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The Fear of Isolation and Ostracism
Many people wonder why it is so important to work hard. Well, accumulation is the reward of personal merit and millionaires are a product of natural selection; the business class is essentially predatory in outlook and habits. The personal attributes of the ideal pecuniary man are ordinarily reserved for moral delinquents. Where the function of the captain of industry is conventionally considered a productive one, the methods of a developed business society is an attenuated form of sabotage. Where pecuniary acquisition is regarded as the reward of social service, the productive function of industry is an expression of workmanship, and the partially fraudulent character of business is an expression of salesmanship and chicanery. Competition has sometimes been looked at chiefly as a rivalry in productive service, but this is only true of the past when there had been no divorce between business and industry. Competition had once centered about rivalry between producers for industrial efficiency; but when business became supreme over industry it had become chiefly a contest between seller and consumers with a large admixture of fraudulent exploitation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
Institutions, individuals, and habits of thought are results of selective adaptation. The simple aggression characteristic of barbarian culture has given way to shrewd practice and chicanery, as the best approved method of accumulating wealth. There are the qualities which have become essential for selective admission into the leisure class. The tendency of pecuniary life is, in a general way, to conserve the barbarian temperament, but with the substitution of fraud and prudence, or administrative ability, in place of the predilection for physical damage that characterizes the early barbarian. The process of selection, under the conditions of modern society, has caused the aristocratic and bourgeois virtues—that is to say the destructive and pecuniary traits—to be found among the upper classes, and the industrial virtues, the peaceable traits, largely among the classes given to mechanical industry. The thing that distinguishes post-Darwinian science from pre-evolutionary science is not the insistence on facts, nor again the effort to formulate schemes of growth or development. It is a difference of spiritual point of view…a difference in the basis of valuation of the fact for the scientific purpose, or in the interest from which the facts are appreciated. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Evolutionary science is unwilling to depart from the test of causal relation or quantitative sequence. The modern scientist who asks the question “Why?” demands an answer in terms of cause and effect and refuses to go beyond it to any ultimate system, to any teleological conception of the cosmos. This is the crux of the distinction; for earlier natural scientists were not satisfied with this bare formula of mechanical sequence, but sought for some ultimate systematization the facts within a framework of natural law. They persistently clung to the notion of some spiritually legitimate end resident in and underlying the matters of fact which they observed. Their object was to formulate knowledge in terms of absolute truth; and this absolute truth is a spiritual fact. This pre-Darwinian viewpoint still dominates the conceptions of modern economics. The ultimate laws formulated by the classical economists are laws setting down the normal or natural in the light of their preconception regarding the ends to which, in the nature of things, all things, tend; and this preconception imputes to things a tendency to work out what the instructed common sense of the time accepts as the adequate or worthy end of human effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Yet evolutionary natural science deals only with cumulative causation, and not with the formulation of some normal case, which is constructed not out of any available facts but out of the investigator’s ideal of economic life. Traditional economics, following a preconceived notion of the normal, formulates an abstraction of the hedonistic man as a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness, passive under the buffetings of pain and pleasure stimuli. In the light of evolutionary science, on the contrary, man is seen to be a coherent structure of propensities and habits which seeks realization and expression in an unfolding activity. Instead of seeking for normal cases in the existence f an imaginary normal hedonistic man, a truly evolutionary economics must be the theory of a process of cultural growth as determined by the economic interest, a theory of cumulative sequence of economic institutions stated in terms of the process itself. Where other economist had found in Darwinian science merely a source of plausible analogies or a fresh rhetoric to substantiate traditional postulates and precepts, it is a loom upon which the whole fabric of economic thinking could be rewoven. The dominant school of economists had said that the existing is the normal and the normal is the right, and the roots of human ills lie in acts which interfere with natural unfolding of this normal process toward its inherent end in a beneficent order. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
By virtue of their hedonistic preconceptions, their habituation to the ways of a pecuniary culture, and their avowed animistic faith that nature is in the right, the classical economists knew that the consummation to which, in the nature of things, all things tend, is the frictionless and beneficent economic system. This competitive ideal, therefore, affords the normal, and conformity to its requirements affords the test of absolute economic truth. In so far as economists had tried to use Darwinism, it was only to fortify this theoretical structure. Henceforth, economics should abandon such preconceived notions and devote itself to a theory of the evolution of institutions as they actually are. It is interesting to note that earlier political economists writing in the nineteenth century saw clearly that the economic process of greater and greater production was a means to an end, not an end in itself. Once a decent standard of material life had been achieved, it was hoped and expected that productive energies would be redirected toward the truly human development of society. The goal of producing more material goods as the final and total end of life was foreign to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essentially to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude, in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the World with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation, which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds or birds which are not domesticated for man’s use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grown without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture. If the Earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
It is scarcely necessary to remark that a stationary condition of capital and population implies no stationary state of human improvement. There would be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress; as much room for improving the Art of Living, and much more likelihood of its being improved, when minds ceased to be engrossed by the art of getting on. And though it is true that a shortening of the hours of labour would in many cases lessen the national dividend and lower wages; it would probably be well that most people should work rather less; provided that the consequent loss of material income could be met exclusively by the abandonment by all classes of the least worthy methods of consumption; and they could learn to spend leisure well. The most revolutionary change in our times lies in the fact that all the peoples of the World have opened their eyes and are aware of their desire for a dignified material life, and that man has discovered the technical means for the fulfillment of this aspiration. In the Western World and in Russian it will take only a relatively short while until this stage is achieved, even though it will take much longer in the nonindustralized countries of Asian, Africa, and Latin America. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Does this mean that in the rich industrial countries there is almost no longer any need for repression? This is, indeed, a widespread illusion among most people; yet it is not a fact. These societies, too, exhibit many contradictions and irrationalities. Does it make sense to spend millions of dollars on storing agricultural surpluses while millions of people in the World are starving? Well, in some senses yes. Many of the people who are starving in these other countries are not allies of America. The World is already overpopulated and by feeding people who are starving, they will be encouraged to breed more. When people cannot afford to feed themselves, they generally abstain from having children, which would reduce the burden on the World. Does it make sense to spend half of the national budget on weapons which, if and when they are used, will destroy our civilization? Well, the only way to protect a nation is to be heavily armed. This will make developed nations and less developed nations strongly reconsider an attack. Does it make sense to teach children the Christian virtues of humility and unselfishness and, at the same time, to prepare them for a life in which the exact opposites of these virtues are necessary in order to be successful? #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
In spite of our sinful heats, competition can bring out the best in people. When we compete, we push each other to test our strengths and give our best. In corporate America, competition can result in innovation and excellence. When people and ideas compete over something, it results in greater good for mankind. We all want a product that is more efficient, a process that is simpler, a person who is more skilled, and a business that is more profitable. Healthy competition is God’s way of providing the best for society. Does it make sense that we fought the last two World Wars for “freedom and democracy,” ending them with the demilitarization of the “enemies of freedom,” and that only a few years later we are rearming again for “freedom and democracy,” except that the former enemies of freedom are not its defenders, and the former allies are the enemies? I hope that the Lord’s people may be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. Death of our military members seems to represent the contradictions of the peace of the gospel and the tides of war. The nations of the Earth have been divided over the possibility of World War III. Feelings run strong. There have been demonstrations for and against. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
War, of course, is not new. The weapons change. The ability to defend and attack is constantly refined. However, there has been conflict throughout the ages over essentially the same issues. In the course of history, tyrants have arisen from time to time who have oppressed their own people and threatened the World. Such is adjudged to be the case presently, and consequently great and terrifying forces with sophisticated and fearsome armaments have engaged in battle. As citizens, we are all under the direction of our respective national leaders. They have access to greater political and military intelligence than do the people generally. Those in the armed services are under obligation to their respective governments to execute the will of the sovereign. When they joined the military service, they entered into a contract by which they are presently bound and to which they have dutifully responses. There are times and circumstances when nations are justified, in fact have an obligation, to fight for family, for liberty, and against tyranny, threat, and oppression. However, we are a people of peace. We are followers of our Redeemer, the Lord Jesus Christ, who was the Prince of Peace. However, even He said, “Think not that I am come to send peace on Earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword,” reports Matt 10.34. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
This places us in the position of those who long for peace, who teach peace, who work for peace, but who also are citizens of nations and are subject to the laws of our governments. Furthermore, we are a freedom-loving people, committed to the defense of liberty wherever it is in jeopardy. I believe that God will not hold men and women in uniform responsible as agents of their government in carrying forward that which they are legally obligated to do. If we try to impede or hedge up the way of those who are involved in a contest with forces of evil and repression, it may even be that He will hold us responsible. If they have a military alliance with us, does it make sense to be deeply indignant against systems which do not grant freedom of speech and of political activity, while we call the very same systems, and even more ruthless ones, “freedom loving?” There is much that we can and must do in these perilous times. We can give our opinions on the merits of the situation as we see it, but never let us become a party to words or works of evil concerning our brothers and sisters in various nations on one side or the other. Political differences never justify hatred or ill will. I hope that the Lord’s people may be at peace one with another during times of trouble, regardless of what loyalties they may have to different governments or parties. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Let us pray for those who are called upon to bear arms by their respective governments and plead for the protection of Heaven upon them that they may return to their loved ones in safety. Does it make sense that we live in the midst of plenty, yet have little joy? Joy comes from exercising faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, worthily receiving and faithfully honouring sacred ordinances and covenants, and striving to become deeply converted to the Saviour and His purposes. Becoming more like the Saviour and receiving His image in countenance our Quest. Does it make sense that we are all literate, have radio and television, yet are chronically bored? Accept the reality of some boring routines. Not all of life is deeply meaningful and exciting. Avoid creating drama, intensity, or conflict to deal with boredom. Instead, appreciate and enjoy the good around you, and look for ways to improve and serve. Does it make sense that…We could go on for many more pages, describing the irrationalities, fictions, and contradictions of our Western way of life. Yet all these irrationalities are taken for granted and are hardly noticed by anybody. This is by no means due to the lack of critical capacity; we see these same irrationalities and contradictions quite clearly in our opponents—we only refuse to apply rational and critical judgement to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
The repression of the awareness of facts is, and must be, supplemented by the acceptance of many fictions. The gaps which exist because we refuse to see many things around us must be filled so that we may have a coherent picture. What are these ideologies which are fed into us? There are so many. We are Christians; we are individualists; our leaders are wise; we are good; our enemies (whoever these happen to be at the moment) are bad; our parents love us and we love them; our marriage system is successful; and so on, and so on. The Russian states have constructed another set of ideologies: That they are Marxists; that their system is socialism; that it expresses the will of the people; that their leaders are wise and work for humanity; that the profit interest in their society is a “socialist” profit interest and different from the “capitalist” profit interest; that their respect for property is that for “socialist” property and quite different from the respect for “capitalist” property; and so on, and so on. As if they were the result of men’s own thinking, all these ideologies are impressed on the people from childhood on by their parents, by the schools, churches, movies, television, newspapers, and they take hold of men’s minds. If this process takes place in societies opposed to our, we call it “brain washing,” and, in its less extreme forms, “indoctrination” or “propaganda”; in our, we call it “education” and “information.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Even though it is true that societies differ in the degree of awareness and brain washing, and even though Western World is somewhat better in this respect than Russia, the difference is not enough to alter the fundamental picture of a mixture between repression of facts and acceptance of fiction. Why do people repress the awareness of what they would otherwise be aware of? Undoubtedly the main reason is fear. However, fear of what? Is it fear of castration, as Dr. Freud assumed? There does not seem to be sufficient evidence to believe this. Is it fear of being killed, imprisoned, or fear of starvation? That might sound like a satisfactory answer, provided repression occurred only in systems of terror and oppression. However, since this is not so, we have to inquire further. Are there more subtle fears which a society such as our own, for instance, produces? Let us think of a young executive or engineer in a big corporation. If he has thoughts which are not “sound,” he might be inclined to repress them lest he might not get the kind of promotion others get. This is, in itself, would be to tragedy, were it not for the fact that he, his wife, and his friends will consider him a “failure” if he falls behind in the competitive race. Thus the fear of being a failure can become a sufficient cause for repression. However, there is still another and, as I believe, the most powerful motive for repression: the fear of isolation and ostracism. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Empathy is an essential condition in the human relationship. An empathic understanding of another’s private World, and the ability to communicate some of the significant fragments of that understanding is very important. To sense if a confidant’s inner World of private personal meanings as if it were you own, but without every losing the “as if” quality, this is empathy, and this seems essential to a growth-promoting relationship. To sense his confusion or his timidity or his anger or his feeling of being treated unfairly as if it were your own, yet without your own uncertainty or fear or anger or suspicion getting bound up in it, this is the optimal condition. When another person’s World is clear to you and you can move about in it freely, then you can both communicate his understanding of what is vaguely known to the client, and you can also voice meanings in the client’s experience of which the client is scarcely aware. It is this kind of highly sensitive empathy which seems important in making it possible for a person to get close to himself and to learn, to change and develop. I suspect that each of us has discovered that this kind of understanding is extremely rare. We neither receive it nor offer it with any great frequency. Instead, we offer another type of understanding which is very different, such as “I understand what is wrong with you,” or “I understand what makes you act this way.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
There are the types of understanding which usually offer and receive—an evaluative comprehension from outside. It is not surprising that we shy away from true understanding. If I am truly open to the way life is experienced by another person—if I can take his World into mine—then I run the risk of seeing life in his way, of being changed myself, and we all resist change. So we tend to view this other person’s World only in our terms, not in his. We analyze and evaluate it. We do not understand it. However, when someone understands how it feels and seems to be me, without wanting to analyze me or judge me, then I can blossom and grow in that climate. I am sure I am not alone in that feeling. I believe that when the counselor can grasp the moment-to-moment experiencing occurring in the inner World of the client, as the client sees and feels it, without losing the separateness of his own identity in this empathic process, then change is likely to occur. Though the accuracy of such understanding is highly important, the communication of intent to understand is also helpful. If he perceives that I am trying to understand his meaning, even in dealing with the confused or inarticulate or bizarre individual, this is helpful. It communicates the value I place on him as an individual. It gets across the fact that I perceive his feelings and meanings as being worth understanding. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
None of us steadily achieves such a complete empathy as I have been trying to describe, any more than we achieve complete congruence, but there is no doubt that individuals can develop along this line. Suitable training experiences have been utilized in the training of counselors, and also in the “sensitivity training” of industrial management personnel. Such experiences enable the person to listen more sensitively, to receive more of the subtle meanings the other person is expressing in words, gesture, and posture, to resonate more deeply and freely within himself to the significance of those expressions. I hope the above account of an empathic attitude will make it abundantly clear that I am not advocating a wooden technique of pseudo-understanding in which the counselor “reflects back what the client has just said.” I have been more than a little horrified at the interpretation of my approach which has sometimes crept into the teaching and training of counselors. If a person has made a pertinent observation or gained an insight into himself, he should examine how the peculiarity uncovered manifests itself in various areas, what consequences it has and which factors in his personality account for it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Consciousness, the capacity to experience the World in its richness, is the evidence for life itself. You may say, “I am experiencing; therefore, I know I am alive!” Certainly a distinguishing characteristic of the healthy personality is openness to new experience. Indicative of the extent of the person’s consciousness is the ability to be responsive to new idea, new thoughts, new perceptions. However, does the person have to be selective about the particular experiences that are chosen and even about the ways new experiences are sought? If at all, chemical alterations in consciousness are at best a mixed blessing and need to be engaged in with great caution. New experiences that entail genuine effort and accomplishment differ from the chemically induced experience in important ways. Consciousness is a complex and important human characteristic, and the serious student should become familiar with a number of professional points of view concerning the expansion of consciousness in one’s own life. This is especially necessary in a time such as the present, when alternation or expansion of states of consciousness has become a popular and sometimes dangerous recreational activity. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
It is essential that the student keep his romantic inclinations under constant surveillance of reason, caution, and reflection upon consequences. He is well advised to avoid emotional entanglements; for in this region there is often, for those who have a special spiritual destiny, a thorn concealed beneath every rose. When two people, emotionally involved with each other, have a misunderstanding or difference of opinion regarding the Quest itself, it is best that they deliberately discontinue their relationship for a while. In this way, they avoid a revival of the discussion which can only lead to exacerbation and further confusion. Time will solve the problem. Probably there are faults on both sides, since we are all human, but we have to carry on with the Quest despite these faults. Being on the Quest need not prevent the continuance and even the development of a friendship with one of the opposite gender, provided that it be kept on a high plane above the physical. Universal laws may be involved and these have to be carefully negotiated. The relationships can be beautiful, platonic, and mutually helpful but a strong discipline of the ego is called for. Great men can liberate great feelings in others or lift them toward acceptance of true ideas. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to provide the City of Sacramento with superior customer service and integrated emergency response to any situation that threatens life, safety, and well-being of people and property. “Firefighters, as a group, are different from other people. I think the thing that brings us you together is not the lives you save, it’s the fatalities that you see together. Most firemen can handle an adult fatality. But the one that gets everybody is the death of a child. Most firemen are family men, and they relate. There have been times when I have come home emotionally drained and have actually just sat down and cried, because things were beyond my control. Firemen need that feeling of being in control of a situation. At a fire you’re doing something not everybody else is doing—you’re going in when everyone else is coming out—but you feel that you have a grip on the situation and you can handle it. It’s not bravery, it’s a matter of fortitude, a little intelligence, with guts mixed in. And then once in a while it gets you, because you can’t handle it. The only thing worse than a child fatality is a fatality involving a fireman. It’s because of the brotherhood that’s there. You can share good times with any group of people, but I think it’s the bad times that bring people together, because you can’t really share it with anybody else. It’s only the guys in the room and the feeling, ‘This is what it’s about, this is what we’re doing this for.’ #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“Some of the outsiders have the idea that what firemen do at a fire is throw things out the window. My fire department doesn’t do that. Our point of view is not to break anything in the interior unless it’s necessary in attacking the fire. Most all cities operate that way. These are people who are leaving their jobs and willing to put their lives on the line, for free, to help their neighbours out, or to fulfill something in their own lives, or whatever their reasons are. But they do it. Just as in any other job, there are various degrees of success. Not everybody is as good as everybody else in any field. That’s why there are superstars in baseball while there are guys in the minor leagues. Not everybody is going to be Hank Aaron. But they’re doing it, and doing it successfully throughout the country. For a country that’s as under the gun from fire as this country is, we have given it a good fight. I’ve been to fires all over Sacramento City, and the thing that amazes me is the blasé attitude of the populace. They will stop and look for a second and then just keep going. Here is somebody’s life tragedy being played out on the streets of Sacramento, and they’ll just stop for an instant and look. Or watch it on the television while they are cooking dinners. There is so much going on here that people are immune. They put walls around themselves. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“In small town America, everyone would be involved. There are some exceptional good Samaritans. When that helicopter went down in the East River, a jogger, who was a teacher, dove head first into cold water to help some people out. Nobody asked him to do it. He was in his mid-fifties. It was a pretty wild maneuver to jump in the water, because the water was moving. I’ve had close friends on teams I’ve been on and business companies I’ve worked for, and we were kind of like brothers. But it’s not like the brother feeling that you get with the firemen. Even if you don’t like the guy. I mean, I had an uncle I wasn’t too found of, but he was still related to me, and there was nothing I could do about it. It’s like that with the brotherhood of the fire department. They are your brothers. You might not like one of them on a given day, but he is your brother. It’s not the shared danger. There are lots of other jobs where you share danger, or sports like surfing, which I used to do a lot. It’s more the things you see, the shared grief, the loss of another fireman, the loss of a child at a fire, the unspeakable things. The things you can’t bring home and tell your family. You tell them about the rescues and the funny things, but you can’t go home and graphically explain. With other firemen, you don’t have to graphically explain, you just look. You just look into each other’s eyes after a fire, and you know that he is thinking what you are thinking. Because nobody else on the face of the Earth comes across what we come across on a regular basis. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“The fireman knows the awful dangers civilians manage to get themselves into, and that’s why he is willing to go to the point of killing himself to make a rescue, because he knows how bad it is. I’ve heard it said that firemen already know what hell is. That could very well be. I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to die by means of fire. I myself really don’t think about it. You wouldn’t be able to do the job you have to do. You get the job done, and you think about it later. You sit around and have a cup of coffee, and you shake your head: ‘I can’t believe I just got myself through that.’ One of the great things about a rescue company is that they are handpicked men, and they get unusual incidents to go to. I have been to building collapses, train crashes, plane crashes. Light planes. I haven’t gone to a jetliner yet, thank God. I hope I never see one of those. I’ve been in many successful rescues. At least four people are walking around today because of me personally, which makes me feel great. I’ve been extremely lucky. I’m lucky to be part of Rescue (number is being kept confidential), the best fire company in the World. There are tremendous people working in the Sacramento Fire Department. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
“I was lucky to win awards. I used the award money to take my family to Hawaii, which was a lifetime dream of mine, having been a surfer most of my life. I use the word luck, and I don’t know another word for it. To make a rescue, you have to be working that day, there had to be a fire your company goes to, there unfortunately has to be somebody trapped, and you have to be in the right position to go get them. Luck stops, though, when you fine those few minor obstacles you have to overcome before you can make the rescue. All the brothers have a common interest, a shared understanding, and that is that we’re out there protecting life and property.” The goal of the Sacramento Fire Department is to continually strive for excellence and seek to improve the Fire Department through innovation, education, teamwork and open communication, making Sacramento a safer place to live and be a source of pride for all. You can help out by donating. Also, remember to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, respect law and order and treat all people with dignity. 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. May America be blessed with angels a cohort, of peace and of rest. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
The Winchester Mystery House
One day Mrs. Winchester’s niece Daisy accompanied her to the attic. While Mrs. Winchester was busy looking for dresses, Daisy wandered around the attic. Suddenly she came running out of the back room and beckoned her aunt to follow her. “There is a lady back there,” she explained. Immediately, Mrs. Winchester went back but she saw nothing this time. Whether this visit to the attic had stirred up some sort of psychic contact, or whether her years of living in the mansion now allowed her to see entities, Daisy had something more to say about Ghosts before long. Naturally, no one discussed such matters with her. Why frighten the young lady? “There is a man in the attic,” Daisy explained earnestly, “and his name is Gunther. He died. He was short in the head, and he’s buried in the back yard under the bushes.” Daisy led Mrs. Winchester to the dining room window and pointed at the bushes in the backyard. It’s under the bushes there,” Daisy repeated and stared out the window. Mrs. Winchester shuddered. It was a spot she had wondered about many times. No matter how she tried, no matter what she planted, nothing would grow on that spot!
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That is Just Slavery in Another Form
Sometimes it seems the times of some people are so fatally lacking in geniality, humour, picturesqueness, and poetry; and are so explicit, so mechanical, so flat in the panorama which it gives to life. Many are overcome by the awfully monotonous quality and there is no twilight region in their minds, and no capacity for dreaminess and passivity. All parts of it are filled with the same noonday glare, like a dry desert where every grain of sand shows singly, and there are no mysteries and shadows. It is harmful to be overcome by a dry school-master’s temperament, to display a preference for cheap makeshifts in argument, where one is lacking education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all one’s fundamental ideas, their whole system is wooden, as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards. Human beings gain knowledge within their souls. “The true lover of learning then must from his earliest youth, as far as in him lies, desire all truth,” says Plato. Nothing justifies the development of abstract principles but their utility in enlarging our concrete knowledge of nature. The ideas on which mathematical Mechanics and the Calculus are founded, the morphological ideas of Natural History, and the theories of Chemistry are such working ideas, finders, not merely summaries of truth. It is possible for “accidents” or novelties to arise which are not predictable from our knowledge of their antecedents—for example, the evolution of self-consciousness, or the application of the voice to social communication. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
In particular instances, the facts are certain to show irregular departures from the law. A thoroughly consistent evolutionist must regard the laws of nature themselves as the results of evolution, and hence as limited rather than absolute. There exists an element of indeterminacy, spontaneity, or absolute chance in nature. Evolution is a change from a nohowish untalkaboutable all-alikeness by continuous stick-togetherations and somethingelseifications. When the whole training of life is to make us fighters for the higher, why should it be extraordinary or wrong to protest against a philosophy the acceptance of which is acceptance of the defeat of the higher? If it means anything at all, calling a thing bad means that the thing ought not to be, that something else ought to be in its stead. Determinism, in denying that anything else can be in its stead, virtually defines the universe as a place in which what ought to be is impossible—in other words, as an organism whose constitution is afflicted with an incurable taint, an irremediable flaw. Determinism is consistent only with the direst pessimism or a romantic mood of resignation. However, fi moral judgments are to be effective there must be some minimum of uncertainty in the universe; this does not necessitate a completely haphazard World, but only one in which there are occasional choices. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The necessity of retaining choices remains, even though one’s dream of universal fatalism be as optimistic in the ultimate advent of a peaceful millennium. Even if no preference can succeed unless it is in harmony with the ultimate triumph of peace, justice, and sympathy, we are still free to decide when to settle down on an equitable and peaceful basis. Until it is finally revealed with certainty what shall succeed, we are all free to try for our own preference. Intelligent mental reactions as those that minister to survival by arranging internal relations to suit the environment, but the critical factor in the cognitive situation, the desire for survival or welfare, is a subjective element which many ignore. The idea of correspondence between inner and outer relations, to be made meaningful as the criterion of mental acts, must be qualified by some subjective or teleologic reference. Furthermore, it is not simply a mirror floating with no foothold anywhere, and passively reflecting an order that he comes upon and finds simply existing. The knower is an actor, and coefficient of the truth on one side, whilst on the other he registers the truth which he helps to create. Mental interests, hypotheses, postulates, so far as they are bases for human action—action which largely transforms the World—help to make the truth which they declare. In other words, there belongs to mind, from its birth upward, a spontaneity, a vote. It is in the game, and not a mere looker-on; and its judgements of the should-be, its ideals, cannot be peeled off from the body of the cogitandum as if they were excrescences, or meant, at most, survival. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
It is habitual to speak as if the mere body that owns the brain has interests, to treat the body’s survival as an absolute end without reference to any commanding intelligence. The reactions of an organism cannot be considered useful or harmful; it can only be said of them that if they occur in certain ways survival will incidentally be their consequence: but the moment you bring a consciousness into the midst, survival ceases to be a mere hypothesis. No longer is it “if survival is to occur, then so and must brain and other organs work.” It has now become an imperative decree: “Survival shall occur, and therefore organs must so work!” Real ends appear for the first time upon the World’s stage…Every actually existing consciousness seems to itself at any rate to be a fighter for ends, of which many, but for its presence, would not be ends at all. Its powers of cognition are mainly subservient to these ends, discerning which facts further them and which do not. What causes communities to change from generation to generation? Changes are the result of innovations by unusual or outstanding individuals, playing the same role in social change as variations in Darwin’s theory of evolution; such persons are selected by society and elevated into positions of influence because of their adaptability to the social situation into which cause of their adaptability to the social situation into which they happen to be born. Social changes can also be attributed to geography, environment, external circumstances—in brief, to everything except human control. The existence of a universal web of causation is one in which the finite human intellect becomes hopelessly entangled. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
The most that sociology can predict is that if a great man of such nature appears under certain circumstances, he will affect society in such and such a way; but that he does affect it should not be denied. The great man is himself part of the environment of everybody else. However, a metaphysical creed is a mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude rather than a system of thought; and in its neglect of spontaneous variations in human thinking and their effect upon society, it is an absolute anachronism reverting to a pre-Darwinian type of thought. Without spontaneity, without some possibility that the individual may in measure alter the course of history, there is no chance for betterment of any kind, and the whole romance of struggle with its attendant alternatives of triumph or failure is banished. There is a zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest lies. The rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. That life should be deprived of its dramatic interest by a scheme of universal causality was an intolerable thought, the most pernicious and immoral of fatalism. When people wish to illustrate the problem of evil, they choose spectacularly brutal murders rather than wars or the homeless crisis in America. Through their hardness and inflexibility of tone, many politicians believe that they are superior to the constituents and entertainment supersedes basic human needs. The interests of the citizens are harshly overridden. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Society has undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless slowly got to change; such changes have always happened, and will happen to the end of time. However, if, after all that I have said, any of you expect that they will make any genuine vital difference, on a large scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing—the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains. And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be the chance for that marriage to take place. I sometimes wonder what did my love of Latin in high school have to do with my life? The only connection that I can find is that I liked words, and the meanings of words, and the derivations of words. However, after a year I had got the hang of that and could look up the rest for myself when I needed it. How did my daughter become so interested in cowboys, when her life had been in Hawaii, New York City, England and the New England coast—before the days she was allowed to stream TV and when she had not seen many movies? I think the answer is that she loved horses. At three, when she said that she felt sick and I asked her what would make her well, she said, “A wide on de pony in de park!” When she was five, the school reported that she was doing well in piano and suggested that she have private lessons. I asked her if she would like this and she said, after only a moment’s pause, “Well, I would rather ride a horse.” She always wanted the horse she did not have, and that may have been her problem, that she solved by being with horses in books. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
When I went to live in Hawaii, for the first time I got interested in studying history. At that time, the written history was only about a hundred years old and all the sources were available to me. At the same time, I could question people for whom much of that past was a part of their own experience, and another lot of it had come to them through their immediate forebears. As I was living in the Islands, all this contributed to my understanding of what I was living in, and I liked this. I think another factor may have been that in the Islands I was exposed to a different way of thinking about life, and I got really interested in Island history in that sense. If “problems” entered into this, I think it may have been chiefly that when I was first in Hawaii, I did have problems, particularly during the first six months. Although I had driven in New York Labour Day traffic and all that, when I go to Hawaii, the traffic in Honolulu scared me so that I parked on Punchbowl and walked into town, until I could figure out how to drive in it. Time after time, as I went around in Honolulu doing errands, I watched the traffic to try to get the hang of it. At last, it became clear to me: instead of going by rules, the drivers went by noticing. They noticed other cars and they noticed pedestrians and moved in accord with them. Then I drove into town and drove as they did and enjoyed it. I had a problem with the slowness of everything in Hawaii: it was what I wanted for myself, but it was still a problem to me because I got irked by it and had to find my way out of that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
I had to slow down myself: then I enjoyed the ease and the lack of friction in moving slowly. I had the problem of living where it seemed to me that everyone had dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes. It was not race prejudice, just homesickness. When I returned to the white skins on the mainland eight years later, it seemed to me that everyone looked sick. I loved the mangoes, papayas, soursops, guavas, mountain apples, cherimoyas, pohas, and all the rest, but it seemed to me that if I could get to California (a place I had never really liked) and eat apricots, peaches, grapes, pears, apples for ten days, then it would be easier for me to go on living in the Islands. I had the problem of ants: I thought I must be a sloppy housekeeper because there were always ants in my house. Sometimes I dived in to help people—and got bumped. The people were somehow different from those I had lived with before. There were all these re-evaluations and adjustments going on, and this seems to open up my mind and lead to questions in other areas too. In trying to answer them, I run into problems, but it does not seem necessary for me to have the problem first. This suggests to me that in trying to provide our children with “security” by keeping them within a closed environment we may be stupidizing them. Then, when we make them specialize at an early age, we are stupidizing them still further. However, is it only the “problem,” anyway? It seems to me that I could have resolved my problem of being sick in another way, but when I found out how little medicine knows about the whole field of chronic illness, I was intrigued by the unknown territory that I lived in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
It scared me at first, but then I began to get used to it, and I like moving in the unknown, even when it scares me and is painful. I do not like the scare and the pain, but I do like the exploring. With the doctor, I explored what is known by medicine about chronic illness, with particular reference to my own. Through his honesty, I learned how much is not known. All this churned around in my head until I had the feeling of a dead end, of being somehow on the wrong track. That was when I side-slipped into psychology. It happened. This could lead me back into medicine sometime. That happens too. This suggests that telling children what is not known may be as helpful as telling them what is. When I am told only what is known, it seems to be “all there”—nothing that I can contribute to it. I can only learn what others have found out. It is a closed World. When I know how small the known is in relation to the unknown, the whole World opens up before me. I am free to explore and make my own discoveries instead of being a passive recipient of what is known—to the point that I think that everything is known by someone else and that it is only through others that I can acquire knowledge. I have seen this happen recently with several people, individually, when they discovered how chaotic the field of psychotherapy is, how much is not known. One of them said, with such freedom, “Each man is on his own!” and the others expressed themselves in much the same way. They moved from the limitation of trying to find a specific answer already known to the freedom of making their own discoveries. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
More is known about how we get into the troubles that we do than is known about how to get out of them. With this knowledge of how things go wrong, these people are now trying to find out for themselves how to go about the undoing, both in the sense of curing and of prevention, by intelligent trial and error. If we all did this, it seems to me that we would get out of our difficulties a lot faster. Some people are very afraid of this, because people will make mistakes. That certainly will happen. However, these will not be such persistent mistakes as taught mistakes are, and I think it is the persistent mistakes that foul us up. It seems to me that much damage has been done by psychotherapists who believed that because they had been trained, they know the answers, and so went on and on with their mistakes. Being sure that the answers they had were right, they did not ask enough questions, and when things did not go well, the questions that arose were answered in terms of the answers they already had. That is a good way to get stuck. If all psychotherapists had done that, we would not have arrived at the new concepts that we have today. Holding to a belief seems to be a large part of our trouble. If I am sure that beating a child is good, or that permissiveness is good, poor results will only lead me to push harder with whatever it is that I believe. That seems to have happened with education. “It has not produced what we wanted, so let us have more of it” seems to sum up what I hear from all kinds of people all the time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
When a profession makes a mistake, a whole generation or more is damaged by it—like four-hour feedings and no rocking the baby. An individual’s mistake just does not reach that far. Another good thing about everyone trying to work out psychotherapy on his own (and including himself) is that all these people would not be Authorities. If I try out something in my relations with other people and it does not work well for them, they will be resistant to me in a way they would not be to an authority, who is believed to know what he is doing. It is my experience of most authorities that “working with them” means that I do as they say even if it gives me hell. That is just slavery in another form. “Working with authorities” make sense to me only when the professional and the amateur each say, “Of what you offer, I go along with this, but not with that,” or “Let us try this and see how it works out.” Then, there is continuing education on both sides, and each one at the same time is responsible for himself, through the choices he makes. That actually makes it much easier on the authorities, and it seems to me that any authority in his right mind would welcome this: he has contributed the best that he has to offer, but the choice is made by the other person. The authority, likewise, is responsible for his choices—for himself, not for anyone else. I know how this works out because I have tried it in medicine, education, and psychology. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
When I meet with authorities who permit this, I become more intelligent, and I enjoy democracy. When I, a parent-authority, permit this, I become more intelligent, and I enjoy democracy. When they are made clearly responsible for themselves, children, in my experience, become more accountable. When they see the responsibility as being up to someone else, they are less so. This happens to grownups, too. It seems to me that democracy has not failed: we just have not really tried it yet. As a boy in grade school said to his teacher, “Mr. P—how do you reconcile your teaching of democracy with the way that you conduct this class?” We need to be more congruent. No one can be devoid of feelings, and the philosopher will not be exempt from this rule. Cheerfulness is an excellent mental attribute and worth cultivating; but where it results from mental blindness it is not worth having, for then it may become a real danger. Feelings, emotions, and passions should not be allowed to submerge reason, unless the feeling is genuinely intuitive, the emotion truly impersonal, and the passion a desire for the highest Truth. Feeling can be trained to become finer, more delicate, responsive to higher urges and ideals. The baser feelings go away of their own accord as the higher ones are let in and encouraged. The man who is seeking regeneration of his character will not often have repose of his feelings, for he is called by himself to struggle with himself. It is in the very nature of emotion to vary like the wind. Consequently, he who would attain inner peace cannot base his attainment upon emotion alone. He must find something much more stable than that, much more constant than that. This is not to say that life of the spirit is without feeling, but it is a calm, unbroken feeling. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
One may legitimately take pride in the fact that he is called to the philosophic life, that he has accepted the philosophic ideal. For it is not the kind of pride which can vaunt itself over other men; its aims are to be fulfilled rather by humbling the ego and reducing its sway. The Roman Stoics, who sought to control their emotions and master their passions, placed character above knowledge. We pursue a similar albeit less rigorous discipline in controlling feelings by reason because we place knowledge above character. The latter is made a preliminary to attainment of the former. Goethe says: “I prefer the harmful truth to the helpful falsehood. Truth will heal the wound which she may have given.” And again, he says: “A harmful truth is helpful, because it can be harmful only for the moment, and will lead us to other truths which must become ever more and more helpful. On the other hand, a helpful lie is more harmful, because it can help only for the moment, and then lead to other lies which must become more and more harmful.” When he can brin himself to see clearly that no woman has anything to offer him which the Overself cannot offer more satisfyingly—be it ecstasy or beauty, intimacy or love, comfort or companionship—the glamour of pleasures of the flesh will pall. Roberto Assagioli, an Italian psychiatrist, developed a theory of healthy personality and a set of techniques for fostering this goal that he named psychosynthesis. He combined contributions from psychosomatic medicine, psychology of religion, study of higher modes of consciousness, parapsychology, Eastern philosophy, personality theory, anthropology, and finally, active techniques for fostering personality growth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
His theory of personality structure states that the human being comprises seven levels, or modes, of functioning: The lower unconscious, which includes drives and urges, repressed feelings, and the like (similar in meaning to the id, which harbours primitive pleasures of the flesh and aggressive demands, in Dr. Freud’s writings). The middle unconscious, which comprises the background of our ordinary waking consciousness and is like Dr. Freud’s preconscious, or to the “background” of awareness described by Gestalt psychologists. The superconscious, which Assagioli states is the source of “higher” feelings, such as altruistic love, and higher inspirations and intuitions, which give rise to truly creative works. The field of consciousness, which designates our ordinary awareness of perceptions, memories, feelings, and urges. The conscious self, or “I” designates a “point of pure self-awareness” independent of the content of one’s awareness. The self, or “I,” he claims, is an enduring center in our consciousness, like a light illuminating the objects that are seen. The higher self, of which we are generally unconscious, and which transcends the “I,” our conscious self. This higher self seems to stand for the possibility of more fully developed experiencing and acting. The collective unconscious, a term that Assagioli borrowed from Jung, refers to the beliefs, assumptions, traditions, myths, and symbols that form a source for and background to a persons ordinary consciousness, a source he or she shares with the other members of the society. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The task for human beings, says Assagioli, is to free themselves from enslavement by ignorance and unconsciousness, to attain a “harmonious inner integration, true self-realization, and right relationships with others.” The goal of such integration—true psychosynthesis—is achieved in four stages: through the knowledge of one’s personality. Control of the various elements of personality. This is achieved by a technique called disidentification. As Assagioli states, “We are dominated by everything with which our self becomes identified. We can dominate and control everything from which we dis-identify.” Realization of one’s true self, the discovery or creation of a unifying center. This stage entails the quest for the best, most fully functioning person that one can be through commitment to a worthwhile mission. Psychosynthesis, the formation or reconstruction of the personality around the new center. This phase calls for the commitment, study, struggle, and action to actualize the mission and, thereby, the image of the best possible self. How can man attain the goal of freeing himself from illusions? Marx thought his goal could be achieved by reform of consciousness. The reform of consciousness consists exclusively in the fact that one lets the World become aware of its consciousness, that one awakens the World from the dream it is dreaming about itself, that one interprets its own actions to the World…our motto must be: reform of consciousness, not through doctrines but by analyzing the mystical self-confused consciousness, whether it has a political or a religious content. One will see, then, that the World has possessed already for a long time the dream of something, of which it must only have consciousness to possess it in reality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
One will see that we are not dealing with a big hiatus between past and present but with the realization (Vollziehung) of the thoughts of the past. Eventually one will see that mankind does not begin any new task but accomplishes its old task with consciousness…this is a confession, nothing else. To have its sins forgiven, mankind has only to explain them for what they are. A group of psychologists, sociologist, economists, and representatives of the consuming public could undertake a study of those needs which are “humane,” in a sense that they serve man’s growth and joy, and those synthetic needs suggested by industry and its propaganda in order to find an outlet for profitable investment. As in so many other problems, the question is not so much the difficulty in determining the difference between these two types of needs and certain intermediate types but rather the raising of an extremely important question which can be brought up only if the social scientists begin to be concerned with man, instead of the alleged smooth functioning of our society or their function as apologists. It is true that to be guided by one’s interest means to take the way of least resistance. The principle means essentially the pursuit of those subjects which at the time being are least repressed. And this is exactly the principle that the analyst applies when he chooses those factors for interpretation which he believes the patient can fully grasp at the time, and he will refrain from embarking upon problems that are still deeply repressed. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Life safety. The primary purpose of firefighters is to help ensure the safety of lives and that means saving people’s lives by preventing and extinguishing fires and it also means by offering medical care during emergencies. “There was no training in the fire department at that time. I learned to run a pumper by myself, by being an observer, and then, on off hours, I’d go over to the station and practice on my own. The first time I ever got into the truck, of course I got my butt chewed up by the old-timers, because that was their job. That was a prestige job in those days. My business was only a block from the fire station, so I was one of the first one there on calls, and when I felt confident with that damn pumper I’d jump in the seat and have it sitting outside when those guys showed up. Some of them didn’t like that. They wouldn’t tell you anything. Same way with the breathing apparatus. At the Fireman’s Association summer meeting, which we had every year in June, we used to have hose-laying contests—two hundred feet of two-and-a-halfs and a Siamese arrangement of two one-and-a-halfs, a hundred feet long. And they timed you from when they said “Go” until water came out of both inch-and-a-half nozzles. We practiced over here every night for six weeks, because there was a particular town in the country that kept walking away with the prize. We were bound and determined that we were going to beat those guys, and we have that thing down pat. Make and break, set that up, and really get her going. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
“Then we went over the conference, ready for this contest, and they gave us an old, beat-up ex-forestry truck that our engineer had never seen before. And he messed up the connection to the hydrant, so we got a little screwed up there. Then we got going, and after it was over, there was a big battle over the timers. Anyhow, we ended up losing. And then the fight was on. With fists. My guys were mad, and those guys thought we tried to cheat them. And one thing led to another. I’m strictly a lover, not a fighter, so I had to laugh. When I’m in charge at a fire scene, the guys I send in to make a search are those ones that attend all the training sessions, because I know they’re not going to panic or anything like that. I never send in just one man, I’ll generally send two and a captain to be their eyes and ears and guide. We practice that way. I got an old building where we practice our firefighting tactics with live fire. We get a little bit more of it each time. It’ll probably take us three or four months before that thing finally goes to ground. Great training for these guys. The state has a training program, but in recent years it hasn’t been able to fund enough instructors. So they are trying to develop self-training programs, by training somebody from each fire department to become the instructor for that particular department. And this works out pretty good, because that’s exactly what I’m doing, following my own training plans. We do ours in the evenings, Monday through Friday, and the guys get their certificate, and so on. I enjoy doing it.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
The Sacramento Fire Department is the all-hazards response team. It is important to keep them fully funded so they have the resources to save the community. You can help save lives and property by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, teach your children what a privilege it is to live in America and be America. Raise them to love America, love God and Jesus Christ and respect law and order and their elders. We can help raise the next generation of patriotic leaders. Let justice well up as the waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. 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. In future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a World founded upon four essential human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression—everywhere in the World; freedom of every person to worship God in his own way—everywhere in the World; freedom from want which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants—everywhere in the World; freedom from fear, which means a Worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbour—everywhere in the World. And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks, nation shall not lift sword against nation, neither shall they learn way anymore. However, they shall sit every man under His vine. And none shall make them afraid. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
The Winchester Mystery House
In the summer of 1899, Mrs. Winchester found herself alone on the stairs on one occasion, when she suddenly heard a voice speak to her. “It’s all right…she can come out now,” some woman said somewhere in back of her. There was no one visible who could have spoken these words and no one nearby. Besides, it was not a voice she recognized. It sounded strangely hollow and yet imperious at the same time. Someone was giving an order, but who, and to whom? Clearly, this someone still considered herself a member of this house. The servants from two were half frightened out of their wits at the idea of living in such a beautiful, but bizarre, pagan-looking place; especially when they got together in the servants’ hall in the evening, and compared notes on all the hobgoblin stories picked up in the course of the day. They were afraid to venture alone about the gloomy, black-looking chambers. One of Mrs. Winchester’s chambermaids declares she could never sleep alone in such a “gashly rummaging old building”; and the footman, who was a kind-hearted young fellow, did all in his power to cheer her up. Mrs. Winchester was struck with the lonely appearance of the house. Before going to bed, therefore, she examined well the fastness of the doors and windows; locked up the plate with her own hands, and carried the keys, together with a little box of money and jewels, to her own room; for she was a notable woman, and always saw to all things herself.
Having put the keys under her pillow, and dismissed her maid, she sat by her toilet arranging her elaborate hair; for being in spite of her grief for Mr. William Winchester and Annie Winchester, rather a buxom widow, she was somewhat particular about her person. She sat for a little while looking at her face in the glass, first on one side, then on the other, as ladies are apt to do when they would ascertain whether they have been in good looks. All of the sudden she thought she heard something move behind her. She looked hastily round, but there was nothing to be seen. Nothing but the grimly painted portraits of her poor dear man, and late newborn daughter hanging against the wall. She gave a heavy sigh to their memories, as she was accustomed to do whenever she spoke of them in company, and then went on adjusting her night-dress, and thinking of them. Her sigh was reechoed, or answered by a long-drawn breath. She looked round again, but no one was to be seen. She ascribed these sounds to the wind oozing through the windows of the mansion and proceeded leisurely to put her hair in papers, when all at once, she thought she perceived one of the eyes of the portrait move, as her eyes were fixed on its reflection in the glass. It struck a momentary chill to her heart; for she was a lone woman, and felt herself fearfully situated.
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/
If You Want the Prizes of Life, You Must Elevate Your Thoughts
If he who suffers from the hallucination—for usually it is nothing less—that an ideal existence can be found by emigrating to some distant spot turns, himself into a different man, then it may be turned into a reality. Our higher nature bids us aspire to inner growth, development, self-control, and ennoblement. It goes further and seeks freedom from enslavement by the passions, thus lifting the human nature above the animal. Animal ties to the World are given, mediated by his instincts. Man, set apart by his self-awareness and the capacity to feel lonely, would be a helpless bit of dust driven by the winds if he did not find emotional ties which satisfied his need to be related and unified with the World beyond his own person. However, in contrast to the animal, he has several alternative ways thus to be tied. As in the case of his mind, some possibilities are better than others; but what he needs most in order to his sanity is some tie to which he feels securely related. The one who has no such tie is, by definition, insane, incapable of any emotional connection with his fellow man. The discontent with a spiritually unfulfilled life has a twofold origin—from personal experiences of the World outside and from vaguely felt pressures by the Soul within for the man to surpass himself. There is thus a reciprocal working of negative and positive feelings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The easiest and most frequent form of man’s relatedness is his “primary ties” to where he comes from—to blood, soil, clan, to mother and father, or, in a more complex society, to his nation, religion, or class. These ties are not primarily of pleasures of the flesh, but they fulfill the longing of a man who has not grown up to become himself, to overcome the sense of unbearable separateness by continuing what “primary ties”–which are natural and necessary for the infant in his relationship to his mother—is obvious when we study the primitive cults of worship of the soil, of lakes, of mountains, or of animals, often accompanied by the individual’s symbolic identification with these animals (totem animals). We see it in the matriarchal religions in which the Great Mother and the goddess of fertility and of the soil are worshipped. There seems to be an attempt to overcome these primary ties to mother and Earth in the patriarchal religions, in which the great father, the god, king, tribal chief, law, or state are objects of worship. However, although this step from the matriarchal to the patriarchal cult in society is a progressive one, the two forms have in common the fact that man finds his emotional ties to a superior authority, which he blindly obeys. By remaining bound to nature, to mother or father, man indeed succeeds in feeling at home in the World, but he pays a tremendous price for this security, that of submission, dependence, and a blockage to the full development of his reason and his capacity to love. When he should become an adult, he remains a child. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Today the many individual cases of “mother fixation” are explained by orthodox psychoanalysts as a result of an undissolved tie to the mother. This explanation ignores the fact that the tie to mother is only one of the possible answers to the predicament of human existence. The dependent individual of the twenty-first century, living in a culture which in its social aspects expects him to be independent, is confused and often neurotic because his society does not provide him—as do more primitive societies—with the social and religious patterns to satisfy need for dependency. This fixation to mother is a personal expression of one of the answers to human existence which some cultures have expressed in religious forms. It is an answer, though one which conflicts with the full development of the individual. If only man finds a higher form of feeling at home in the World, if not only his intellect develops, but also his capacity to feel related without submitting, at home without being imprisoned, intimate without being stifled, only then can the primitive forms of incestuous ties to mother, soil, etcetera, of benign and of malignant ecstasies disappear. On a social scale, this new vision was expressed from the middle of the second millennium B.C. to the middle of the first millennium—one of the most remarkable periods in human history. The solution to human existence was no longer sought in the return to nature nor in blind obedience to the father figure, but in a new vision that man can again feel at home in the World and overcome his sense of frightening loneliness; that he can achieve this by the full development of his human powers, of his capacity to love, to use his reason, to create and enjoy beauty, to share his humanity with all his fellow men. Christianity proclaimed this new vision. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
The new bond which permits man to feel at one with all men is fundamentally different from that of the submission-bond to father and mother; it is the harmonious bond of brotherhood in which solidarity and human ties are not vitiated by restriction of freedom, either emotionally or intellectually. This is the reason why the solution of brotherliness is not one of subjective preference. It is the only one which satisfied the two needs of man: to be closely related and at the same time to be free, to be part of a whole and to be independence. It is a solution which has been experienced by many individuals and also by groups, religious or secular, which were and are able to develop the bonds of solidarity together with unrestricted individuality and independence. In order to understand fully the human predicament and the possible chocies man is confronted with, we must understand that there is another conflict inherent in human existence. Inasmuch as man has a body and bodily needs essentially the same as those of the animal, he has built-in striving for physical survival, even though the methods he uses do not have the instinctive, reflexlike character which are more developed in the animal. Man’s body makes him want to survive regardless of circumstance, even of happiness or unhappiness, slavery of freedom. As a consequence of the will to survive, man must work or force other to work for him. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In the past history of man, most of man’s time was spent on food gathering. With the animal, it essentially means gathering the food in the quantity and quality his instinctive apparatus suggest to him. In man there is much greater flexibility in the kind of food he can choose; but more than this, man, once he begins the process of civilization, works not only to gather food but to make clothes, to build shelters, and, in the more advanced cultures, to produce the many things which are not strictly necesary for his physical survival but which have developed as real needs forming the material basis for a life which permits the development of culture. If man were satisfied to spend his life by making a living, there would be no problem. Although he does not have the instinct of ants, an antlike existence would nevertheless be perfectly tolerable. However, it is part of the human condition that man is not satisfied with being an ant, that aside from this sphere of biological or material survival, there is a sphere characteristic of man which one can all the trans-survival or trans-utilitarian sphere. What does this mean? Precisely because man has awareness and imagination, and because he has the potential of freedom, he had an inherent tendency not to be dice thrown out of the cup. He wants not only to know what is necesary in order to survive, but he wants to understand what human life is about. He is the only case of life being aware of itself. He wants to make use of those faculties which he has developed in the process of mere biological survival. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Hunger and pleasures of the flesh, as purely physiological phenomena, belong to the sphere of survival. (Dr. Freud’s psychological system suffers from the main error which was part of the mechanistic materialism of his time and which led him to build a psychology on those drivers which serve survival.) However, man has passions which are specifically human and transcend the function of survival. Nobody has expressed this more clearly than Marx: “Passion is man’s faculties striving to obtain their own object.” In this statement, passion is considered as a concept of relation or relatedness. The dynamism of human nature inasmuch as it is human is primarily rooted in this need of man to express his faculties in relation to the World rather than in his need to use the World as a means for the satisfaction of his physiological necessities. This means: because I have eyes, I have the need to see; because I have ears, I have the need to hear; because I have a mind, I have the need to think; and become I have a heart, I have the need to feel. In short, because I am a man, I am in need of man and the World. Marx makes very clear what he means by “human faculties” which relate to the World in a passionate way: “His human relationships to the World—seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting, loving—in which all the organs of his individuality are the…expression (Betaetigung) of human reality…In practice I can only relate myself in a human way to a thing when the thing is related in a human way to man.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Philosophy does not believe that any man is doomed to continue to sin, but that every man is capable of rising to a life higher than that which he has previously lived. It believes, too, in the forgiveness of sins and in the truth of hopefulness. It is not pessimistic but reasonably optimistic in its long-range views. Whatever within himself keeps a man from seeing the Real and knowing the True must be got rid of, or rectified. And whatever he lacks within himself and also keeps him away from them must be acquired. The struggle to attain these things may not interest most people, whose desire for self-improvement is not strong enough to move their will: but it is well worthwhile. There is a devilish cunning in the human ego, animalistic beastliness in the human body, angelic sublimity in the human soul. However, this is only the appearance of things. All three conditions are really mental conditions. They pertain, after all, to the mind. We must root out the evil or foster the good there and there alone. Occult power should not be sought until the battle for self-mastery has been largely won. The nobler part of his self may exist in a man even though he has not yet come to awakening. There are three activities which he needs to keep under frequent examination and constant discipline—his thoughts, his speech, and his action. The quester who wants to keep his integrity in a corrupt World may not be able to live up to his ideal but at least he need not abandon it. The direction in which he is moving does still count. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
It is not his business to reform others while he himself remains as he is. The attack on them will only provoke them to answering attack. Temptation is easiest cast out at first thought. As the number of thoughts grow, control grows harder too. A year ago at New Year’s I was talking with a Navajo man who had said “Happy New Year” to me. I asked him if he thought the New Year would be good for him or if it would be like my own life, “I think there is no end to being down—and then things change. They go alone well, and I think ‘now at last, everything is all right’–and then it isn’t.” He nodded, and said simply, “Just like us.” There was complete acceptance that life was the same for both of us, even though I had never been hungry as he had, had never been in jail as he had, and had never been forced to submit to the imposition of another culture as he had. That this is true, I know through listening to a woman talk for seventeen hours, in three days, about her life. Her life had been as “different” from mine as mine from the Navajo’s. We had very little. This woman had been born to Old Masters, a yacht with a crew of twenty-eight men, and everything that went with that. The more I listened, the more I mew that there had been no difference between the lives of the Princess and the Pauper. The innerness the same. Sometimes it is clearly the mainstream of a person’s life even though smaller streams confuse it. Other times, it has showed only briefly in a person when through stress or ease the barriers went down. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This used to be a puzzle to me: which was the person? Other people said that what a person was most of the time was what he was, and this confused me, because it seemed reasonable and yet—what the person was at times in privacy seemed so much more vibrant, living, real. Sometimes his pouring out of it was almost more than I could bear, the agony of man’s knowing his inability to be what he knew himself to be. Sometimes it was gentle and tender, this knowing and so sad. Which is the person? A woman told me that one day she was at a football game waving a pennant and cheering, when suddenly the hand holding the pennant fell to her lap, and with all the excited mob around her she thought, “Why am I doing this? I haven’t enjoyed it for fifteen years.” Which was real—the fifteen years or the moment? The knowing of the realness in another person—his desperate desire to be non-hurtful, loving, responsive, constructive (or creative), at one with others—seems to me to explain why one person sometimes stays with another against all reason, and not necessarily with good judgment. A very simple “ignorant” woman, who had every reason to hate her being to know this, “He wants to be good.” Mothers often know this in their children and defend them—not their behaviour—when they are destructive. Observations, and the associations and question they arose, are the raw material. However, work on them takes time, as does every analysis. In a professional analysis, a definite hour is set apart every day or every other day. This arrangment is expedient but it also has certain intrinsic values. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Patients wiith mild neurotic trends can, without disadvantage, see the analyst merely when they are in trouble and want to discuss their difficuties. However, if a patient in the clutches of a severe neurosis were advised to come only when he really wanted to, he would probably play hooky whenever he had strong subjective reasons for not going on, that is, whenever he developed a “resistance.” This means that he would stay away when actually he needed the most help and when the most constructive work could be done. Another reason for regularity is the necessity to preserve some measure of continuity, which is the very essence of any systematic work. Both reasons for regularity—the trickiness of resistances and the necessity to maintain continuity—apply, of course, to self-analysis as well. However, here I doubt whether the observance of a regular hour would serve these purposes. The differences between professional analysis and self-analysis should not be minimized. It is much easier for anyone to keep an appointment with an analyst than with himself, because in the former instance he has a greater interest in keeping it: he does not want to be impolite; he does not want to expose himself to the reproach that he stayed away because of a “resistance”; he does not want to lose the value that the hour might have for him; he does not want to pay for the time reserved for him without having utilized it. These pressures are lacking in self-analysis. Any number of things that apparently or actually permit of no delay would interfere with the time set apart for analysis. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
A regular, predetermined time for self-analysis is unfeasible also because of inner reasons—and these quite apart from the subject of resistances. A person might feel like thinking about himself during a spare half hour before dinner but resent it as a nuisance at a prearranged time before he leaves for his office. Or he may not find any time during the day but have the most illuminating associations while taking a walk at night or while falling asleep. In this respect, even if his zest to express himself is diminished, even the regular appointment with the analyst whenever he feels a particular urge or willingness to talk with him, but must appear at the analyst’s office at the arranged time. Because of external circumstances this disadvantage can scarcely be eliminated, but there is no good reason why it should be projected into self-analysis, where these circumstances are not present. Still another objection to rigid regularity in self-analysis lies in the fact that this process should not become a “duty.” The connotation of “have to” would rob it of its spontaneity, its most precious and most indispensable element. If a person forces himself to his daily exercises when he does not feel like taking them, there is no great harm done, but in analysis listlessness would make him lame and unproductive. Again, this danger may exist also in professional analysis, but there it can be overcome by the analyst’s interest in the patient and by the very fact of the common work. In self-analysis a listlessness produced by overstressed regularity is not so easily dealt with, and it may well cause the whole undertaking to peter out. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
Thus in analysis regularity of work is not an end in itself but is rather a means that serves the two purposes of preserving continuity and combating resistances. The patient’s resistances are not removed because he always appears for his appointment at the analyst’s office; his coming merely enables the analyst to help him understand the factors at play. Nor is consistent punctuality any guarantee that he will not jump from one problem to another and gain only disconnected insights; it is an assurance of continuity only for the work in general. In self-analysis, too, these requirements are essential. Therefore, they do not demand a rigid schedule of appointments with oneself. If a certain irregularity in work should make a person shirk a problem, it will catch up with him. And even at the expense of time it is wiser to let it slide until he himself feels that he had better go after it. Self-analysis should remain a good friend to fall back upon rather than a shcoolmaster pushing us to make our daily good marks. Needless to say, this warning against compulsive regularity does not imply taking things easy. If we want it to be a meaningful factor in our life, just a friendship must be cultivated. If we take it seriously, only then can analytical work at ourselves can yield its benefits. Finally, no matter how genuinely a person regards self-analysis as a help toward self-development rather than as a quick panacea, there is no use in his determining to pursue this work consistently from now until the day he dies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
In pursuing its preventive and therapeutic aims, and especially in arousing the interest and support of the public, the mental hygiene movement (which has become the mental health movement) has of necessity communicated in overly simplified terms about mental illness and mental health. The ways of seeking mental health are not always clearly distinguished from the ways to avoid mental illness. Mental health is most readily (though not most helpfully) defined as the absence of mental illness. Mental illness is defined in terms of certain symptoms, and the specifications of those symptoms has been a primary responsibility of psychiatrists. As the mental health movement has gained momentum the psychiatrist has found himself increasingly on call to speak out to the public about mental health (rather than illness) and it is only human of him to react to his enhanced prestige by relinquishing the smaller role of expert pathologist-therapist for the smaller role of expert pathologist-therapist for the larger role of arbiter of social values. In this role, the psychiatrist has frequently expanded the domain of mental illness to include all degrees and kinds of psychological distress, failing to appreciate that human suffers some pains not because he is sick but because he is human. Invitation to the role of “expert” in an area in which society has suddenly developed intense interest is always a seductive one. (Note the number of chemists and physicists who have become “social” scientists since World War II!) #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
If he occasionally failed to note that as an authority on values, the psychiatrist well may be forgiven; the meaning of existence, and how to live he is at best on par with other learned and thoughtful men. The psychologists and social workers have not been noticeably less susceptible to the sacerdotal appeal, but have been called less frequently to the altar than have the psychiatrists. The mental health movement together with psychiatry suffers from imprecision in the definition and delineation of psychopathology. The subjectivity of diagnosis, especially where neurotic behaviour is in question, coupled with expansive or inclusive trends in the diagnostician, creates particular problems when by broadcast methods the public is being encouraged to self-examination and to the seeking of “preventive” therapy. The insufficiency of therapeutic resources to meet the legitimate needs of truly neurotic patients is seriously exacerbated when uncritical enthusiasm encourage persons with the non-neurotic frustrations common to all inhabitants of a less-than-perfect World to seek expert therapy, and when ambiguous nosology encourages the therapist to a nondiscriminating investment of his expensively acquired skills. There is a historical parallel to this problem which has been noted in the earlier period of the mental hygiene movement: “Indeed, so great was the enthusiasm over mental hygiene, that it led for a long time to a dangerous overemphasis on the mental factors in problems of social work. The important sociological factors were lost sight of while psychological factors were given almost exclusive attention. Mental Hygiene was being ‘oversold’ by over-enthusiastic adherents.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
As long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest of man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. This crystallization of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up to now. In handicraft and manufacture, the workman makes use of a tool; in the factory the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instruments of the machines that he must follow. In manufacture, the workmen are part of a living mechanism; in the workmen are part of a living appendage. Or (education of the future will) combine productive labour with instruction and gymnastics, not only as one of the methods of adding to the efficiency of production, but as the only method of producing fully developed human beings. Modern Industry, indeed, compels society, on the penalty of death, to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by lifelong repetition of one and the same trivial operation, and thus reduced to the mere fragment of man, by the fully developed individual…to whom the different social functions he performs are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers. Alienation is the sickness of man. Since it starts necessarily with the beginning of division of labour, that is, of civilization transcending primitive society, it is not a new sickness; it is most strongly developed in the working class, yet it is a sickness from which everybody suffers. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
When it has reached its peak, only then can the sickness be cured; only the totally alienated man can overcome the alienation—he is forced to overcome his alienation since he cannot live as a totally alienated man and remain sane. Man has to become the conscious subject of history, experience himself as the subject of his powers and thus emancipate himself from the bondage to things and circumstances. With his development the realm of natural necessity expands, because his wants increase; but at the same time the forces of production increase, by which these wants are satisfied. The freedom in this field cannot consist of anything else but of the fact that socialized man, the associated producers, regulate their interchange with nature rationally, bring it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by some blind power; that they accomplish their task with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to their human nature and most worthy of it. But it always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power, which is its own end, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can flourish only upon that realm of necessity as its basis. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Many people admire firefighters. It is a very normal thing for one to become a firefighter. A firefighter we will call “Dieter” shares with us his account. “I wanted to be one so bad, I just wished that I could be done with high school, with all of the crap, and have it over with. When you’re a fourteen-year-old and you’re going down and riding with squads, all the other things—high school football games, dances, and stuff like that—are anticlimactic. I was seeing what real men do. And when I got a little older, I was actually doing a man’s job. I was strong for a high school kid, and when I would go to the firehouse, they’d let me work as a firefighter. That was in a suburb. I see these jokers getting off the train. You ask a kid in a school, ‘What does your dad do for a living?’ They say, ‘I don’t know, he goes to some office.’ Well, I knew what my old man did for a living. I knew why we were eating and why we had a roof over our heads. It’s because my old man was busting his backside as a fireman, freezing in the wintertime and having rocks thrown at him in the summertime. I knew what he was doing. Other people, they take the train and they commute back and forth to the city, and I thought to myself, ‘That’s not for me. I want to do something that’s important, that’s vital. If these jokers did not go to work, nobody would miss them.’ Of course, now that I’m a little bit more mature, I realize everybody’s job is just as important. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I don’t think firemen are supermen, by any means. At the time, I thought, ‘Hey, firemen are strong, and they’re doing an important job, and people’s lives depend upon them being here.’ Other jobs are not like that, and the police did not appeal to me. I didn’t want to be a doctor. Anyhow, I was working for this town in California, waiting to get called by the Sacramento Fire Department. I was still single, going with my future wife, and her dad was a big mucky, muck at construction company. I came down on vacation, and I took the fire test here. I didn’t even know if I wanted the job, and I didn’t think I could get it. Well, for the first time in something like six years, they took guys right off the top of the list. So as a result, we got a bunch of guys who were schoolteachers, guys with engineering degrees, and all kinds of real sharp guys in our class. Take the time to get to know the Sacramento Fire Department, and be sure them to thank them for keeping our community safe. Also, out of the kindness of your heart, please be sure to make a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. 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. If you are dissatisfied with yourself abandon yourself! You can make a start by abandoning its negative ideas, its animal passions, and its sharp critiques of others. You are responsible for them: it is you who must get rid of them. He must refuse to allow himself to become emotionally overwhelmed by an unthinking majority or intellectually subservient to an unworthy convention. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 