism to the country. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. God of Might, God of Right, Thee we give all glory; Thine all praise in these days as in ages hoary, when we hear, year by year freedom’s wondrous story. Now as erst, when Thou first made’st the proclamation, warning loud every proud, every tyrant nation, we, Thy fame still proclaim, bend in adoration. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another; as I have loved you,” reports John 13.34. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
The Winchester Mystery House
Did you know that when Mrs. Winchester was alive, in addition to her mansion, there were other Victorian houses on the estate as well as gazebos?
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
It Comes on You Like a Spell and Your Poor Mind is Full of Hell
Every cross roads has a story. The Devil and his works have long assumed many forms. In modern America, rebellion for the sake of rebellion has taken precedence over genuine need for change. The frozen sperm of Satan’s magical children have been born upon the Earth. The child is no longer made in the image of God, but in the form of Satan. The quality of children has become more important than the quantity because relative material stability has been reached with the help of technology. A child who can produce is more important than having many children. A swordsman needs but a good smith to forge him a stout blade. Christians are facing a conflict because as man becomes more able to extend his life and prevent death, many consider this to be due to witchcraft and demonic elixirs which are not natural. Some question if Christians will want to experience immortality because they cannot afford to be aligned with things of the Devil. Satanism differs from other religion because it does not hold man enthrall of a fantasy, it rather President a little slice of Heaven here on Earth, known as The American Dream. Satanism is taken out of logical rather than desperation. The need for a cultural stimulus and aesthetic satisfaction has been with us every since the struggle to stay alive ceased to be so whelming that it absorbed all of man’s time and energy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
William was a general practitioner in an isolated area in the Rockies. There was no other doctor for miles around. He worked day and night, but no matter how hard he worked there was never enough to support his large family and he was always in debt to the bank. For a long time, he had advertised in medical journals for a partner to give him some relief, but he insisted that no one suitable had ever shown up. He operated in fields, homes, and hospitals, and sometimes at the bottom of a mountain crag. He was immensely resourceful and almost completely exhausted, but not quite. He came for treatment with his wife because they were having marital problems, and his blood pressure was going up. In the end, he found a University Hospital not far away which has some fellowships for general practitioners who wanted to become specialist. This time he did find someone to take his pace as a country doctor. He gave up his complex and lucrative practice and found that he had enough assets to keep his family going while he settled down as a surgical resident with a small stipend. “I’ve always wanted to do this,” he said. “But I never thought I’d get away from my driving Father Part until I’d had a coronary. But I didn’t have a coronary, and this is the happiest time of my life.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
It is evident that his spellbreaker was to have a coronary, and he thought that was the only way he would ever get off the hook. However, with the help of the group, he did manage to break out of his script in good health. William illustrates in a relatively simple and clear-cut way the action of the whole script apparatus. His counter script came from both parents: “Work hard.” His father than gave him the pattern of a hard-working doctor. His mother’s injunction was “Never give up. Work hard until you drop dead.” However, his father gave him the spellbreaker: “If you have a coronary, you can relax, ha ha.” With his treatment did was get into that part of his brain or mind whence all these voices sent their directives. The injunction was then lifted by giving him permission: “You can relax without having a coronary.” When this permission made it way through all the shells and devices protecting the script apparatus, it broke the curse. Note that it was useless to say to him “If you keep on this way, you will have a coronary.” He was well aware of that threat, and telling him again only made him feel more miserable because he wanted a coronary, which would free him one way or another. What he needed was not a threat, nor an order (he already had enough orders in his head), but a license that would liberate him for those orders, and that is what he got. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Then he ceased to be a victim of his script, and became his own master to do his thing. He still worked hard, and he still followed his father’s medical pattern, but he was no longer script-ridden to overwork nor script-driven to drop dead. Thus, at the age of fifty, he became from to fulfill the autonomous aspirations of his own choice. Make sure what you really want before you go after it. The bitter experience in life is to find after years of effort that the thing you have gained is not the thing you want. It is admittedly painful to tear one’s will away from one’s desires but it is still more painful to have it torn away by life’s experiences. Hence, the philosophical method to conquer desire is a twofold one. We must let it wear itself out by submitting to it through experience and letting it come up against inevitable disappointment, disillusionment, or suffering whilst alongside this we must become reflectively and analytically aware of its causes, self-deceptions, and consequences. It is a matter of gradually letting the desires lost their intensity until we become free of them not through their forcible renunciation nor through the long-drawn process of waiting for the golden years to comes but through the process of learning to live more and more within the satisfactory beatitude of the Overself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
We give up our desires not by negating them but partly by comprehending their mechanistic cause and mentalistic nature and partly by superseding them with the exalted peace of the Overself. The undeveloped mind lives only for the day. It can see the immediate events in a series but cannot conjure up the ultimate ones. The disciple dares not risk such a blind condition. He must deliberately set out to bring the two together, by the use of creative imagination or by analytic reflection or by both. If passion rises in him, at least its counterbalance, the mental picture of the evil consequences of passion, rises a second later with it. If a man is not free from lust, fear, and anger, be sure he is not united with the Overself, whatever other qualities, powers, or virtues he shows. Long continued reflection turned sharply and analytically upon desires and cravings helps to counter them, but does not basically weaken them. For that, contrary emotions must be aroused. This is most effectually done by happenings and experiences. However, because these are mostly beyond our choice, the third way left to us is to seek Grace. One way to invite this Grace is by sitting in mediation upon the non-self. He may complain of his weakness and immediately submit to a temptation. Or he may recognize that the Higher Self is also him; he may try to use will and grow in strength by this resistance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
He finds that he is perceptibly pulled away from fleshly lust to a deeper level where the calmness and the judgement enable him to realize that the lust belongs to his animal physical inheritance and not to his inmost character and that, therefore, it may be brought under control and discipline. If he acquires the power to achieve this, it will come imperceptibly for it will come mostly by grace. The satisfaction of passion has a claim on the animal body, but it must always be subject to the higher claims of reason and intuition and the need for the sense of human responsibility. The amoral is always the first step to the immoral. The idea that he has to attain mastery over the desires of the flesh is a correct one. However, that this mastery will lead to reunion with a “soul-mate” is not the teaching of the best mystics or philosophers. What really happens is a reunion with the true “Beloved,” who is none other than the Soul of the individual, his higher Self. This is a real living entity, whose presence is felt, whose words are heard, and whose beauty arouses all one’s love. Where man is open only to Worldly forces and not to inner ones’ where he submits to the World’s demands and ignores the soul’s; and where he succumbs to his own terrestrial forces without thoughts of regulating, controlling, and disciplining them, we may expect to find that he is quite insensitive to any teaching of this kind. He is like a person who has been caught in a mire and with every movement gets deeper into it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
He will learn the pleasure of self-control. It is not always easy but all effort for the rewards bear fruit. The man who can develop emotional placidity and rise above passions begins to know what peace of mind means. That is only a beginning for in its fullness it can come only with the knowledge and the enlightenment of Truth. Until then this placidity will free him from the constant alternation, the rise and fall of feeling, the elation and depression to which the average person is subject. Whether it be to acquire fame or accumulate wealthy or any of the other major desires, what he wants from life will in the end rest on his stage of spiritual evolution. The terrestrial man is there, but it must be brought under control or it will claim too much and diminish his aspirations. Then they become fitful, coming less and less, departing more and more. The passions contain futility, danger, and defilements. Self-conquest must be his secret wish’ deliverance must become his impassioned yearning. When wholetime meditations and his spare time thoughts are unremittingly given to uprooting passions that hinder spiritual progress and cultivating ideas that promote it, the neophyte will not be left without reward. Restricted by no monastery’s vows and obeying no order’s rules, he may yet be purer in thought and conduct than most of the self-actualized Christians. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The terrestrial of our inheritance will then be kept in its proper place, subjugated, its strength absorbed into his higher will. Within this highly structured and orderly society, the exterior developments of industrialism and progress within the natural sciences has brought not only material wealth but also increased pollution and waste, without forgetting increased ill health in the wake of this pollution and stress. The focus must now lay on health, nature, spirituality, and so forth. However, the contemporary focus on a profitable present and an almost superstitious belief in a science for the future should bring about a romantic longing for distant pagan pasts. The current generation born in America is fed up with what is being offered. What better way to protest than to just head out into nature in a highly romanticized state of mind? They have also found out that there have already been precursors in older generations who have explored exciting phenomena like nudism and vegetarianism. Americans have also simply started acting out rather than just talking about change. And I do not mean these Americans who are perceived by the World as being so weak because they cannot deal with the outcome of the American election. I am talking about those who have stopped placing their faith in a human being and place it in God. They are minding their own business and working with their hands to amass money so they can live a life they desire. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
In an age where even kids playing hopscotch and hiking has become politicized, turning to spirituality is one of the most mature things a man can do. Being able to step out and embrace the California morning sunshine is much better than seeing a guard in the gun tower. The threat of being in the center of the most cellblock of a prison in the State, where men are kept in cages with walkways above so it is possible for guards to stroll around and look down into the pits; cells with no furniture except a drain-hole toilet, and when the prisoners go out guards are carrying clubs surround them is often where people who do not go to Church and fear God end up. No students of American politics could fail to see the inevitable uprising of this revolutionary tribe of young Christian activists, religions offspring of the first social media-Einstein-multidimensional-simultaneous-immediate-energy generation. All the computers are turned on. Jet streams across WiFi, seamlessly transitioning spiritual healing as it sweeps through the homes and corridors of those in desperate need of the gospel of Christ, turning on fourteen-year-olds through the computer screen. Wise ancient children, the smartest, best endowed, healthiest. Time’s sweet pollen laughing answer to the lethal pressure of computerized humnoids pumping out propaganda over Obama TV. As these reports smoke and laugh, they do not realize that their days are numbered and streaming content is stealing thousands of viewers away from free TV daily. With lower ratings, the station’s revenue declines, the quality of programs suffers and less people tune in to the fake news. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
And everyone complains about everything becoming so political, but it is because that it what the TV news finds profitable and it is all that people talk about. However, for decades, people have been complaining that the news is rubbish. It is not what they consider news to be. People used to think news was investigative reports about things like the artic ice, or how there were actually Pilgrims, like Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island, who had peaceful dinners with the Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day. Or how planet TOI 700 d, the outermost known planet in the system and the only one in the habitable zone, is 20 percent lager than Earth and can sustain life. Everything has become political or about getting famous because that is what people focus on. Once you turn your attention to more important things, like learning to cultivate the land, how to create the perfect drought resistant lawn, or why ICE cars are important for our future, then you will start to see the beauty in life again. The advocate of crime really only respects two kinds of power: one, which he finds among his own class, founded on the accident of birth, and the other by which, through sheer villainy, an underdog raises himself to the level of the libertines of noble birth whom Sade makes his heroes. This powerful little group of initiates knowns that it has all the rights. Anyone who doubts, even for a second, these formidable privileges is immediately driven from the flock, and once more becomes a victim. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
Thus, a sort of aristocratic morality is created through which a little group of men and women manage to entrench themselves above a caste of slaves because they possess the secret of a strange knowledge. The only problem for them consists in organizing themselves so as to be able to exercise fully their rights which have the terrifying scope of desire. They cannot hope to dominate the entire Universe until the law of crime has been accepted by the Universe. Sade never believed that his fellow countrymen would be capable of the additional effort needed to make it “republican.” However, if crime and desire are not the law of the entire Universe, if they do not reign at least over a specified territory, they are no longer unifying principles, but ferments of conflict. They are no longer the law, and man returns to chaos and confusion. Thus, it is necessary to create from all these fragments a World that exactly coincides with the new law. The need for unity, which Creations leaves unsatisfied, is fulfilled, at all costs, in a microcosm. The law of power never has the patience to await complete control of the World. Even if it means surrounding it with barbed wire and observation towers, it must fix the boundaries, without delay, of the territory where it holds sway. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
At its best, criticalness is a sincere effort to help other improve. At its worst, it is the compulsion to get other people before they get you. If you are a manipulator who exaggerates the values of criticalness, you distrust and blame others. This keeps you “above” their level, but it often keeps you isolated and lonely as well. It is as if you were playing a game which you often win, but cannot enjoy winning because it is a secret game, and only you know about it. If you expose it, you cannot play anymore. So you sit at home, all alone, never admitting to anyone the secret of your game. The game is called, “I am better than you,” and you can find all the evidence you need to support the fact that you are winning. However, with no one to share the victory with, you only feel more isolated from others and think less of them. If you are a master, you are learning to trust others more and more every day. You are becoming more willing to forgive them for their natural tendency to be human. In particular, you are learning to appreciate your own humanness. Having done this, you see yourself, not as above others, yet not below them either. You begin to regard them as friends, rather than enemies or competitors. Your actions toward them are rewarded with love and caring rather than a hollow victory in being “right.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
As a master, you appreciate your supportiveness as well as your criticalness. You do things for others rather than to them. You stop judging others, because you stop judging yourself. Ultimately, bring right loses importance. Winning loses importance. And being with people grows more important every day. If it is not cultivated, attitudes toward transference, for instance, range from considering it a fiction which protects the therapist from the consequences of his real behaviour and its effects, to viewing it as early stereotypic behaviour which will be extinguished in the natural course of events. Symbolic analysis plays little role, partly because it is usually content-specific and covered by response to emotion. (I believe the so-called archaic symbols are significant, chiefly because they are cleaner communicants; like new words in a foreign language, they shake loose the multiple complexities of conventional meanings, and say just the elementary things each person means them to say.) The unconscious does not currently figure in client-centered literature. It is considered a reductionist assumption about phenomena better understood in terms of attention and “levels of awareness.” An ahistorical bias has always been plain among us, and this is one of the currents which moves us to an appreciation of some of the existential writings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
Diagnosis is a moot point too, though our departures are not as radical as they once were. The word “schizophrenia” becomes a damning designation. To have it once applied to a young man can be to ruin a career, despite all evidence of subsequent healthiness. A name implies a concept; and if this concept is unsound, the diagnosis can ruin treatment; the very naming it can damage the patient who we essay to help. The sick in mind…are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poison of their own breath, in infinite repetition. It is not that we decry classification as such; we recognize it as a useful scientific tool. However, when it leads to reification of terms, it is dangerous. We have been in an unprecedented era of self-actualization. Young people and most intelligent older people who appear to be laid back are taking care of their own situation first. They are “getting their heads together,” discovering and tending their bodies, learning how to produce their reality movies. College students are not charging after partisan dogmas or idealistic rhetoric. However, do not be deceived by this quiescence. It denotes neither apathy nor stupidity. In fact, it may well be the better part of wisdom to lay back until something worthy of your intelligence comes alone. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
The existentialists also have pointed out that the self is made through decisions. You become what you decide. If, in the choice between running away or facing an unpleasant task, you choose to face up to the issue, you have become a better person. If you choose the weaker and more cowardly alternative, you become, at that moment, on the basis of your own choice, a weaker, lesser person. The behaviourists have, on the other hand, suggested that you have no “choice” but that your choices are determined by factors that control you, such as your parents’ wishes, your genes, and social demands upon you. Again the existentialists reply that one can also choose to let others make decisions for oneself but that the responsible direction is to recognize that, in almost all difficult decisions, the choice is still yours. The fake-nationalists are such terrible creatures, that on one occasion, they drove our unforgettable former President Clinton to bluntly express his opinion. State authority can guarantee peace and order only when the state World-concept and the World-concept of the people agree. Violent elements promoting a World-concept, one that differs from the people’s, will look like individual criminal groups and will not be seen as champions of a great idea which is opposed to the views of the state. If this were not the case, and the opposition held a World-concept that the people’s World-concept, the state can apply the most violent measures for centuries against the terror threatening it, but, in the end, the state will submit because it is unable to defeat the opposing idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the professional personnel and programs for the citizens of Sacramento and is committed to protecting life and property from fire and explosions through inspection, investigation, training, education, data processing and statistical fire reports. “A child was caught in one of the rooms. The main fire was on the second floor of this apartment building, and there were women and kids downstairs screaming at us. We used every length of hose in the bed, it was a long stretch, because we had to go around a courtyard and up the stairs. The fire was coming around the cracks of the door to the second-floor doorway. I remember thinking, ‘This is it, this is where the stuff hits the fan.’ We had to knock down the fire before the guys from the truck could get in to search. I was on the nozzle, and we crawled through the doorway, and suddenly I had excruciating pain in my knees. The heat went right through my boots. We first hit the doorway with the line, then the hallways and the ceiling. The heat was extraordinary. We didn’t do it scientifically, we went in very, very fast because there was somebody in there. Halfway down the hall, I screamed, ‘My knees are burning.’ My officer said, ‘My knees are burning, too, but we have a job to do. Move in.’ I said to myself, ‘He’s right.’ #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
“It was the most fire I had ever seen, it was from wall to wall and ceiling to floor. There was all sorts of junk on the floor—a baby carriage frame, a shopping cart. The metal was glowing. It was blocking our way. I said, ‘We’ve got to pass this stuff out.’ I couldn’t move around it, and I couldn’t climb over it. The guy behind me thought I said, ‘I’m going to pass out.’ Realizing that communications were down, I handed the line over to the backup, grabbed the shopping cart, stood up, and moved it out of the way. When I lifted the shopping cart, just for those few seconds, I got second-degree burns on my fingers. I got back down and grabbed for the line, and they gave it back to me. I realized that this must be really bad, because you never get the line back. We went on, and I was thinking, ‘This is it. My sanity is gone. Nobody can stand this much pain. I can’t give in to it.’ Then I told myself, ‘You don’t feel it.’ A lot of guys don’t feel it when they’re burned. I did. I felt the whole thing, the whole time. I was making a conscious effort not to pay attention to it. I just kept moving. I have visions that I wasn’t going to have any knees left, they were just going to be done. Afterwards I really didn’t think I did that good a job. I was disappointed in myself. While I was throwing that stuff out, it must have looked like I was backing out. Maybe I could have climbed over that stuff. I felt I was too slow. I should have moved in a lot faster. And then, when I got outside, my knees were killing me. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
“I found out the rescue had been made by a die-hard fireman I know, X, the salt of the earth. He always has a frown on his face. He had gone up the fire escape and into one of the back windows and found a kid in the bathroom, a three- or four-year-old boy who was in the next bed to me in the emergency room. Rosy pink cheeks, he looked like he was half Black and half Irish. Really beautiful-looking child. They were taking him to the air chamber at the hospital, a decompression chamber for smoke inhalation victims. Anyhow, after the fire was out, we went back up with the hose, and I remember I had trouble walking upstairs because of my knees. The truck really took most of the line up. I wasn’t doing much of anything. I was dragging. I didn’t say anything about my knees. I kept thinking it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. I was making too much of it, and everybody else must be just as sore. I did say to somebody, ‘Boy, my knees are really killing me.’ And he said, ‘God bless you. My wife and I will pray for you.’ I got back to quarters, and my lieutenant said, ‘You don’t look so good. Are you sure you had the right gloves on?’ He was worried about my hands. I told him it wasn’t my hands, it was my knees. He said, ‘Well, all of our knees hurt a little.’ I said, ‘No. They really hurt.’ This was bout forty-five minutes after getting back. He said, ‘All right, let me see.’ #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“I pulled up my pants, and my knees looked like a couple of golf ball blisters. I said, ‘Holy God.’ I had pulled some of the skin off. The chief took me to the hospital. I was dirty. They put on a sulfa drug, which is supposed to be a miracle drug for burns. They determined I had second-degree burns. At the burn center a few days later, they determined that the burns were third-degree. The doctor at the burn center said it was the most common kind he treats at the hospital. Burned knees. From kneeling on a hot surface. It seems that each time I knelt, I was burning the knees deeper and deeper. The doctor said I had cellulitis, which is a bad infection. ‘You have to be admitted right now. You’re going to have to go on intravenous for six or seven days. Then you’re going to have grafting.’ I was shocked. I had to call my wife and tell her and the family. That was very hard. I spent thirty-three days there, on and off. I’ve had three surgical grafts since then. I don’t think the guys who haven’t been in that situation know how painful it is. The burn is just the beginning. After that is when all the pain starts. Being in the burn center with other firefighters, there is a lot of camaraderie there. You’re all in the same boat. There were two others there, one with knees and the other had a hot cinder down his boot and he grabbed it with his hand. I thought I was in hell. I woke up in this icy room, and I was in a room full of men. God is punishing me, I thought. It was like a MASH unit. What an education. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
“The skin grafts came from my hips and pelvis. Supposedly it wouldn’t show so much there. Because I was a firefighter, they took deeper sections of skin, because I was going to be back on my knees. One of the guys was a probie. His recovery was going to be a lot longer than mine. You’re lying in bed, half naked, but we tried to make the best of it. We became very close. When we were separated at one point, we came to see each other on crutches or in a wheelchair. His wife had a baby since. I remember feeling very close to him. We shared the experience of the job.” The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to working closely with fire service organizations and other proactive groups to enhance solutions to the fire problem. The services provided by the agency include: arson investigations, fire prevention safety in buildings, boiler and pressure vessel safety, the program for petroleum and chemical tanks, collecting and analyzing fire reports, and the personnel standards and education for the firefighters in Sacramento. Awaken compassionate thoughts and actions by helping others realize that, like our Saviour, they too have compassion for others. Please make donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to asset them in their fire prevent duty and other programs. To help keep America a God loving, Christian community, please raise your children to love America and to love God and Jesus Christ. In a afford to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars and other American made good and services. Also, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
Paranormal investigators have recorded disembodies voices and witnessed strange shadows following them through The Winchester Mystery House. The enormous 19th century mansion once was nine stories tall, and had 600 rooms, but the 1906 earthquake demolished the nine-story observation tower, and took much of the 4th floor with it. However, 160 rooms, of which 110 are available for tour, still exist in this meandering catacomb.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Happy Veteran’s Day!
Randolph Harris II International Institute 