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Set Goals and Work to Achieve them!
The purpose of this lesson here on Earth is to inspire of to set goals and work to achieve them. A goal is a standard, a skill, an ideal, or a destination that is to be achieved. When we decide to accomplish a particular thing, we set a goal. Some goals, such as cleaning the house or writing an essay, may take a short time to accomplish. Other goals, such as saving money to buy a new home or doing thing to improve the love and peace within the family, may take months or even years. Goal that will help us to become worthy to dwell eternally with our Heavenly Father may taken an entire lifetime. Some goals may not even be attained during a lifetime on Earth, but may require additional effort in the hereafter. It is one thing to set up such a goal in life; it is another to find the way to reach it. For the attempt to live in celibacy—unless wisely managed and informed with knowledge—provokes the animal in us to revolt. Some people often waste days, months, and even years of their lives going down paths that lead them to no worthwhile achievements. Other people set goals and progress steadily along paths that lead them to achieve much. When his involvement in the Quest has become a desperate affair to the point of morbid self-analysis endlessly repeated, it is time to restore his balance. How many misguided persons have condoned brining harm to a fellow human or animal creature by quoting a text or doctrine! #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Without discipline the passions and emotions may run wild. With excess discipline the heart may freeze, the man become fanatic and intolerant. In the scriptures Heavenly Father has stated His major goal concerning His work: “For behold, this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man,” reports Moses 1.39. One who follows the ways of the Lord will be neither slavish sycophant of modern sophistication nor an over-enthusiastic votary of ancient folly. To feel detachment from Earthly pleasures is one thing, but to feel distaste for them is another. He must not so clamp himself in the rigidity of any system as to turn it into a superstition. When criticism becomes so harsh that it becomes hysteria, the man has lost his balance. A mind surcharged with hysteria or neuroticism will not be able to appreciate, let alone find, the highest truth. A man must know his limitations, must know that there are certain desires he can never attain and certain people with whom he can never be at ease. Moreover, he must know other men’s limitations too, must realize that he can never make some understand, let alone sympathize with, his mystical outlook and that he can never bring the unevolved herd to give up their materialistic, racial, or personal prejudices. The simple life need not be a squalid one. The austere life need not be an ascetic one. There is room for aesthetic appreciation in the first and for reasonable comfort in the second. Both must respect the finer instincts and not decry them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
When it comes to marital life, a woman who was born with a mild drive for pleasures of the flesh and whose experiences while growing up did nothing to intensify that drive, for her, pleasures of the flesh in marriage is satisfying as long as it expresses warmth and tenderness and as long as she feels that her husband needs and values the love she is capable of giving him. And if, with good judgment and equally good luck, she has selected a man whose personality, attitudes and drive for pleasures of the flesh complement her own, she can have a genuinely happy marriage. Very few couples, however, start out perfectly matched. The question is whether a husband and wife can learn to respect and accommodate themselves to differences in the strength of their desires for pleasures of the flesh. Suppose, for example, that this young woman with limited drive for pleasures of the flesh marries a man whose enjoyment of pleasures of the flesh depends to some degree on the intensity of his partner’s enjoyment. In the beginning his pleasure inevitably will be somewhat tempered by his wife’s low-key responsiveness. If these two are to achieve a compatible relations with intimate passions, they must reach a mutual understanding of their individual natures. They must accept the fact that variations in drives for pleasures of the flesh do exist, that neither partner should apologize to the other for having more or less energy for pleasures of the flesh, that one is not “better” or “worse” than the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
The husband must make his wife feel that he accepts her nature for what it is and that any regret he may have about her inability to experience a more intense degree of pleasures of the flesh is genuine regret, not dissatisfaction. The wife in turn must make her husband feel that her muted response is not a reflection of his skill as a lover or in any way a personal rejection but her natural expression of fulfillment of pleasures of the flesh. Thus, instead of acting as two separate individuals with contrasting—or even conflicting—standards of behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh, they become a couple who honour the intimacy of their marriage. Limited responsiveness with pleasures of the flesh is, of course, often enough true of the male. The same principle applies—an acceptance of variations in natures of intimate passions. This means rejecting the idea that the husband is any less a man because his needs for pleasures of the flesh are less urgent than his wife expected, and it also means rejecting the idea that the wife is at fault because she fails to stimulate her husband to greater activity. The strength of the drive for pleasures of the flesh can change over a period of time. It is not fixed at a permanent level. A woman—and, of course, a man—may become more responsive; physical needs may surface more frequently and with greater intensity. If this happens, fine. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
However, it does not mean that there was anything wrong with that person before the change occurred. It simply indicated that the drives of pleasures of the flesh of this particular individual were stabilized at a lower level as a result of any number of factors, such as limited experience, personal problems, family demands and social pressures. As these things change, so does the behaviour of pleasures of the flesh. In trying to resolve their conflicts involving pleasures of the flesh by changing their ways of interacting, a man and woman can be easily discouraged. If their occasional and inevitable failures result in criticism or a loss of self-esteem, sooner or later the confidence that is needed to keep trying will evaporate and all efforts will stop. Continuation depends on encouragement, and the acceptance of failure as shared responsibility is encouraging. If only because it is preeminently realistic, the ability of both partners to share responsibility is additionally encouraging. Each is prepared to take into account the fact that both of them are not only fallible but temperamental, that they cannot and do not always act as they would like to, and that apologies are acceptable after something has gone wrong. This is an act of faith and it is crucial to the establishment of conciliation of intimate passions. To expect or want or need something of another person, and to let that person know this truth, is to be open to disappointment or denial. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, as long as the disappointment or denial is as long as it can be seen as a reflection of such things as forgetfulness, impatience, lethargy or unhappiness, the hurt can be accepted or at least put in perspective. And when forgiveness is later asked for—and given—sharing has taken place. Trust has been reaffirmed; openness to each other has been maintained; and the ongoing process of accommodation of pleasures of the flesh can continue. The “renunciate” who gloats over the miseries of life and points continually to its horrors is not necessarily wiser than the hedonist who sings over its joys and points continually to its beauties. Each has exaggerated his fact; each is too preoccupied with a single facet of existence. Wisdom lies in the impartial appraisal and the balanced view. We need all these virtues, yes, but we also need to practise them on the proper occasions—or they lose their values and do more harm than good. It is not the ordinary use and ingenious or aesthetic development of material things which corrupts man, but it is the excessive use of, and infatuated attachment to them which does so. The life of some unbalanced persons seems to be a periodic swing from one side of the pendulum to the other—that is, from extremes of emotional and physical sensuality to extremes of fanatic and wild asceticism. Their existence is filled with contradictions and discrepancies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The unseen source which suggests or encouraged fanatical austerities, extreme self-ordeals, or dramatically exaggerated sacrifices is suspect. When detachment is overdone it becomes a cold-bloodedness. The man then moves and acts like a marionette. There is a constant preaching of renunciation: abandon possessions, embrace poverty, chill off desires, and turn aside from luxuries. The high evaluation of poverty by holy men—in the preachments—is not seldom contradicted in their practice. If such ideas are not used to support harmful actions, why should he go out of his way to destroy religious ideas which others put their faith in. We must recognize that men are at different stages of response to the commands of Moses, the counsels of Jesus Christ. Consequently, it is vain to hope that they will accept or obey a universal rule of behaviour. Enthusiasm may degenerate into exaggeration. Note that ego consciousness needs to be stilled, and out of the way, for harmony to appear. It takes extra work to make a commitment last. Occasionally, an idea of what one is doing wrong in the relationship will break through clearly and be rememberable. Often why our relationships are not working out well tends out of reach because couples are not effectively communicating, which tends to create misunderstanding. It is possible to allow our experiences to grow strong and then deal with them without blocking them out. It is then more than likely that one will be able to address and deal with whatever images or voices appear. Sometimes they consist mainly of things said in a voice like one’s own thought. For others, images are more common than voices. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
What is said or imaged always rises unexpectedly and usually is not immediately understood. This is one difference from ego consciousness. When a man thinks of something, he has some anticipation for the next thought, and it appears familiar and understood. Conflict can be unanticipated, strange, surprising, and not even in one’s frame of reference. People often let experiences become frame of a single word or brief phrase said in an instant of time. The reaction for a lot of men is to grab onto the words, becoming too conscious and delaying the actual message. Autosymbolic refers to the mental process by which the mind easily forms representations of its own state. If one examines what was in consciousness at the moment the conflict arose, its meaning is clearer. If you are caught in a love polarity, you have an exaggerated desire to please and placate others, rather than express genuine caring. You have come to believe that relationships are best when you are kind to people, and so you “kill with kindness.” Part of your problem is that you have no real concept of your own self-worth, substituting it with the notion that you should “never be selfish” and care only for others. If instead you are a mater, you learn the beauty of self-expression. In other words, you become involved with what you like and thus you like being yourself. Not surprisingly, people then like you. You enjoy core-to-core contact with those you love. The contact need not be intimate passions, but an emotional kind of intimacy that can include tears, vulnerability, and trusting. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
On top of this, as a master, you enjoy the feeling of exhilaration in the natural swings between love and anger. When you can feel both of these things—without guilt, without apathy, and without fear—your life takes on a natural excitement. Your relationships are richer than before because you can recognize that people react according to their own feelings about things more so than according to anything you do. For many people, the script set can be so far removed from the reality of their life that there is no way to reconstruct it by mere observation or interpretation. The best way of getting a clear picture of what is going on with some people is through a dream. The “script-set dream” is recognizable because as soon as the person tells it, many things fall into place. Pictorially, it has no resemblance to the person’s actual way of life, but transactionally, it is an exact replica. A woman who was always “looking for a way out” dreamed that she was being chased, and found a tunnel that sloped downward. She crept into the tunnel and the people chasing her could not follow. They just stood guard hoping she would come out again. She discovered, however, that there was another gang of dangerous people waiting for her at the other end of the tunnel. Thus, she could go neither forward nor back; at the same time, if she relaxed, she would slide down into the arms of those who were waiting below. Therefore, she had to press with her hands against the side of the tunnel, and as long as she did that, she was safe. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
In script life, most of her life had been spent trapped in a tunnel in this cramped position, and it seemed clear from her attitudes and past history that the end of the script called for her to get tired of holding on and slide down into the arms of waiting death. She, too, had made considerable “progress” during her treatment up to that point. Translated, that progress meant “how to be more comfortable while holding on to the sides of a tunnel and waiting for death.” A script cure meant to get her out of the tunnel and into the real World, which again was a comfortable one for her. The tunnel was her script set. There are, of course, may other interpretations of this dream, as any freshman who has taken Psychology 1 can readily see. However, the script interpretation is important because it tells the therapist and the other group members, as well as the individual and her husband, what they are dealing with and what has to be done, and emphasizes that “progress” is not enough. The tunnel scene had probably remained unchanged since early childhood, as the patient had had this dream many times before. The concentration-camp scene is evidently a later adaptation of a child nightmare which the woman was able to recall. It was clearly based on early experiences modified by reading and adolescent fantasies. Adolescence, then, is the period when the fearsome tunnels of infancy are given a more realistic and contemporary form to build the operative script set for the individual’s life plan. This woman’s reluctance to probe into her husband’s “tricks” shows how tenaciously people cling to their script scenes while complaining about how disagreeable they are. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
The capacity to suppress emotional expression and to delay immediate responsiveness is valued by moralists and also by personality hygienists. However, the personality hygienist may differ from the moralist in that the hygienist affirms the value of the capacity to express emotional tensions just as much as the capacity to suppress them. The healthy personality displays neither immediate expression nor chronic suppression of emotion exclusively. Rather, the healthy personality displays a capacity to choose between the alternatives and suppression and expression. When it will not jeopardize important values, these people will express their feelings freely, laughing with gusto, crying without restraint, or expressing anger with vigour. If other values would be endangered by such emotionality, they are capable of suppressing their feelings and carrying on with whatever behaviour was in process at the time of emotional arousal. In the long run, however, this regime of selective suppression and release insures that the persons’ bodies and their ability to perform will not suffer the effects of prolonged emotion suppression and that they will not needlessly endanger their job, reputation, self-respect, and other important values by heedless emotional explosions. They can suppress when they choose, and they can let go when they choose—and it is they who do the choosing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Emotion suppression becomes unhealthy when it is prolonged for any reason. When persons chronically suppress their emotions, they generally do so because they fear the consequences of emotional expression. Fear of emotional expression is often irrational, based on overgeneralization from unpleasant occurrences in the past. Perhaps someone was severely punished, or lost a job, because of an emotional outburst. From this one event, the person may have generalized that all emotional expression is dangerous or bad. Thus, the person comes to suppress feelings—though he or she is fully aware of them—without discrimination. The longer-range consequences of chronic suppression may be psychosomatic illness (provided other necessary and sufficient causes are present), such as elevated blood pressure, mucous colitis, asthma, peptic ulcers, chronic fatigue (it consumes energy to suppress hostility and other strong feelings), muscular aches and pains, migraine like headaches, impaired work and study efficiency, inability to concentrate, impaired reality contact, and impaired relationships with people who want their friends and loved ones to be able to express feelings. The chronic suppressor is often derogated as a “sick,” “stone-face,” or “iceberg”—someone who is “less than human.” Every beginner must remember that his own way to the truth is not the only way. However perfectly it suits his need and temperament, it may not suit another man’s. Each gains his understanding of it according to the level of his evolution. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
The terrestrial politics are rooted Newtonian-Euclidean reality. They are based upon territorial mammalian competitions between neighbouring hives who share the same neurotechnological level. Each quantum jump in neurotechnology increases the size of the political unit. Tribes are swallowed up by neighbours who have superior artifacts. Higher technology nations set up territorial boundary tensions of greater extension. In the latter 20th Century China and Russian confronted each other along a 3000-mile border with the same nervous, bluffing robot postures of four-foot mammals protecting turf. Ideological differences are, of course, irrelevant in mammalian terrestrial politics. The enmity is instinct-robotic. Neighbouring gene pools have to compete according to a relentless law of territorial—plus-minus—magnetism. To occupy an ecological niche is automatically to be “against” those who inhabit the neighbouring niche. To illustrate the limbic, primitive-brain nature of the Old World politics consult the map illustrating the state of terrestrial politics in the latter 20th Century. We see that Morocco received its arms from America and that its neighbour, Algeria, obtained weapons from Russia. The border between the two neighbours was tense. The next country, Tunisia, received its arms from America and quarreled with both its neighbours, leftist Algeria and leftist Libya. Poor confused Egypt caught between Black and White ambiguity switched from Russian to America. For example, Egypt managed to maintain hostile contact with both its neighbour—Libya and Israel—regardless of the ideological paradox! #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Continuing down our past, we note that Israel fought Syria. Syria growled at Israel above and Iraq below. Iraq fought Iran. Iran snarled at Afghanistan. Afghanistan frowned at Pakistan. Pakistan hated India. India tensed against China. China suspiciously rubbed up against Russia and the South East Asian states—all of which distrusted their neighbours, regardless of ideology. An examination of the politics of Southern Africa at that time reveals the same checkerboard sequence of neighborhood confrontations. South East Asia provided a similar confirmation of the theory that terrestrial politics produces an almost perfect unbroken sequence of robot mammalian-territorial confrontations. A magnetic ordering of plus-minus charges in neighbouring units develops. With robot regularity, and with an amazing disregard for common sense or political principles, each country opposes it neighbours. Even the renowned 20th Century political theorist Henry Kissinger failed to understand this neuro-political principle because he was so totally robotized—like iron filings held in a magnetic field—in confrontation with Russia. Mr. Kissinger believed in the Domino Theory—if South Vietnam fall, then all the South East Asian nations would topple shoulder-to-shoulder into monolithic Communism. This paranoia, for which 282,000 USA and allied military deaths occurred, completely disregarded the obvious. Once Saigon collapsed, then the nature took over! Cambodia attacked Vietnam. Vietnam raided Laos. Thailand snarled at Vietnam. And all Southeast Asian countries opposed their northern neighbour China. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Being a member of the Sacramento Fire Department means being a leader, a counselor, a strategist, and a motivator. While it is important for fire fighters to be able to articulate the seven Fire Fighter Values, it is even more imperative that they be able to demonstrate these values in their daily interactions with others. Values are the foundation of the Sacramento Fire Department. Personal development, values, ethics, officership, tactics, and techniques, are the fundamentals for setting direction, problem solving, and methods for building stronger relationships. When thinking of the Sacramento Fire Department, some will undoubtedly pick out only those traits which are shown in deeds of physical prowess, or in firefighting, discovery, exploration and the like. However, we also have to see and appreciate those gentler traits that are no less heroic. The fact that patience under ordinary difficulties, persistent industry in mastering the ordinary and hard things of life, the ability to forgive injuries and rise to superior to petty annoyances are just as heroic, and quite as hard to cultivate, as courage in the face of danger, or brave fighting when all the accompanying circumstances tend to arouse the best that is in one. Good health and a strong body play a part in making a member of the Sacramento Fire Department. Courage and the power to do hard things is largely dependent upon these. Hence the duty of proper care for their health and their physical powers. Also, keep the education and training in mind. Many of these characters accomplish many of their greatest deeds through their intellectual power. And the Sacramento Fire Department also has heart qualities, the power of goodness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
No amount of physical strength or intellectual power will ever make a man a hero worthy of the name unless he be also a good man, loving his fellow men and willing to give his life for service. It is not only missing the aim of such a course of study to allow it to pass without the effort to grow more worthy of one’s best ideals; it is even dangerous to allow one’s ideals to be enlarged and one’s better impulses to be quickened without such effort. It is the hope and prayer of the author of fire programs that out of them there may come to firefighters and EMTs a higher ideal and nobler purpose for living, a gleam of the divine ideal for us all that shall strengthen them to “Follow the Christ, the King, live pure, speak true, right wrong…else, wherefore born?” “I go trout fishing in the spring and duck hinting in the fall and play basketball in the summer. I also play football and tennis. When I was voted into the fire department, even as an apprentice, my kids were very proud of me. It was exciting for them to have a father who was a firefighter. A lot of their friends would come over to see what I looked like. When I was going through training, I would have the kids come over and teach them about what it means to be a fire fighter. I feel that all the children on the block have a good sense of fire prevention and fire safety now. On several occasions in the wintertime, without me knowing, my wife would go out in her robe and boots and start my car up. She’d warm it up while I was getting my gear on. She does have fears. It scares her at times that I may never come back. She’s been my childhood sweetheart since we were fifteen years old, and I’ve been married to her for sixteen years, so we’ve shared a good twenty-some years. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
This Friday I’ll be doing fire prevention for the sixth graders over at X school. And by daughter is in the fifth grade. She can’t wait till I come so people can see her dad is a firefighter. And my other daughter, who is six, is in the first grade. I’m also going to the first grade, so she is real excited and keeps telling her teacher every day that I’m coming in. I went this week, on my own time, to my son’s class. He’s eight. We weren’t scheduled to see his class, but his teacher called and said they were learning about fire departments and asked me to come in. So I came in with all my gear and showed the kids what a firefighter wears, and explained what happens when they call and how important it is that they give good direction and an address when they call. It was a rewarding half hour. I got a wonderful thank-you note signed by all the kids. That’s the kind of thing I think children really need: they need someone who really wants to tech them. My oldest son—he’s twelve—goes to private school. He’s near genius, that’s why we put him in a different school. I want for my children whatever they want for themselves. I try to trach them that no matter who you are, you can be whatever you want to be. In my house, to survive, I teach the kids to know how to do all the chores, whether you are a man or a lady. That’s how I was raised, boys and girls have to know how to cook and mow the lawn. Every week we had a different job to do, so we were very well rounded by the time we left home. Yes, they could be President, if they want. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
“I did teach them, too, that it’s not easy. If you want something, you have to work your arse off for it. It didn’t come easy to me, and I know from now till the day I die I will have to work to keep up, with everything in the fire service changing so fat. My wife and I both work at a heating and colling company. She’s president, and I’m vice president. We started out with only three of us, and now there are seventeen workers and nine trucks. It’s an enjoyable business, and what’s amazing is that we can go to work and still be together. A lot of people might find that difficult, but I enjoy it. I sometimes do the office work, and she helps with the bidding and proposals and blueprints, estimating, things like that. I think I’ve done right, I have no regrets. Just like going into business, this was a dream my wife and I had, and I knew that if we never tried it, we’d never know if we could make it. So we tried it and made it. If we hadn’t, at least we could say, “Hey, we tried.” We helped build our own home. We had both lived in Colfax all out lives, and we came out here in 2020. It took us six months. My wife and I did all the heating, electrical, and plumbing. She was right by my side. We would just take up a bunch of Pampers and food for the weekend, come down here with the kids, and we’d work on the house. My most relaxing time is to dim the lights and listen to some music. To sit down and watch football. To be human together. I think that’s most important. A lot of times when I come back from a fire scene or a medical run, I can’t go to sleep. And it’s sort of neat, because what I do then is, I clean. I turn the music on low and just go around the house and clean. My wife thinks it’s great. She’ll get up, look around, and say, “Oh, it was a good run last night, huh?” #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
“We have a small fireplace, and a lot of times it’s very relaxing for me to sit in front of it and see a controlled situation, where fire can be beautiful, as opposed to being so deadly in nature. That’s a really nice feeling. We take the kids everywhere we go. We go up north to her parents’ cottage. We took them on an airplane for the first time this year. We flew to Florida. We went to Disney World and Epcot Center. It wasn’t really long enough, it was only three days, but we all needed to get away from business and the fire service, and just from home, I think. My wife goes to fire department functions with me. I would never go without her.” Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
The Winchester Mystery House
Experience an unforgettable journey back to the time of kings and queens with this entry ticket for The Winchester Mansion in Santa Clara, California which was the residence of Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After tour, there will be time enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Its Weapon is Easily Recognized
Times have changed. Uninformed assumptions, illogical accusations, and outright lies are passed around as truth. Being blames in a hostile spirit is not the same as being criticized in a friendly constructive one. Yet over-sensitive egocentric persons usually act as if it were! What are we to do? As disciples who strive to “stand as witnesses of God at all times and in all things, and in all places” (Mosiah 18.9), we must do something. A close friend or a kindly spiritual guide will render him a better service by making him more aware of his frailties than by remaining silent. For it is these latter that are the seed of his future suffering, as well as the bars to his future progress. Every man whose orbit touches your own is unwittingly your teacher. He has something of value for you, however small it be. Let him perform his mission, then. Do not dim the lesson by covering it with clouds of negative emotion. Most neurotics cannot take any criticism—no matter how helpful, constructive or well-meant it be—but only exaggerated praise. Moral advice is not usually wanted, liked, or obeyed. The more it is pressed upon a person, the more it is likely to be resisted. He is content to stay as he is. Criticism of others should be benevolent, constructive, and suggestive, firm, yet sympathetic. He needs to learn that it is not necessary to be rude in order to be outspoken. It is a brutish sign to be unable to put vigour, emphasis, and feeling into criticism without using obscene four-letter words. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Even while you are criticizing and protecting against what is negative, keep an even balance and affirm what is beneficial in life. He can give others full understanding, but only by intellectually identifying himself with them. If it is not to be dangerous, this is an inner process which must be temporary, even momentary. To give others who hold different beliefs a mental sympathy—enough to understand what it is they hold and why—calls for a capacity to detach oneself temporarily from one’s own beliefs. This is not to be done, of course, by rejecting them in any way but by just letting them stand as they are while moving over and into the other person to get an understanding of his point of view. Such a capacity cannot be acquired without enough humility and selflessness to make it possible to entertain a distasteful viewpoint even for a single second. Even if he finds the opinions, beliefs, and actions of others repulsive and not to his taste, he would experiment at times in the development of tolerance and in the knowledge of human nature. This can be done by entering imaginatively into their history and into their experience until he understands why they think and act as they do. That need not result in the acceptance of their attitudes, but in the comprehension of them. He should be able to give an imaginative sympathy to those whose outlook is far from his own, lower than his own. He should be able to probe understandingly into the mind and heart of men with whose views he profoundly disagrees and whose actions he instinctively abhours. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
He should be able even to put himself without wincing into the shoes of a hardened criminal. However, he should do all this only momentarily, only just enough to glimpse what is this mystery that is his fellow man, and then return to being himself, broadened but untainted by the experience. When he deals with or speak to another person, his handling of an uncongenial person with whom he has to live or work will fail or succeed according to his practice of identifying himself with him. If the self-actualized Christian fails to do this, it means that he persists in identifying himself solely with his own little ego and its personal interests, activities, or desires—hence the irritability, bad temper, and negative reaction to the other’s deficiencies. However, if, on the contrary, he instantly tries to feel with him, to identify himself with him, to give him temporary intellectual sympathy—that is, to practise love—there will be forgiveness of the other’s failings and mistakes, good humoured acceptance of his deficiencies, and laughing patience with his shortcomings. Both persons will then make more progress more rapidly. If the self-actualized Christians tolerance, sympathy, and understanding are wide enough to enter every point of view, this does not mean that his judgment, balance, and discrimination are inactive. He is to see men and women not only as they are with their meanness and frailty, their wrong-doing and cruelty, but also as they are unwittingly struggling to become—perfectly expressive of the divine in them. And if the uglier one is to be the first impression, the lovelier one must follow quickly as the final impression. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
In doing this the self-actualized Christian makes truth out of life, instead of bringing falsity into it, as some rainbow-dreaming cults would have him do. More, he gives the best possible help to others in their struggle because he brings the kingdom of Heaven to their Earth in the only way it can be brought. Try to understand other persons not in order to blame them but in order to understand better the operations of mind itself, the human mind. If he catches himself criticizing his critics, being indignant with those who oppose him or despondent because others have denounced him, he ought to pull himself up sharply. Instead, let him enter into their shoes for a few moments to understand why the dislike or attack him as they do, and then to give their attitude his mental sympathy for these few moments. Their statement about him may be totally false or quite true, somewhat exaggerated or willfully distorted. Nevertheless, let him continue to step imaginatively into their shoes. This attempt will not be easy and an inner struggle will probably be unavoidable before he can bring himself to make it. He is not asked to endorse their attitude or approve the emptions which give rise to it, but only to practise this useful exercise for developing tolerance and diminishing egoism. Even if the others have tried to bolster up their own egos by deriding his, the activity may seem pleasant but will prove unprofitable. For not only does it break any harmonious relations with him, but it poisons their own psyches. Thus, they punish themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
Why should he let resentment drag him into the same error? On the contrary, they offer a chance to deny his ego, to exalt his ethical outlook, and to shift his emotional center of gravity from the negative pole to the beneficial one. Let him regard them as his tutors, possibly his benefactors. Let him take these episodes as chances both to do needed work on himself and to refuse to identify himself with negative emotions. They are to be used for present instructions and future guidance. Thus, he lifts himself out of his personal ego, actually denying himself as Jesus Christ bid him do. Until it becomes perfectly natural and quite instinctive for him to react in this philosophic manner to every provocation, temptation, or irritation, he needs to continue the inner work upon himself. He needs to drill himself every day in those particular qualities in which he is deficient. If the foregoing is to be practiced, each problem in his relations with others must be accepted as a problem in his own development. However, after that has been done and not before, since it is an indispensable perquisite, he may dismiss the problem altogether and rise to the ultimate view, where infinite goodness and calm alone reign and where there are no problems at all. The self-actualized Christian’s sympathetic understand will include both those to whom religion is vital and those to whom it is suspect. Where sympathy is prolonged excessively, when this shift of personality from oneself to another is not limited to gaining understanding of that other’s need, and is not guarded by wisdom, there will be a denial one one’s own individual being. This can lead to harm on both planes—spiritual and physical. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Mental sympathy with others must go only as far as a certain point: if it begins to affect of negatively, we must refrain from proceeding farther. He need not stray either from the line which his thinking has been following nor the direction along which his conduct has been moving, even though he tries to give mental sympathy to different characters. Sometimes men act as the authority for their wives. Her concurrence does not alter the fact that he is using male standards and male attitudes as guidelines for female behaviour involving pleasures of the flesh, something no man should presume to do. Even if by chance he happens to guess right, what he is doing is wrong—because his wife then comes to conclusions on the basis of her husband’s reasons, not her own, and the damage to her self-confidence can be incalculable. For if he has in fact guessed right, and if she follows his suggestions and achieves greater responsivity than in the past, she must believe that he knows more about her feelings involving pleasures of the flesh than she does—and this is absolute nonsense. Exactly the same situation prevails when a wife tells a husband what he is thinking or feeling or should do. Where pleasures or the flesh is concerned, no partner can ever be the authority for the other. Each partner must accept the other as the final authority on his or her own feelings. In affirming that principle, a man and woman have taken the first step toward achieving harmony with pleasures of the flesh in marriage. They are telling each other without question the fact that they are individuals, separate but not separated, different but not dissimilar, and that their happiness must flow both from the delight they find in their differences and the security they derive from their similarities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
This is not a conviction too easily attained, especially for young men and women. In growing up, the emphasis was never on what they shared or on an appreciation of the differences that distinguish them as male and female. On the contrary, considerable emotion was invested in sharpening the sense of difference and in using that difference as a way of defining selves with intimate passions. If girls like to talk, then a boy’s taciturnity is an assertion that he is a male. If boys like to compete, then a girl’s cooperativeness marks her as a female. Each gender defined itself by deliberately choosing not to think or feel or behave like the other. With such a heritage, it is no simple matter for a married couple to overcome the prejudice of the past and to understand that the differences between them are essentially no more and no less than the differences between any two individuals. As long as the old attitudes persist, however, as long as a man and woman use the differences between them as a way of separating themselves to prove that they are male and female, their marriage is likely to remain at best a working partnership. In those circumstances, conflicts are threatening and are consequently avoided or denied. To do otherwise would seem to put the partnership in jeopardy. However, for the man and woman who accept conflict as offering an opportunity for growth, much depends on whether they have developed an adequate system of communication. To say that disagreements can revitalize a relationship leaves open the question of how the disagreements are expressed. This is particularly true when gender is the issue. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
How indeed can a husband and wife adjust their discrepant physical needs and at the same time reinforce their marriage bond? They must find realization that a conflict involving pleasures of the flesh is not a problem in need of a solution. It is a situation that requires resolution. These are two entirely different approaches, promising radically different outcomes. Suppose a husband wishes pleasures of the flesh four times a week while he his welcomes it just twice. Arithmetic suggests a simple compromise of three times a week. However, the idea is, of course, ludicrous. The husband will still feel frustrated; the wife might feel imposed upon; and neither one would have learned anything about the other’s feelings. If that were not enough, there remains the final incongruity: the real difference between them has nothing to do with numbers. Frequently of pleasures of the flesh is almost never the true issues. Had this couple been able to communicate with each other, they could have explored the situation they were in. If possible, their goal would not have been to determine how many times to have pleasures of the flesh each weak but to discover their true feelings on the latter. Literally hundreds of alternative factors might have been operating for each partner. The husband might have felt that he was failing to excite his wife, that he was in need of more care and warmth than usual, or that he felt especially living and filled with energy. His wife might have felt oppressed by financial pressures, or unhappy because she had put on weight, or preoccupied by her new job. For this couple to ignore these matters and discuss instead the frequency of their pleasures of the flesh, would be to talk in an emotional vacuum. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Even if they fully unburdened their feelings, they would still have to deal with the fact that the husband’s needs for pleasures of the flesh were, at least for the present, greater than those of his wife. However, their basis for approaching each other would be entirely changed; the problem would not be one of taking or demanding versus not giving or submitting—it would be that of finding the best way to express care and concern for each other and to meet the needs of which ever partner was under the greater emotional strain. This kind of communication is not easy to accomplish, but it can be achieved by any couple willing to make the effort and to abide by two principles. The calls for neutrality; the second for mutuality. The neutrality principle requires both husband and wife to assume that past discord with pleasures of the flesh will not necessarily repeat itself in the future, because each partner is motivated to try to change. Each, in brief, credits the other with good intentions and the will to implement those intentions. Each accepts full responsibility for what he or she does—or fails to do—in making the effort to act differently. And each individual accepts responsibility for functioning with pleasures of the flesh, and does not hold the other accountable for the body’s responses. If a man and woman are to have a good physical relationship, each must strive to be responsive to the other, not responsible for the other. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Furthermore, the second principle, that of mutuality, requires all messages of pleasures of the flesh between two people, whether conveyed by words or actions, by tone of voice or touch of fingertips, to be exchanged in the spirit of having a common cause. Mutuality means two people united in an effort to discover what is best for both. In attempting to reconcile differences in their needs for pleasures of the flesh and desires, they must avoid what lawyers call “adversary proceedings,” in which each person tries to prove that he is right and his opponent is wrong. (It remains right vs. wrong even when other terms are used such as healthy vs. uptight, and everybody-does vs. nobody-I-know-does. By contrast, the principle of mutuality calls for both partners to accept the idea that is a sustained—and sustaining—physical relationship is desired, no conflict involving pleasures of the flesh can be resolved on an either/or basis. Often, of course, one partner may be in position to impose a decision on the other. Most frequently it is the husband, taking authority in matters of pleasures of the flesh as the traditional male prerogative or as simply another instance of the tune being called by whoever pays the piper. However, almost as frequently the decision is imposed by the less emotionally stable of the partners. Such is the tyranny of the neurotic over the normal that a person who suffers from persistent depression, chronic psychic exhaustion, free-floating anxieties, the need to be a martyr or another similar mental afflictions, generally succeeds in coercing a considerate partner to yield in pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Let us feel that we are trying to become good men of warm hearts, not good statues of cold marble. It would appear that ideals that seem too remote for realization and goals that seem too high for achievement are not worth the trouble of setting up. Yet to abandon them altogether would be to lose the sense of right direction. That would be a mistake. It is wiser to keep them as ultimate ideals and goals, drawing from them inspirational and directional value. It is here and for such a purpose that the dreaming idealists themselves have their place, not in the all-or-nothing revolutionary way that they themselves think they do. It is needful to make a compromise between the facts about human nature in its present state and the ideals which it can hope to realize only in some future state. It is not necessary to go all the way with the extremists, whether in art, mysticism, politics, or economics in order to realize that we can learn something from each of them. Let us take what is adaptable in their views, but let us reject what id decidedly extreme. There are not only sins against moral virtue; there are also sin against balance and proportion. What follows is more likely to be an experience of the opposite value. How often have you heard someone say, “I laughed until I cried,” or “After we have had a big fight, our pleasures of the flesh are always so intense,” or “Just when I had given up trying, I suddenly had new strength to start again.” This is not an unusual or unnatural phenomenon. In fact, it is perfectly natural and predictable. So not condemn yourself for loving somebody deeply one moment and being furious with him the next. In such instance, your natural restraining function is simply pulling you from flying off too far in one direction. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
When you start going too far on the other, it will pull you back again. So relax, and do not try to stifle or control it. The patterns in your life is basically circular. From a central core, our emotions, values and interests ray outward to a perimeter, or circumference. In physics, when an object is moving around a central core, there is one force which constantly trues to keep it moving toward that core; this is called center-seeking, or centripetal, force. At the same time, another force is trying to move it outward away from the core; this is called center-fleeing, or centrifugal, force. When centripetal force beings the object to the center, centrifugal force pulls it out to the perimeter where centripetal force draws it back in. Then the cycle starts all over again. The basic model for this phenomenon is the atom, which consists of a nucleus in the center and electrons flying around it. In atomic physics, the positive magnetic attraction of the nucleus keeps the negatively-charged electrons from flying off into space. The nucleus is a natural restraining mechanism. In your emotional make-up, your core (or center) performs a similar function. Trouble occurs when you refuse to “listen to” your core, refuse to stay in touch with it, thereby denying one value and intensifying the opposite one all out of proportion. This is the “overcontrol.” Some people exaggerate their anger, to the detriment of their other values, particularly love. If a person expresses their love, might be fearful of what may happen. Instead, this leads to an individual expressing a degree of anger all out of proportion to what would have been called for only by their loved one’s actions. Thus, an individual symbolically “kills” their loved one for disobeying them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
When people are unable to feel an intense amount of love, it may be a good idea to push their emotional teeter-totter to the level of intense anger. Doing this in an atmosphere which is not judgmental or “right-wrong” oriented, the individual will then be free to let the teeter-totter swing the other way, as it naturally is inclined to do. The result is a natural outpouring of the love one holds so bottled up all of one’s life. One will finally be able to express love for someone who, in the past, had been one’s enemy. If a man remains detached, he is akin to a fundamentalist minister trying to capture the depth of an African tribal celebration in fundamentalist terms. They very language and the frame of reference of the innermost is quite different from our ordinary way of thinking. I would have no quarrel with anyone who asserted the language of the novelist, poet, or musician is closer to the quality of human experience than the language of psychologists. One can distinguish what is outermost in man as that which is more or less perceived by and available to himself, from an innermost that extends from this to aspects of himself which are quite unlike the public self. Each of these areas can be roughly ordered. The real outermost is the World which we more or less agree upon and assumes exists regardless of ourselves. One can experience trees, sky, people and all “others” as though they are a World superordinate to us. It exists. Less outermost are perceptions which are relative to the perceiver. For instance, I see this room, my study, as relative to me. An empty study divorced from my presence and use of it would be something else, strange to contemplate. At about this level might he included the reaction of one person to another in which there is awareness of both as present, id est, “Your words surprise me.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
At the inner border of the outermost, I would include sensation of one’s own body. It can be like a thing possessed and used. For instance, I notice a little stiffness here and there and need to change position. It is almost as though I tolerate my body as a necessary other. In this outer region, I would also include states of mind in which I think of what to say to others, so to speak—adjustments of my mask. The inner me (or to borrow the French ‘lautre moi, the other me) begins at this border and extends to puzzling and even unknown aspects of myself. Near the border of the outer, l’autre moi includes spontaneous associations of thought which arise unbidden when in a social context or alone. Inside that are vaguely felt sensations, feelings, images in something of an apparently hodge-podge order. There are states in which one can awaken the inner life to stand forth of its own. There are, in rough order toward the innermost, drifting-fantasy, auto-hypnotic inner perception, the hypnogogic state (the territory near sleep or relaxation) and dreaming while asleep. There are also so-called abnormal states such as hallucinations, altered perceptions of the body and outer World, visions, et cetera. The whole of this inner me, this inner territory, is marked by one distinct difference from the outer me. The life of the inner arises spontaneously, showing surprising twists and turns. The outer me is guided by circumstances or what I choose to do and think. The border of the inner is reached when spontaneous thought, feelings, or images arise, perhaps related to the outer situation at hand, but still autonomously surprising in their nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
The surprise may be a little one, where one can see the associative link. Or it may be like a dream where the message of the inner is not really understandable. To the conscious outer self the inner, or l’autre moi, is marked by this spontaneous unaccountability. There are lovely images in literature where the relationship of the inner and outer are portrayed. For instance, in the Christian Bible there are references to the relationship of the servant to the master of the house. It may come as a surprise to ego, but in this imagery, ego is servant and the inner is the master. The master provides and the servant makes do with what is provided, id est, the inner springs provide resources and the outer is judged by what is made of them. Some creative people make good use of the inner and are judged favourably by themselves and the World. At this point mankind is no longer even defended. On the contrary, “to attack that wild beast, man, with every possible weapon, and to attack the creator…” that is the intention. Overwhelmed at the thought of having God as an enemy, intoxicated with the solitude experienced by great criminals (“I alone against humanity”), M. Maldoror goes to war against creation and its author. The romantics maintained with the greatest care the fatal opposition between human solitude and divine indifference—the literary expression of this solitude being the isolated castle and the dandy. However, Mr. Latreamont’s work deals with a more profound drama. It is quite apparent that he found this solitude insupportable and that, ranged against creation, he wished to destroy its limits. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
Far from wanting to fortify the reign of humanity with crenelated towers, he wishes to merge it with all other reigns. He brought back creation to the shores of the primeval seas where morality, as well as every other problem, loses all meaning—including the problem, which he considers so terrifying, of the immortality of the soul. He had no desire to create a spectacular image of the rebel, or of the dandy, opposed to creation, but to mingle mankind and the World together in the same general destruction. He attacked the very frontier that separates mankind from the universe. Total freedom, the freedom of crime in particular, supposes the destruction of human frontiers. It is not enough to condemn oneself and all mankind to execration. The reign of mankind must still be brought back to the level of the reign of the instinct. We find in Mr. Lautreamont this refusal to recognize rational consciousness, this return to the elementary which is one of the marks of a civilization in revolt against itself. It is no longer a question or recognizing appearances, but of no longer existing at all on the conscious level. The child has a picture of the World which is quite different from the way it appears to his parents. It is a fairy-tale World, full of monsters and magic, and it persists all through his life and forms the archaic background for his script. A simple example is the night fear or night terror, where Jeder calls out that there is a bear in his room. His parents come in and turn on the lights and show him that there are no bears there, or else become angry and tell him to hush up and go to sleep. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Either way, his Children knows that there is, or was, a bear in the room nevertheless. Like Galileo, he cries: “Eppur se muove.” The difference in the two ways of handling it does not change the fact of the bear. The reasoning approach means that when there is a bear, you parents will come and protect you and the bear will go into hiding; the angry approach means that when there is a bear, you are on your own. However, the bear stays, either way. By the time he grows up, Jeder’s World image or script set has become much more elaborate and also much better hidden, unless it reappears with its original distortions in the form of delusions. Usually, however, there is no inkling of it until it appears in a dream, and then suddenly much of the patient’s behaviour becomes coherent and understandable. What do person do what they have been provoked to emotional arousal? The alternative reactions of a person to emotional arousal are immediate uncontrolled expression and release, suppression or emotional behaviour, and repression of the emotional quality experience. Immediate expression is the characteristic pattern among young children when they experience emotional tension. They laugh, cry, strike out, jump up and down, throw tantrums—in short, they appear to be almost out of control. It is as if their cerebral cortex has been dethroned from rational control over behaviour and their entire organism is directed by “explosions” of subcortical brain structures, such as the hypothalamus. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
On the beneficial ide, immediate expression of emotional tension in this uncontrolled manner is effective in getting rid of the tension. Once it is given expression, the person is able to proceed in a more controlled and less tense way. On the negative side, immediate expression is undesirable, especially in an adult, because: Society condemns uncontrolled expression of emotion in adults on a purely normative and moral basis. Adults who throw tantrums or who cannot control their emotions are viewed as immature, as person who cannot be trusted with important responsibilities. While expressing uncontrol emotions, the person is out of touch with external reality. Persons out of touch with reality do not perceive the World with accuracy—indeed, they are not interested in the external World during the tantrum. Further, they do not protect other important values while in those throes of an “affective storm.” They may break things that they value; they may say or do things that cost them their job, marriage, reputation. It is so very important that you do not let praise and adulation go to your head. Adulation is poison. You better never lose sight of the fact that the Lord put you where you are according to His design, which you do not understand. Acknowledge the Lord for whatever good you can accomplish and give Him the credit and the glory and do not worry about that coming to yourself. If you can do that, you will go forward with love for the people and a great respect for them and you will try to accomplish what your office demands of you. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Direction is telling others what to do. Providing effective direction requires that leaders communicate the desires end state for the direction they provide. To accomplish a mission, leaders prioritize tasks, assign responsibility, supervise, and ensure subordinates perform to standard. They ensure subordinates clearly understand their guidance, while allowing subordinates the opportunity to demonstrate initiative withing the overall commander’s intent. Providing clear direction allows subordinates initiative to adopt their tasks withing the commander’s intent when circumstances change. The Sacramento Fire Department requires leaders who provide direction and firefighters who can execute without the need for continuous guidance. Motivation is the will and initiative to do what is necessary to accomplish a mission. While motivation comes from within, others’ words and actions affect it. The Sacramento Fire Department understands others’ needs and desires, and aligns and elevates individuals desires into team goals. Even if it means risking their lives, the inspire others to accomplish those larger goals. At other times, such as constrained or dangerous situations, the leader gets the fire fighters to do things quickly and explains the reasons later. Indirect approaches to motivation can be as effective as direct approaches. Setting a personal example can sustain the drive in others. Then becomes apparent when crews share hardships and risks with each other. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
“Social life? I’ve been going with a lady, and it’s getting serous, so I have to be thinking about marriage. She hasn’t been put through the wringer yet, so she doesn’t really know what fire service is like. It’s happened with some of my other women, where I don’t show up at all because I’m at a fire. Or we’re out someplace and a fire call comes in, and I have to stop the date and go to the fire, because I’m needed. But our first date was kind of funny. We went out with some friends and their wives, and were sitting around the house toward the end of the evening, and a fire came in. I said, ‘Well, no time like the present to break into the fire service, huh?’ And off I went. I went on the fire call, and she was taken home by some of the other wives. I don’t think any woman likes to be left at home in those situation. But the fire department is my first love and always will be my first love. And when duty calls, I have to go.” Understanding the expectations and applying the attributes and competencies prepares the Sacramento Fire Department for situations they are likely to encounter. Fire fighters who gain expertise through operational assignments, institutional learning, and self-development will be versatile enough to adapt to most situations and grow into greater responsibilities. All members of the Sacramento Fire Department are loyal, dedicated to duty, respectful, selfless, honourable, possess a great deal of integrity and display personal courage in the face of danger and adversity. You can save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. As a reminder, parents, pleasure teach your children love America and be patriotic citizens and to buy goods and services made in America. It is also important to respect law and order and treat your elders with respect. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. In an effort to help America pull through the massive national deficit, please buy American made cars. American made cars used to be the envy of the World and because American car brands are offering a wide range of options, from family SUVs to electric vehicles and luxury sedans, we are now seeing a resurging interest. American made cars are equal or superior to those made overseas. The Chevrolet Trax, for instance, is a well-designed, fuel efficient, and safe SUV. And as you know, there is no better car on Earth than 1950-1970s American Muscle Car. Americans make sure superior product, but we are buying things from other nations. American food imports have risen by 300 percent since 1999. American farmland declined by nearly 20 million acres between 2017 and 2022. As of 2022, there were 880.1 million acres of land dedicated to farming, compared to 900.1 million in 2017. The data shows there are now little more than 1.9 million farms in the country. Americans and American corporations spent $136 billion on food and beverages from other countries. It is a national security risk to lose American Farms and farmers. If there is a war, and most of our meat, produce, poultry, dairy, and fruit is coming from foreign counties, we stand the risk of starving. With war breaking out all over the World, in these uncertain times, it is very important to bring American farms back. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. As money flows, it influences further investment. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever. Also, to ensure that we have farmland for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrant to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a populations that equally represents all races of people. If Americans continue to spend money on American products, then more need to be made to keep up the inventory. When investors notice these goods are selling, it gives them the confidence to pour more money into that local business. It shows that people want these goods made in America and pressures investors to keep these goods and services in America. The jobs stay here, the business stays in American, wages naturally increase, and more money is invested to keep up with demand. This reduces the burden on the taxpayer. When you support American businesses, that money stays in our economy and can help to reduce the national debt. The government creates debt by borrowing from businesses in the private sector or from foreign countries. It also increases the national debt by spending more than it gains in tax revenue in a fiscal year. When people shop locally, more tax money stays in the economy and goes to the government. This way, it keeps more money in our national economy and keeps more jobs located in American which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the nation debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by send more money overseas. Buying American made products is also better for the environment and helps to reduce the carbon footprint because these products do not have to travel nearly as far. Furthermore, American companies and manufacturers are held to much higher standards in regard to pollution. American companies have to be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Moreover, please remember to respect law and order and treat your elders with the utmost dignity and kindness possible. And take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. It is inborn in the human minds to wish to know. If this begins with the endless surface questions of a child’s curiosity, if it continues into deeper questions of a scientist’s probing investigation, it cannot and does not stop there. For the higher part of the mind will eventually come into unfoldment, that union of abstract reflective thought with mystical intuition, which is true intelligence, which needs and sees a view of the whole of things. And so, the knowing faculty enters the realm of philosophy. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
Laguna Park, CA | From the Mid 500’s
Now Selling!
Welcome to the New Fabulous Forties! This intimate enclave of 37 homesites with available one- and two-story floorplans is the place to be in Sacramento. Waking up to a home you love sets just the right tone for what is ahead. Ventris Place offers beautifully designed homes. Danville, Residence 4, has 3 to 4 bedrooms and a loft across 1,846 square feet of living space.
Danville gives two levels, each one with its own defining purpose to create exactly what you need and want in the moment. Your home will flex with you, whether you need to invite work or play right into your comfort zone.
There are also nooks that conjure up a visionary escape, welcoming you to lounge or create for the perfect work love balance. A main level with sweeping, open spaces and down to earth textures and tones, is designed with all the luxury details and faraway feels, much like the extended Laguna Park neighbourhood it occupies.
Organically designed to pull the outdoors and the indoors out, you can dine alfresco right of your gourmet kitchen or make the night bright, sitting on your side yard, for an entirely fresh perspective. A setting that is as cool as it is calm, elegant, and ready for the way you want to live.
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This is the perfect community for those who are on the go, or just want to enjoy life at a slower place. The convenience is uniquely charming. https://nextgenerationcapital.us/new-homes-elk-grove-ventris-place/
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Western Fever!
Some well-meaning moralists who say that the disciple should no longer look for the evil in others swing to the other extreme and say that he should look only for the good. Philosophy, however, does not endorse either point of view, except to remark that we have no business to judge those who are weaker than ourselves and less business to condemn them. It further says that to look only for the good in others would be to give a false picture of them, for a proper picture must combine the bright and the dark sides. Therefore, it prefers mentally to leave them alone and not to set any valuation upon them, to mind its own affairs and to leave them to the unerring judgment of their own cycles of retaliation. The only exception to this rule is when a disciple is forced to have dealings with another man which make it necessary for him to understand the character of the person with whom he is dealing; but even this understanding must be fair, just, calmly made, impartial, and unprejudiced. Above all, it must not arouse personal emotions or egoistic reactions: in short, he will have to be absolutely impersonal. However, it is seldom that a disciple will have to make such an exception. He should refrain from giving attention to the imperfections and shortcomings of others, and he should certainly never blame them for these. He should turn his critical gaze towards himself alone—unless he is specifically asked by others to examine them—and exercise it to correct himself and improve himself and reform himself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
To create a lasting, happy marriage, couples must learn how to resolve conflicts so that each individual feels understood and decisions are made that involved acceptable compromise. “If a husband and wife sometimes enjoy pleasures of the flesh for different reason, is there good communication? I mean, suppose for one it is an emotional things on the one part and physical on the other?” Wonderful blessings flow from resolving conflict in an atmosphere of love. “There are times when I feel much more emotionally in need than physically. Isn’t it perfectly all right for me to go ahead and just find the emotional satisfaction I want even thought I know it would be more stimulating to my husband if I reacted more physically?” Of course, it is all right. Both you and your husband must be completely free to express what you want and feel what you want every time. And knowing there is complete trust between the two of you, you are completely attuned to each other’s wishes, and understand that you have moods and that you are a different person with different needs at different times. “Can any couple ever really be completely attuned to each other?” Well, being attuned is not magic. It is communication. It is something you participate in by identifying with another person and sharing with that person and learning how to reconcile your private, intimate thoughts and feelings with those of other person. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
Being attuned results as well from good nonverbal communication. And being attuned is the key to an important point. Expression of intimate passions is not necessarily a matter of yes or no, to bed or not to bed. Expression of pleasures of the flesh exists on a continuum. It includes a very wide range of behaviour. It means reaching out just to touch, drawing close to share a mood, developing it or letting it drift. It means enjoying the feelings of pleasures of the flesh in the moment without necessarily turning them into an invitation or request or command. However, being attuned also means sensing when the mood is right to take the next step, and then you should be free to respond in the way that feels best for you. To be able to say, “This time I am going along for the ride.” Or not even say it; just feel it. Or to be demanding—and, if it goes wrong, to communicate and say, “look…” “Isn’t it natural sometimes not to be completely with it? To be a little removed? Sometimes I even find I’m short of watching…Is there anything wrong with that?” There probably is not anyone who, while having pleasures of the flesh, does not become a spectator for a time. On occasion, we watch what we ourselves may be doing or what our partner is doing. It is perfectly natural to consciously observe the procedure; in fact, it is quite stimulating to do this now and then. What is important is the degree to which we assume this spectator’s role. In some cases, being the spectator on occasion may reflect a detachment from any emotional involvement. This is natural and no cause for concern. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
However, being a spectator does cut down on the input of the stimulus. If you are the spectator during pleasures of the flesh activities, for instance, some degree of your wife’s pleasure and excitement does not really get through to you, which means you lose that stimulation. Ans to a degree your own pleasure is dulled because you are not lost in the experience—you are observing. I am not saying that you experience no pleasure at all. I am just saying that some of it is blocked. A level of perception is blocked. This becomes critical in cases of sexual dysfunction. For example, suppose the male has trouble achieving or maintaining “attention.” In that circumstance both partners have fears. Whenever the wife approaches her husband, he worries: can I? will I? And then there is his wife’s fear: will he? can he? or am I going to be left hanging? “Is it my fault?” Do I contribute to the problem? Am I pushing him too much? And in that case, when dysfunction crops up, the fear of performance rather than the pleasure of performance becomes dominant. Then one really becomes a spectator. Because both partners are off in the corner, watching to see what happens. Usually nothing does. “What the male cannot sustain himself in the long run—what is the main cause? Are you asking about the male who loses “attention” without climax or who climaxes too soon? “Too soon.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Premature climax is very difficult to define. However, or concept of it, basically speaking, hold that is a man maintains control long enough to provide the opportunity for his female partner to achieve satisfaction approximately fifty percent of their coital opportunities, he cannot be consider a premature climaxer. Now, there are certain circumstances under which any man may tend to function to such a rush that his partner is unsatisfied. Suppose he had been away for a couple of weeks. The first time after that he usually has trouble, He may have similar trouble during his first encounter with a new woman. These are classic situations. However, if the problem is a consistent one within the marital unit, there is a technique to remedy matters. When this technique is used longingly by husband and wife together, almost every man can learn self-control. It is simple enough to put into practise easily but too complicated to describe in detail right now. “You said before that pleasures of the flesh are a natural process. To not wait it—is that unnatural?” On occasion or for a long period of time? It is perfectly natural on occasion—sometimes you are just not hungry. If it lasts two or three weeks, though, it may be time to give the matter some thought. “Say it lasts a month.” Tension involving pleasures of the flesh exists in the body just as the appetite for food exists. If the desire for intimate passions is lacking, we would first want to check for physical disability, just as we would if a person went too long without feeling hungry. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
However, in one respect pleasures of the flesh is like no other physical process. It is the only physical process that can be denied indefinitely, even for lifetime. It is one thing, of course, for someone with reasons that are valid for him or her deliberately to condition himself to set it aside. However, fi you are talking about someone who suddenly finds that now there is no interest where there was interest before, and if there seems to be no physical explanation, then the answer may lie in the cares and concerns that are draining his energies. “Is this problem—you know, lack of desire and all that—is it the same for a woman? If she’s busy with the house and the children and she’s just beat…” Of course that is going to affect her responsiveness! How could it not? There is probably no young mother in the country who would not know what you are talking about. “Isn’t it a fact that women have their strongest sexual drive at a later age than men? What is it—eighteen to twenty-five for men and twenty-give to thirty-three for woman?” That is a reflection of the old Kinsey data. It is not a physiological fact but a sociological one. It is culturally induced. Perhaps one of society’s ways of protecting young girls from the risk of pregnancy was to teach them that they had no feelings for pleasures of the flesh; they were given all the moral precepts to make sure they remembered the lesson. Boy were permitted—even encouraged—to have pleasures of the flesh feelings, so they got off to a head start. Girls took longer to catch up, that is all. It is cultural, not biological. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
Differences of opinion, habit, or background are inevitable, but we have ample resources to help us know how to cope. Couples can learn methods for dealing with conflict. Inspiration can lead to changing hearts that soften each spouse from the inside. Some of our greatest opportunities to demonstrate our love will be within the walls of our own homes. Love should be the very heart of family life, and yet sometimes it is not. There can be too much impatience, too much arguing, too many fights, too many tears. When troubles persist and become destructive to family life, there can be more serious causes of conflict, including immaturity, selfishness, desire to win power struggles, and pride. I have long felt that the greatest factor in a happy marriage is an anxious concern for the comfort and well-being of one’s compassion. In most cases, selfishness is the leading factor that cases argument, separation, divorce, and broken hearts. Whenever one considers the bad feeling and the unpleasantness caused by contention, it is well to ask, “Why do I participate?” It is important to recognize that we choose our behaviour. At the root of this issues is the age-old problem of pride. When problems persist, whatever the cause, we need to learn new skills and soften our hearts. If his higher faculties have not yet awakened and possessed him, why blame a person for what he does? He is only doing what he can. Moreover, it is prudent never to condemn others. For others will then by retaliation condemn you. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
We need not be unaware to the vaults and lapses of inspired men, but we ought to forgive them. A balancing of accounts justifies this attitude. Those who bring this rare gift with them deserve a wider indulgence than others. We should always remember that everyone, on all the different and varying levels of spiritual advancement, has his own difficulties and problems. To accept these without giving way to negative emotions is the first step in the right direction. Coming to terms with life and oneself is a never-ending procedure from which no one is exempt. The very nature of existence is synonymous with the individual struggle for self-development. Do not belittle any human being who is awake to his higher nature. Do not condemn another soul for his misdeeds, even though he be the wickedest of all men. Firstly, because he cannot be other than he is, for time, experience, tendencies, and destiny have brought him to this particular point and way of self-expression. Secondly, because the worse his misdeeds the greater will be the redemptive suffering to which he unconsciously condemns himself. It seems to me that this way of living is also the way of exploration and the way of science, when it is truly exploring and truly scientific, and the way of learning (education), and that this is also the way of infants before they know anything except what they are born with. An adult is a deteriorated child. One of the major theoretical hypotheses of client-centered therapy is that during therapy the concept of the self is revised to assimilate basic experiences which had previously been denied to awareness as threatening. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Why do we “do it” to each other in our relationships? Why do people manipulate each other? Why do some women constantly “do it” to their husbands by reminding him of his obligations rather than supporting his need for self-expression?” Some women prevent their husbands from doing what he wants to do, just so they can keep up the mask. Each of us has a number of emotionally charged ideas about life, which are called values: anger, love, strength, weakness, criticalness, support, dependency and control. Somewhere in our development, we form the notion that one of more of these values is “taboo,” forbidden. One of the forbidden values is sometimes control. To some women, the woman is supposed to be dependent. The man is supposed to be in control. Yet women know, deep down, that they have the capacity to be independent, to take control, to support themselves and their family. This is the reality. The forbidden reality. However, because women have formed the opinion that this reality is unavailable to them, they mask it with the opposite face, the face of the helpless manipulator. However, women may not know on a conscious level that they have to capacity to be independent. On this level, all many of them have are their ideas, the values impressed on them during their upbringing, her thoughts about the way things should be and her obvious actions. It is inly by coming into touch with her feelings about dependency that a woman is able to get a conscious knowledge of what is really true for her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
This is not always easy. At one point in any relationship, matters sometimes get so strained, couples sometimes have a hard time being together at all. Women sometimes constantly judge their husbands for wanting to shirk his duties; men sometimes constantly put their wives down for not appreciating them. Sensing is a great way to start doing things together so as to create a closer relationship. Taking walks together, doing household chores together, reading to each other are great ways to bond and heal a relationship. After a woman realizes that she is masking her true values, she may find it increasingly easier to be comfortable with herself, with the notion that she no longer needs her husband’s income or control. After that session, when he usually begins to talk about his frustration with a therapist or ministry, a woman will typically open up and may become spontaneously warn towards her husband. She understands she can just “be with” his frustration and not try to avoid or condemn it. Interestingly, the number of things a could does together decreases after a time, yet their relationship still grows closers because as they learn to unmask their feelings, they can be together more, while actually seeing each other less. In order to make her martial relationship free, some woman lean to understand the concept of interdependence. She cannot be dependent upon her husband all the time, though this is precisely what some women have tried to do. Since two people are in an intimate relationship, one spouse cannot be entirely independent of the other all the time either. There are times, however, when it is appropriate for woman to be totally dependent or independent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
For example, some women do not have the heart to discipline their children. When they do something which is a clear violation of the rules, about all she can do is scold them with, “You know you are not supposed to do that. You should be ashamed of yourself.” On the other hand, many the fathers find it easy to be the disciplinarian, taking away the children’s privileges and putting up with their protests. Thus, when it comes to discipline, woman can be totally dependent on their husband—without manipulation or suppression. When it comes to running the house, generally women feel entirely competent. Man can feel lost. A woman does not typically have to consult her husband on how much to pay for caviar or when to get a faucet fixed. In that realm, she can be totally independent—again, without manipulation or suppression on the part of either of them. Apart from these instances, there are a number of situations which call for interdependence. If a man should leave his job and stay at home writing, he would need his wife’s ability to work and provide an income for them. At the same time, however, sometimes a housewife knows nothing about investing and the needs of her husband’s help in committing their excess funds to the financial plans. What some women have to learn is that no relationship can exist for long with one person always being the superior and the other being the subordinate. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
Each person in a couple must permit independence, dependence and interdependence. The proper balance of these three aspects is difficult to achieve, but it is equally freeing to both parties, who can then stop “doing it” to each other and just “be with” each other in the way that the situation dictates. Emotional interdependence is like a dance, in which each partner is aware of and sensitive to the movements of the other. They do not battle, they do not fight for control. Rather, each responds to the music in the rhythmic flow with the other. As partners, neither is a superior or subordinate. Each is sure of oneself as a dancer and does not need to push the other around or be pushed around. Many marital or family conflicts arise because of uncontrolled anger. If we are not careful, we can follow an angry incident with constant thinking about how we were wronged. The longer we ruminate, the more reasons we can generate to justify our perspective. This brooding can prevent us from calming down, and when a second wave of anger emerges before the first is resolved, hormonal reactions can lead to additional outbursts. Therefore, before you try tackling a problem, allow your emotions to cool down. Wait out the chemical reaction that may be taking place. Find a distraction. Choose to think about something else or take a walk. Write down your thoughts for feelings. For some, this helps to increase self-awareness. Let it out in productive ways. Yelling about your feelings will not “get it out of your system.” The more you vent in an angry manner, the more intense your feelings will become. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Adolescent members of society can face challenges related to navigating the strict moral code of the religion while also dealing with typical teenage pressures like peer influence, identity exploration, and grappling with issues like pleasures of the flesh, particularly when it comes to same-gender attraction, which can lead to feelings of isolation or conflict with religious teachings; additionally, the heavy emphasis on personal accountability and “worthiness” can contribute to anxiety and guilt among struggling teens. Masturbation is something of his own. He is not sure what to do with his new feelings for pleasures of the flesh or hot to fit them into his plan, so he reacts to them with the earlier feelings he has become familiar with, his racket. Masturbation may also put him through the agony of a true existential crisis: it is something he does or does not do at a given moment, and it is (or should be) his decision alone; and once he has done it, he, and he alone, must take the consequences. These may be private feeling such as guilt (because masturbation is wicked), fear (because it will damage his health, he thinks), or inadequacy (because it will weaken his will power, he thinks). All these are “head transactions” between the Parent and the Child in his skull. On the other hand, he may have transactional feelings which depend on the reactions, real or imaginary, of his public: hurt, anger, or embarrassment, because now he thinks they have a real reason to make fun of him, hate him, or shame him. In any case, masturbation gives him a way of fitting the new feelings of pleasures of the flesh in with the old feelings he learned as a child. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
However, he also learns to be more flexible. From his schoolmates and teachers, he gets “permission” to react with feelings other than those encouraged at home, and he also learns to cool it: not everybody takes seriously the things his folks worry about. This switch in his feeling-system gradually separates him from his family and draws him closer to people his own age. He adapts his script to the new situation and makes it more “presentable.” He may even change his role from being a total failure to being a partial success, from being a loser to being merely a nonwinner and at least breaking even. If he has a winning script, he discovers that that requires a certain objectivity. He is not in a competitive situation and victories do not come automatically, but only after a certain amount of planning and work; and he learns to take a few losses without getting shaken up. When children can benefit from their parents’ wisdom is ironically often the time when they are least likely to accept it. Adolescent children, in particular, strive to become independent, and the urgency of that drive, heightened by the pull of peers and Worldly influence, sometimes draws them away from those who could help them the most. Sadly, their parents, wanting desperately to help, sometimes watch helplessly as they make unfortunate mistakes. Headstrong children, bent on doing things their own way, rebuff the most loving of fathers and mothers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Boredom arises from doing repetitive, unchallenging work. It arises as a consequence of relationships with persons who lack spontaneity and who do not relate to us in ways that meet our needs for affection, understanding or intellectual stimulation. Boredom arises when people do not actively choose what they will do, but instead permit their lives to be lived for them by social pressures to conform with rigid roles and concepts of respectability. Boredom is inevitable in human life, but there are healthy and unhealthy methods of coping with it. The unhealth patterns include permitting it to continue for indefinite periods of time without making an effort to understand its causes, and impulsively seeking excitement or diversion without striving to understand the causes of boredom. For example, some people may drive automobiles at breakneck speeds, smoke marijuana, or fornicate simply to interrupt monotony. Other flee ennui by attending many movies, drinking too much liquor, using other drugs, watching television for long hours, staying on the Internet, or reading escape literature. The healthier approach to boredom is to reflect upon one’s life, to ascertain what one truly wants and the ways in which existence if failing to provide legitimate satisfaction. If persons are unable to diagnose their own needs, they are serving the interests of healthy personality by discussing their situation and personality with a friend or by seeking counseling. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Geography is important because it provides a foundational understanding of how the physical environment interacts with human societies, allowing us to analyze and address global issues like climate change, resource management, population distribution, and political conflicts, essentially giving us a holistic view of the World and how different places are connected and influenced by their geographic features. The most instructive way to look at a World-Map is to reposition the map so that East is down. The reexperience the long climb of humanity from East to West. The busy caravans like ant-files shuttling up and down the Asian trade routes. The enormous ant-armies of Alexander overrunning the past—no Worlds for him to conquer westward. Genghis Khan’s fast-moving mobile, equine technology storming columns. Roman legions painfully pushing up into Gaul sense the movement of human swarms over the centuries—the empire-hives sending out columns and waves, the exploratory probes westward. The flotillas of frail craft moving up the Atlantic, shipping that most basic cargo: sperm and eggs. The other cargoes are support-logistic. When you watch the sun disappear over the horizon, you are looking into the future. The greatest technological problems faced by DNA on this planet was scaling the Atlantic Ocean. For over a thousand years, from 40 to 1400 AD, the waves of mobile-elite sperm-eggs splashed up to the Western-European Atlantic beach-ledges—and waited. It was the greatest swarming phenomenon in human history! #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Port-cities teeming with migragents, explores, and space-travelers. Western Fever! And Columbus—Columbus obsessed with this Everest problem, commanded by genetic directive to scale this mountain of water three-thousand-miles-high. He said, “I gave the keys of those mighty barriers of ocean which were closed with such mighty chains.” Not the timing of Atlantic Ascent. It has to await the Protestant Reformation. The Luther self-actualization freed gene pools from the Catholic-hive center. Only a society of self-actualized families, democratically linked together, was capable of pushing gene pools three-thousand-miles up, into the storm altitudes of the North Atlantic. Recall that the ascent had been made mover and over again during the ten centuries before Columbus by doughty Vikings, fervent Irish monks and hundreds of masculine bands. Some returned to tell the story of the new ecological niche. However, this signal did not activate the swarm because the technology for lifting gene pools three-thousand-miles into the unknown had not yet emerged. Thousands of European sailors who found the new lands did not return. Instead, they were absorbed by native gene pools. If thousands of Amazon female sailors had reached North American before the Protestant Revolution, they too would have been swallowed up by the native gene pools. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Philosophy secularized the ideal. However, tyrants appear who soon secularize the philosophies that give them the right to do so. Nietzsche had already predicted this development in discussing Hegel, whose originality, according to him, consisted in inventing a pantheism in which evil, error, and suffering could no longer sever as arguments against the divinity. “But the State, the powers that be, immediately made use of this grandiose initiative.” He himself, however, had conceived of a system in which crime could no longer serve as an argument and in which the only values reside in the divinity of man. This grandiose initiative also had to be put to use. Socialism in this respect was only a transitory heir, only the speculative and rabid outcome of nihilism. In all other respects those who, in correcting Nietzsche with the help of Marx, will choose to assent only to history, and no longer to all of creation, will be perfectly logical. The rebel whom Nietzsche, at least in his theory or superhumanity, and Marx before him, with his classless society, both replace the Beyond by the Later On. In that way, Nietzsche betrayed the Greeks and the teachings of Jesus Christ, who according to him, replaced the Beyond by the Immediate. Marx, like Nietzsche, thought in strategic terms, and like Nietzsche, hated formal virtue. Their two rebellions, both of which finish similarly in adhesion to a certain aspect of reality, end by merging into Marxism-Leninism and being incarnated in that caste, already mentioned by Nietzsche, which would “replace the priest, the teacher, and the doctor.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
The fundamental difference is that Nietzsche, in awaiting the superman, proposed to ascent to what exists and Marx to what is to come. For Marx, nature is to be subjugated in order to obey history; for Nietzsche, nature is to be obeyed in order subjugate history. It is the difference between the Christian and the Greek. Nietzsche, at least, foresaw what was going to happen: “Modern socialism tends to create a form of secular Jesuitism, to make instruments of all men”; and again: “What we desire is wellbeing…As a result we march toward a spiritual slavery such as has never been seen…Intellectual Caesarism hovers over every activity of the businessman and the philosopher.” Placed in the crucible of Nietzsche philosophy, rebellion, in the intoxication of freedom, ends in biological or historical Caesarism. The absolute negative had driven Stirner to deify crime simultaneously with the individual. However, the absolute affirmative leads to universalizing murder and mankind simultaneously. Marxism-Leninism has really accepted the burden of Nietzsche’s freewill by means of ignoring several Nietzsche virtues. The great rebel thus creates with his own hands, and for his own imprisonment, the implacable reign of necessity. Once he had escaped from God’s prison, his first care was to construct the prison of history and of reason, thus putting the finishing touch to the camouflage and consecration of the nihilism whose conquest he claimed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department exists to serve the residents and visitors of the City of Sacramento, and the entire Capital Region. They accomplish this through a full-time, career staffing. Their team is comprised of well-trained, diverse, and highly motivated individuals who provide services in fire safety education, fire codes enforcement, emergency management, and all-hazards emergency response. “In Sacramento, I was rotating from the squad to the engine. I worked the engine that night, and I had the tip. We had two first-engine jobs and I was taking a beating, because I was fighting a lot of fires. I had also been a paramedic for a long time. So it was two good jobs, and I hate the tip in both. When you fight fire constantly, you grow accustomed to it, but when you rotate, you’re in squad 90 percent of the time. I think that the most meaningful thing is being both a firefighter and a paramedic and just whipping them all together. There’s great satisfaction in fighting a fire. And when you’re a paramedic and you get somebody who is having a heart attack, you know that if you don’t do the right thing within the next five minutes, this person is going to be down. You feel obligated, you give them the right drug, and they get straightened out. That’s meaningful. The paramedic just does rescue work when there are two men on the squad. If you have three men, that third man rotates out to the engine. What happened was, I had been on a two-man squad for many a year, and I was constantly doing paramedic work. Then we got a third man and we started rotating, so that every third week you would go on an engine. When you’re been away from breathing smoke for a while, it’s a little bit harder. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
“I got into the paramedics by accident. I was a rookie in a ladder company, and when they needed an EMT, they naturally picked on the rookie. So they made me an EMT, and I worked the rescue squad. An EMT does basic life support, that is, splinting legs, doing CPR if necessary, then running the patient to the hospital. A paramedic goes into heavy life support, he gives IVs, gets into cardiac defibrillation and drug administration, he gets patients to the hospital and contacts the doctor. He has basic command with the doctor and does what is called prehospital care. I love the system in Sacramento, where we rotate into the engine. Some paramedics don’t like that. When I got into the fire department, being a fireman was something I had always dreamed of doing. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved the horns, I used to watch the engines go by, and my dream was to be one of the guys on the fire truck. I did a lot of job. As a matter of fact, I was in my forth year as a pipefitter’s apprentice, and I quit when I was called for the fire department. I loved fighting the fires, and I still love it. When you’re fighting fires, you say, “There’s a fire. There’s a challenge.” You rise to that challenge, you want to beat it. When you do, you feel high. When you’re a paramedic, it gets down to you and your partner. You find somebody who is unconscious, you’re got to find out what’s wrong, figure out the right thing to do, and do it. There’s satisfaction in know that you are doing something for somebody, you’re doing something that’s important. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“That’s the basic line in both jobs. You’re doing something important. That’s what all firefighters feel about themselves: they feel important. I’ve done other jobs where I’ve made more money, but I never felt any sense of worth. It makes me feel good when the kids in the neighborhood come to me when one of them’s gotten cut playing football or something. I’m the neighborhood medic, a sort of neighborhood hero. The kids look up to you. It takes some intelligence to become a paramedic, but we all have to have a certain amount of intelligence to get where we are, the ability to grasps the information, retain it, and then apply it. It’s not a matter of superior intelligence, just being open to somebody teaching you something. What makes a good fireman is being able to do anything that’s put before him. Most of us have another occupation, we’re plumbers, carpenters, electricians, whatever. Each one is a jack-of-all-trades. They can do just about anything. We have deaths too much, too often. My life peaked when I first became a fireman, I was doing everything I ever wanted to do. Then they made me a paramedic, and I went through a little valley. As a rookie paramedic, I was a little unsure of myself, then I had a few failures, patients who didn’t make it. I remember going home and spending four days off just sitting in the house, depressed, worried that I didn’t do the right thing. Then as time went on, I felt better, I got more confidence in myself. I knew I was doing the right thing, and whatever happened was the will of God, whether it was a save or not. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“Being a paramedic is hard mentally, because you have to deal with people at their worst. Sometimes you can change it, you can right it and make things better. But sometimes you can’t, so you have to deal with a lot of tragedy. You have to get used to it, and that’s where it takes a good partner. If you don’t have a good partner, being a paramedic can get real depressing. The worst things that stick in my mind are crib deaths, babies. Elderly persons have already lived their lives. But a dead baby is somebody who didn’t even have the chance to talk yet, or see where they’re going. What bothers me most is kids. You have to deal with the parents, but after you’ve been a paramedic for a while, you know who to tune in, and who to tune out. So a lot of times you have to tune a parent out, just to deal with their kid and with the situation. The only thing that really affects me is my particular patient. I’ll do anything the fire department wants me to do. I don’t know if I can do anything else that would make me more satisfied. The only thing that they could do for me now is give me more time off and more money. There is no other job I could want. If there’s anything else, this is just a personal thing with me, I would like to go fifty-fifty between the fireman and paramedic. I would like to do it more firefighting. I like to do them both, for they are important in different ways.” #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. Elon Musk recently warned that America is going bankrupt. The national debt is nearly $40 trillion, and the interest payments on the debt is $1 trillion. America is paying more in interest than on the principal of the national debt. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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Mortals Live Dependent One Upon Another
The key to feeling confident is to always listen to your inner self—the real you. And in the kingdom of God, the real you is more precious than rubies. Every young woman is a child of destiny and every adult woman a powerful force for good for they are our greatest examples and resources for these young women. And if you are obsessing over being a size 1, you will not be surprised when your daughter or the Stacy in your class does the same and makes herself physically ill trying to accomplish it. We should all be as fit as we can be—that is good Word of Wisdom doctrine. That means eating right and exercising and helping our bodies function at their optimum strength. We could probably all do better in that regard. However, the World has been brutal with you in the aspect. It terms of preoccupation with self and a fixation on the physical, this is more than social insanity; it is spiritually destructive, and it accounts for much of the unhappiness women, including young women face, in the real World. Much has been said lately in entertainment media about the current craze for “reality shows.” I am not sure what those are, but this beautiful generation of young should grow up going to Church. In rightfully assuming a “full voting partnership” in the relationship involving pleasures of the flesh, however, women must be careful to avoid making the same kind of mistake men have made for a long time. The mistake can be found in the remark of a wife who said in no uncertain terms that she was just as “entitled” to satisfaction with the pleasures of the flesh as her husband was. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
To be entitled to something means to have the right to claim it and expect that it will be provided. No matter how gently she may let him know, this wife is in effect saying to her husband: “I should be enjoying intercourse more than I am, and I would like you to do something about it.” Unwittingly and ironically, she has flipped to its opposite side the same coin the male has been using for generations, the coin of service involving pleasures of the flesh-one person is expected to satisfy the needs of the other. In the past, of course, it was the female who served the male as part of her marital obligation. Today’s young women have grown up believing that satisfaction involving pleasures of the flesh is something one partner is capable of giving to the other. More explicitly, and quite logically, they believe that since, as they have been told, a wife’s compliance is all that a husband needs to obtain the “excitement: he wants, she should have the right to expect him to do the same for her. Unfortunately, the coin is counterfeit. In a continuing relationship pleasures of the flesh-as-service rarely leads to sustained enjoyment and is very unlikely to bring a woman the fulfillment she desires. It is no different for the man. Contrary to one of the most widespread of all conceptions involving intimate passions, the fact is that pleasures of the flesh-as-service has failed to reward most men with the erotic gratification they anticipated. It has failed because it is based on fallacy—the notion that the male animal is biologically endowed to function sexually at will as long as he has a female at his disposition. And regardless of whether she is eager, indifferent or even reluctant to accommodate him, and regardless of whether she participates actively or passively, he will have the pleasure he wants. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
This is a myth, one of the most deceptive and destructive ever to dominate the intimate lives of men and women. Many a man has married believing the myth and convinced that as long as his wife accepts him whenever he chooses to have pleasures of the flesh, he will be satisfied and their relationship with pleasures of the flesh will be rewarding. Sooner or later, however, and more often sooner than later, he learns that he was wrong. Even though his wife may willingly remain available, if all she does, or all she is permitted to do by the moral codes that govern their lives, is to receive him without responding, his satisfactions eventually fade and so does desire. Availability is not enough. This truth is reflected in the crude and hostile jokes of men, such as the complaint that “the two most overrated things in this country are home cooking and home loving.” It is reflected in the dismal number of husbands who function poorly in the marriage bed or do not function there at all. And it is directly confirmed by the testimony of those men who seek professional help with problems involving pleasures of the flesh. If a husband is to perform effectively over the years, what these men must learn is that he requires more of his wife than that she merely be compliant. No matter how the feelings are communicated, a man no less than a woman wishes to believe that his marriage partner values him and needs him and desires him. To the extent that his wife makes him aware that she sees him as an individual and is emotionally committed to him—not just economically dependent—she fortifies his esteem. And it is this pride in himself both as an individual and as a man that he expresses with vigour in the union involving pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
If asked, she may well say that the woman’s role is to yield to her husband whenever he desires her; and he may insist that he expects his wife to be willing. They may say that and even believe it, echoing old codes fashioned out of the double standard—but their marriage is in fact a contradiction of what they say. They are not living on the basis of services duly rendered. The wife is not a servant in the home, not in the kitchen or in the bedroom. The husband is not her employer, who gets only what he pays for and must pay for whatever he wants. Their relationship involving pleasures of the flesh mirrors their personal relationship, in which each is responsive to the other’s wishes, each takes pleasure in pleasing the other and each values having the respect of the other. Since emotionally stable human beings are not split personalities, how they feel about each other and how they act toward each other is essentially no different at night from what it is by day. However, the yearning of a young wide today for greater physical fulfillment than she now experiences is certainly understandable. In these transitional times, when society is slowly but inevitably learning to honour the intimate passions of the female as it has always honoured that of the male, women’s changing expectations can be satisfied only by those men who are capable of changing their attitudes and who want to change them. They are unlikely to be motivated by a sense of obligation. Even if he wants to oblige, any wife who lets her husband know that she feels “entitled” to a climax during pleasures of the flesh and expects him to bring it about may find that he will probably fail more often than not. And the more emotional pressure she exerts on him, the less physical pleasure she is likely to experience. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
She will be learning the same lesson that men are beginning slowly to comprehend: pleasures of the flesh-as-service does not produce the desired pleasure. The mistake men made was to think of the female as a receptable. The mistake women must avoid making is to think of the male as an instrument—for she risks paying a greater penalty for her error. While a man with an unresponsive woman may still manage to secure a release of tensions during pleasures of the flesh, a woman with an unresponsive man can expect only greater tension, because his impotence will increase her frustration. If flipping the coin to the other side is no solution, if pleasures of the flesh-as-service is even more self-defeating a principle for how the female, how, then, can a sexually emancipated woman succeed in securing the fulfillment that is her birthright? In the same way—the only way—the male can secure his own birthright: together with a partner who is committed to the principle of mutual pleasure. More is required, of course, than simply having the right outlook, but it is indispensable as a starting point. To translate the wish and the will into the achievement, however, involves both husband and wife in the negotiation of their differences on the basis of genuine equality. As equals they accept responsibility for mutual cooperation in the bedroom and for mutual creation of the emotional environment needed for the relations involving pleasures of the flesh. The term “with” implies mutual cooperation, just as the terms “to” or “for” carry the connotation of active-versus-passive roles with intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
Perhaps the best means of encouraging mutual cooperation consists of communicating one’s needs for pleasures of the flesh confidently and openly to one’s partner. Free flow of both verbal and nonverbal communication between cooperating partners of pleasures of the flesh is the cornerstone of effective functioning with intimate passions. In essence, accepting responsibility in pleasures of the flesh means informing and cooperating: one partner must never presume knowledge or attempt to control the other partner’s needs for pleasures of the flesh. Conversely, mutual cooperation also includes the necessity of an ear constantly attuned to a partner’s expression of interest with pleasures of the flesh. If one’s own reception of the message is confused or prejudiced, it matters little how clearly a partner sends a message of need for pleasures of the flesh. The willingness to send and receive is as vital in communication with pleasures of the flesh as in any other kind of communication. Each partner is responsible for pleasures of the flesh and for keeping both capacities in good working order. In recent years, there has been a more social interpretation of responsibility with pleasures of the flesh that bears at least passing scrutiny: that of responsibility for conception. The sense of commitment between partners does not end with their mutual concern for the pleasures of intimate passions but carries over to include their mutual obligation in exercising control of conception or accepting responsibility for the results of their union—pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
The introduction of contraceptive information into our culture approximately forty years ago helped to liberate the woman from her role as sexual servant. Whether one is committed to the contraceptive technique of “rhythm” or to that of the “pill,” or to any step in-between, sexual parity would never have been possible without the opportunity that contraceptive knowledge alone provides for both genders to assume full responsibility for every potential interaction of pleasures of the flesh. Therefore, responsibility for pleasures of the flesh has a twofold implication in today’s World. Primarily, we are responsible only for ourselves in our commitments to pleasures of the flesh, for full communication of our wants from pleasures of the flesh and, subsequently, for physical expression of our drives for intimate passions. Also, we are committed to remaining fully attuned to partner communication and to the cooperation necessary to enable one’s partner to satisfy his or her needs for intimate passions. Secondarily, our responsibility for pleasures of the flesh extends not only to full obligation for pregnancy, but to adequate control of conception. The potential rewards from parity of roles involving pleasures of the flesh are limitless. For a man, alleviation of the fears of performance during pleasures of the flesh were so ingrained in his socially assigned role of doing to or for his wife, inevitably will be of major consequence to his functioning during pleasures of the flesh. And freedom to be and do during pleasures of the flesh as a full partner will immeasurably improve the quality of a woman’s expression during intimate passions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
However, the largest dividend will come to the culture. No longer will pleasures of the flesh be accepted as a thing apart, an isolated entity, a sexist privilege or an exploitable commodity. With each individual assuming responsibility for himself or herself alone, pleasures of the flesh will finally be returned to the only position for which it can be viewed with comfort, and experienced with reliable fulfillment—that of a natural function. When we try to escape from pass patterns that are unhealthy, it is extremely difficult to change. In the process of emergence, a man becomes horrified by the cruelty which is a kind of killing, that is done through ignorance. It shocks several men that they have been a part of this cruelty and that to a degree they still are. At first, this is so terrible to many that it seems unbearable—like pain going on and on until it reaches the point of explosion. Men fear this exploding in themselves—complete disruption—chaos. How could he live with his knowing? It seems to men that perhaps it was better to be ignorant, and they try desperately to shut out what they knew (was seeing for himself). “The truth shall make ye free, but first it shall make ye miserable.” However, in spite of a man’s desperation, his strongest efforts in that direction seem to be feeble: he has gone too far to turn back. His own tide is sweeping in on him. What could he do? What could one small man do against massive ignorance which he had only recently begun to get free of himself? He feels the way many politicians feel about corruption in America. “I am never going to be able to change America.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
However, there is always something a man can do. He can be his mind into the immediate present, and to the realm in which he can be active, and let himself act. That is, let himself be responsive. He can let himself be responsive. He can accept his own limitations, and do not try to do what he cannot do. Even if he is only trying to figure out how he can do it, to try to do what he cannot (in the literal sense) fills a man with frustration. This last, in fact, can so paralyze a man that he cannot do eve what he can. To further highlight this illustration, when the Navajos were in great distress all over their nation (it is that to them), what I could do seemed so little so utterly futile, that I got caught in “What is the use of doing anything?” A drop of water in a sieve. This was not exaggeration. In point of fact, when the government got around to distributing a couple of million dollars among the Navajos, it came to about $30 a person—to people who needed shoes, blankets and food, and were already in debt to the trader. Their food was pitiful. A blow of mush, and picking the tiny bits of meat still clinging to lamb bones after the rest had been eaten was a meal. In the cold harsh winter, they slept in their hogans with only a sheepskin between them and the ground. They had not only the winter to contend with, but also us. We had reduced their sheep to prevent overgrazing and then blizzards decimated those which we had permitted them to keep. We had imposed on them a senseless World which had no meaning to them. When a Navajo caught some horses on Wild Horse Mesa, the government branding inspector refused to brand then because there was no bill of sale. And still, they never lost their sensing of humour of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
One Navajo said, with recognition completely free of malice, “Oh, if we could run the white man’s world for three days, what a mess we would make of it!” Former President Obama said the same thing, and you see how that has turned out to be a complete mess. Successive Commissioners of Indian Affairs, each with his own values, had imposed these values on the Navajos. During one commissioner’s term, education was most important. During another’s health was most important. Under one commissioner, it was most important to send the children off the reservation to school. Under another, it was most important to keep the children in school on the reservation. The Navajos were “sold” on these and so many other changing values that when one of their own young men came back from theology school, and wished to help them, they told him, “We are sorry. We like you, and we would like to do as you say, but there is no more room in the head.” What could I do? I could be human. Real human. If people from another culture were in power and insisted that I must adopt their ways without question, that everything I believed and lived for was wrong, and then one person from the race listened to me, understood my World and let it be, how would I feel? I could stand beside a Navajo who did not know English, while I knew no Navajo, and share his feeling-World with him. When I did this, I had the feeling of increased strength in me, and it seemed to me that there was this increase in him, too. I could sit with a Navajo woman whose infant had been run over by the wheel of a cart. She sat on the Earth floor of the hogan with the infant on her lap. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
The infant’s thigh was so bloated that it seemed to belong to a pig rather than an infant. The wound gaped so that you could look right into the distorted flesh. The child suffered silently. The mother suffered silently. I could join this silent suffering and share it, not giving advice because what advice was there to give? Somehow this silent sharing eases pain. It seems unlikely that an infant could take part in this and yet, when we are disturbed does not this affect the infant? So why should it not affect the infant too that mother and visitor knew this quiet in themselves? “And I know that these moments of real relationship with these real persons have been the essential reward…” When I was in the hospital dying very rapidly—I could feel so much less life in me each day—all my success and mu failure seemed to cancel out. It was the same with the good that I had done and the bad that I had done. They canceled out. What was left—all that was left—was the wordless resonance, a feeling of love that was universe-al, a kind of singing intelligence that was universe-al too, that knew all and was undismayed. That was all that was left—and that was all that I had ever wanted. I was sad, with water in my eyes for all the not-living that I had done. Mortals live dependent one upon another. In your everyday life, you face a continuing dilemma. On the other hand, you are constantly admonished to “act like an adult, stand on your own two feet,” and be independent. On the other hand is the reality of modern society, a situation in which you are dependent upon many people for your most basic needs. How do you handle that? If you are someone who has really gotten stuck on the dependency polarity, you have never learned to stand on your own two feet when dealing with others. You have never learned to become an adult in the sense of giving up a measure of external support and substituting it with self-support. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
As such, you may feel resentful a lot of the time because you constantly depend on others who no longer want to give in to you. You may have made up your mind that being self-reliant is something you are capable of, yet you lack whatever it takes to become self-reliant. If you are a master in this area, you have grasped the idea of interdependence, which means nothing more than this: Sometimes you are independent of others and sometimes you are dependent on them. On occasion, the switch between the two is so rapid, it is hard to tell the difference—and the difference does not matter. Life becomes a constant dance between independence and dependence, with each person being a person in his or her own right, not needing to push others or be pushed around by them. Mastery comes when you acknowledge dependency has a place in your life along with control. In doing that, you learn to “be with” other people rather than “do to” them. All culture is family culture, things learned as a knee baby. Details and techniques may be learned outside the home, but their value is determined by the family. The script analyst foes to the heart of the matter with a single pointed question: “What did your family talk about at the dinner table?” By this he hopes to ascertain the subject matter, which may or may not be important, and also the kinds of transactions which took place, which is always important. Some child-and-family therapists even have themselves invited to dinner at the patient’s house, with the idea that this is the best way to get the greatest amount of reliable information in a short time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
One of the script analyst’s slogans is, or should be, “Think sphincter!” Dr. Freud and Dr. Abraham were the first to elaborate the idea that character structure centers around bodily orifices. Both games and scripts do likewise, and the physiological signs and symptoms which form an important feature of every game and script usually center around a particular orifice or sphincter. The family culture, as shown at the dinner table, tends to revolve around the “family sphincter,” and knowing which is the family’s favourtie is a great help in treating the patient. The four external sphincters concerned are the oral, the anal, the urethral, and the vaginal, and perhaps more important are the internal sphincters related to these. There is also an illusory sphincter which may be called, as it is in psychoanalysis, the cloacal. Although the mouth does have its own external sphincter, the Orbicularis oris, that is not usually the muscle “oral” families are concerned with, although some do have a motto, “Keep your mouth shut.” What “oral” families mainly talk about is food, and the sphincters chiefly concerned are those of the throat, stomach, and duodenum. Thus, oral families are typically diet faddiests and stomach worries, and those are the subjects they talk about at dinner. “Hysterical” members of such families have spasms of the esophagus, stomach, and duodenum, or, conversely, they throw up or have fears of throwing up. The anus is the sphincter par excellence. Anal families talk about bowel movements, laxatives, and enemas, or the more aristocratic colonic irrigations (consult your doctor before manipulating the normal cycle of your bowels). #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
Life for them is a round of poisonous matter that has to be got rid of promptly at any cost. They are fascinated by intestinal products, and proud of themselves or their children when these are large and firm and shapely. Diarrhea is judged by its copiousness, while mucous or bloody ulcerative colitis is of eternal interest and can be word with an air of modest distinction. The whole culture merges with sexuality (or anti-sexuality) in the motto “Keep a tight a** hole or you will get screwed.” This means keep a poker face as well, and the philosophy may pay off in making money. We are not capable of experiencing guilt until we have formed a conscience. Young children, prior to the internalization of their parents’ moral expectations, may experience fear of punishment for misdeeds, but this is not guilt. Guilt is the experience of self-loathing that arises when persons transgress their own moral principles. It can be so powerful an emotion that guilt-ridden persons may kill themselves rather than endure the onslaught of self-hatred. Common occasions for guilt include hurting another person, stealing, violating one’s own sexual morality, or cheating in examinations. A distinction can be drawn between guilt that arises from the violation of moral taboos that one truly has outgrown and existential or humanistic guilt, which arises when persons have diminished the quality and possibility of life for themselves and others. Dr. Maslow calls the former silly guilt, as in instances when an adult engages in masturbation and feels a catastrophic loss of self-esteem for what is properly viewed as harmless solitary sport. Existential guilt is illustrated by the failure to respond to a call for help or the failure to fulfill one’s own possibilities through lack of nerve. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
Existential guilt, a phenomenon of the psychological realm, is also sometimes seen as a constructive analogue of pain in the physical realm. Guilt helps you to determine when something is wrong with your behaviour and, like physical pain, provides an early warning system of something that must be corrected in the self. The capacity for existential guilt is an achievement; of course, the most life-giving response to such guilt is to make restitution and to seek then to live in conformity with one’s ideals. Too many people use their voices to hinder what is good in their own character, or even to despoil it, instead of using them as instruments of service. How pitiful to see so many employ their tongues in empty chatter and idle gossip for most of their lifetimes! When anyone becomes a quester, this matter may no longer be ignored. Jesus Christ did state that to self-discipline oneself, it is essential to “Abstain from foolish talk and harsh speech.” Since no utterance can be recalled into the silence whence it came, the quester will be more than ordinarily scrupulous about all his utterances. This does not mean that he is to abjure all trivial talk, certainly not at all humorous talk, but it does mean that he is to bring some degree of discipline to bear upon his vocal activity. He will not, for instance, waste time in uncharitably analysing the character of others when no business in which he and they are involved really calls for analysis at all, let alone the backbiting uncharitable kind. This practice of criticism and slander is a common one and is often the result of the habit of gossiping. It helps no one but hurts everyone—the speaker, the persons spoken about and those who readily listen to condemnatory gossip. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
He must attend to his own life, even to the extent of often refraining from talking about other persons. If this calls for a quality of generosity it, is he who will be the gainer in the end. If he cannot say anything good about a person, he will prefer to say nothing at all. If he cannot praise, he will practise silence. And if the situation is one where doing that would ultimately lead to a worse result, then he will criticize helpfully and entirely constructively, not condemn hatefully. If he finds it necessary to be outspoken, he avoids making personal attacks. Sometimes it may be needful to speak sharply, to utter words which may be odious to the other man’s ego but necessary to his welfare. In those cases, however, he should first put himself in the calmest, quietest mood and second, speak in the kindest possible way. Is it not better to disagree gently with the other man without being disagreeable to him? When he hears someone filling speech with negative statements and there is no duty laid on him to correct them, he puts his mental attention elsewhere. Better still, he starts affirming and holding the positive ideas which counteract the other person’s remarks. If he practises the following exercise, it will help a quester overcome the fault of habitually speaking harsh words or occasionally speaking angry ones. Let him sit for meditation and think in turn of some of the persons whom he has offended in this way. Then, seeing the other person’s face and form before him, he is in imagination to speak with the utmost kindness in the one case or with the utmost calmness in the other. He may take any situation or incident which usually provokes his fault into expression. Let him do so with closed eyes and as vividly as he can bring them before his mind’s eye. Further, the discipline of speech requires him to pause momentarily but long enough to consider the effect his words will have on those who hear them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Too many people—and of course especially impulsive people—are too eager to speak before they are ready, or before their words are chosen. The quester tries to avoid using words without awareness of their meaning or responsibility for their effect. Nietzsche was a great, but controversial philosopher. His philosophy, undoubtedly, resolves around the problem of rebellion. More precisely, it begins y being a rebellion. However, we sense the change of position that Nietzsche makes. With him, rebellion begins with “God is dead,” which is assumed as an established fact; then it turns against everything that aims at falsely replacing the vanished deity and reflects dishonour on a World which doubtless has no direction but which remains nevertheless the only proving-ground of the gods. Contrary to the opinion of certain of his Chrisitan critics, Nietzsche did not form a project to kill God. He found Him dead in the soul of his contemporaries. He was the first to understand this rebellion on the part of men could not lead to a renaissance unless it was controlled and directed. Any other attitude toward it, whether regret or complacency, must lead to the apocalypse. Thus, Nietzsche did not formulate a philosophy of rebellion, but constructed a philosophy of rebellion. If he attacks Christianity in particular, it is only in so far as it represents morality. He always leaves intact the person of Jesus on the one hand, and on the other the cynical aspects of the Church. We know that, from the point of view of the connoisseur, he admired the Jesuits. “Basically,” he writes, “Only the God of morality is rejected.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Christ, for Nietzsche as for Tolstoy, is not a rebel. The essence of His doctrine is summed up in total consent and in nonresistance to evil. Thou shalt not kill, even to prevent killing. The World must be accepted as it is, nothing must be added to its unhappiness, but you must consent to suffer personally from the evil it contains. The kingdom of Heaven is within our immediate reach. It is only an inner inclination which allows us to make our actions coincide with these principle and which can give us immediate salvation. Not faith but deeds—that, according to Nietzsche, is Christ’s message. From then on, the history of Christianity is nothing but a long betrayal of this message. The New Testament is already corrupted and from the time of Paul to the Councils, subservience to faith leads to the neglect of deeds. What is the profoundly correct addition made by Christianity to the message of its Master? The idea of judgment, completely foreign to the teachings of Christ, and the correlative notions of punishment and reward. From that moment nature becomes history, and significant history expressed by the idea of human totality is born. From the Annunciation until the last Judgment, humanity has no other task but to conform to the strictly moral ends of a narrative that has already been written. The only difference is that the characters, in the epilogue, separate themselves into the good and the bad. While Christ’s sole judgment consists in saying that the sins of nature are unimportant, historical Christianity makes nature the source of sin. “What does Christ deny? Everything that at present bears the name Christian.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Christianity believes that it is fighting against nihilism because it gives the World a sense of direction, while it is really nihilist itself in so far as, by imposing an imaginary meaning on life, it prevents the discovery of its real meaning: “Every Church is a stone rolled onto the tomb of the man-god; it tries to prevent the resurrection by force.” Nietzsche’s paradoxical but significant conclusion is that God has been killed by Christianity, in that Christianity has secularized the sacred. Here we must understand historical Christianity and “its profound and contemptible duplicity.” During World War II. Mr. Hitler was approached by a committee of distinguished scientists from the Max Planck Institute and the Prague Pharmaceutical Laboratories, who proposed the theory that the Earth is hollow. Und zo, if we can find the entrance or punch a hole through to the interior, mein Gott, all sorts of new military adventures suggest themselves. We can pop up behind enemy lines and conquer the external surface. Whom controls the inner surface of a sphere controls the outer World. Heil Hitler! Heute Deutschland; Morgen das Inner-welt, morgen morgen das Extra-welt. This legend has been passed on, in print, by anti-Nazi agents to demonstrate the philosophy of Mr. Hitler. There is no hard data concerning whether der Feuhrer really did divert scientific energy—which could have supported atomic bomb-research or improved rocket-research—into inner-Earth exploration. However, let us assume that the legend is true, that Adolph did believe in an “inner-World” and did, indeed, initiate scientific inner-World-exploration. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
To make this assumption is to credit Mr. Hitler with considerable prophetic genius. Inner-World aspirations in 1935 clearly anticipated the Neurological Revolution of the 1960s, which sent over one hundred million America digging in psychic mole-holes, pursuing the vision of an inner-World rebirth. Heil, Werner Erhard. Who controls the inner surface of a sphere controls the outer World. Heil Hitler! Mr. Hitler, like many premature evolutes, inhabited a post-terrestrial set of realities. Total power in the context of Tibetan Buddhism obviously activated the self-indulgent and the self-actualized circuits in his nervous system. Mr. Hitler, however, made the same error that millions of naïve trippers made in the 1960s. He failed to understand that the very self-centered, post-hive consciousness that exhilarated him to messianic perception was also available to others. He was not informed that the self-actualized brain must include in its mapping the reality that other self-actualized, futique brains exist and are independently building neigbouring future plan-its. The hostility of the fanatic extremists has been aroused. We have to get them under control before the begin to throw around hand grenades and fire off machine guns, occupy public buildings, and generally threaten the community. It was a terrible mistake to eliminate the death penalty during a time of War and to leave the border wide open. The heroes who have volunteered to protect this country do not need threats of the death penalty. What it means to be American is being erased from the minds of our citizens, their fighting strength is becoming crippled, or as the privileged-class World would rightly say in such cases: “Water has been missed with the wine.” When this happens, indeed, the trees can no longer grow up to Heaven. The hostile, vile, and cowardly elements in this mass of the worst extreme is becoming dominant. Add to that the fact that no only has the best extreme group become thinned out on the battlefield in the most horrible way, in the last four years, but the worst group is protected in the most remarkable way. For every hero who protects America by their holy sacrifice of death, there is a wretched coward who very cautiously turned his back on his country. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
The Sacramento Fire Department is committed to serving Sacramento by continuously improving with a culture that encourages innovation, professionals, and inclusion, while also preserving life and property. “We rolled into a big two-and-a-half frame, and we got a report there were people trapped up there. When we puled in, the fire was coming out three or four windows on the one side. I was forcible entry man, so I jumped off the truck, and not waiting to put on my Scottpac, I ran in the house and went up the stairs. Another fellow was with me. I opened the door at the top of the stairwell, and both of us were blown back down the stairs by the pressure of the heat and the heavy black smoke. I ran back to the truck, grabbed the Scott mask and just threw it on. I went back upstairs. There was no line in operation yet. I went in and started crawling around. I went into one of the rooms, and I heard a moan. I found this man lying there, Mr. Pops, a big black man, about six-two, weighing about 220. I couldn’t see him. All I could do was feel. I could also feel the heat. They still didn’t have a line in operation. I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know which way to get out, because of the heavy smoke condition. The man was unconscious. I tried to lift him. I couldn’t life him. I grabbed him, put my arms under him, and started to drag him. I dragged him past the rooms that were on fire. The engine company got water, and they hit the fire from the outside, and they pushed it in. Not knowing where I was going, I had to drag this man through the fire. He got burned, and I got burned. I dragged him out to the second-floor porch. By the time I got him there, he wasn’t breathing. I took off my mask and put it on him; I put in on the bypass to give him a shot of air. He started to come to, then he went out again. One of the guys got there and started to give him mouth-to-mouth. The ambulance people came, they took him. I found out that on the way to the hospital he stopped breathing again. They brought him back. The same thing happened at the hospital. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
“Later on, I found out that the man had five operations, and he lived. He went down from 220 to 167 pounds. On Medal Day, he was there to present me my award. It made me feel good, because I saved a life. I saw quite a few people die in the North End. There was one fire where a mother and child died. I wanted to cry, because they were right by the window. Probably in the dark, they didn’t know where they were. All they had to do was lift up, and out the window they’d go. After the fire was out and they removed the bodies, you could see their outline on the parquet floors as if somebody took a pencil and drew the figures. Everything around them was soot except where they had lain. It even showed where the little baby’s foot was sticking out at the mother’s arm. Then there was a fire right down the street from the firehouse. It was a big two-and-a-half story frame house. We lost three people. Two guys dove out the window. One went head first. The was a war veteran. We tried our best to save them. I accept the deaths of the adults more than I do the children. The children get me more than anything. It takes a toll. Sometimes I think of my own children. What would happen if I lost one of them in a fire? I don’t know how I would handle it. I really don’t. Later on, there was another fire about six in the morning. I was on the truck company then, Ladder X. A second-floor fire, heavy smoke, heavy fire upon arrival. A report of two elderly women trapped in the apartment. I went up and made it to the apartment door, but I couldn’t get in without a line. The line came in finally and protected me. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
“I went past the fire to the back bedroom, got the woman, a sixty-year-old black woman. She wasn’t breathing. I slung her over my shoulder. They kept the line on the fire until I got back. I got her down to the street. They worked on her, and she lived. I feel fortunate about that. Sometimes you’re at the right place at the right time.” The Sacramento Fire Department strives to build a safer and more resilient Sacramento. Firefighters and EMT put their lives on the line every day, several times a day to provide the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive service possible. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. This is America, Cadillac, Chevrolet, Dodge, Buick, and Ford should the number one cars on the road. Instead of a Honda Accord or Toyota Camry, consider the Cadillac Celestio, or Dodge Charger, Or Chevy Malibu. Instead of the Lexus RX, consider the Ford Branco, the Mustang Mach E, Cadillac Lyriq, or a Buick Envision. These are just some examples. Americans make very fine cars and you will be supporting American workers and keeping your hard-earned money in America. You parents and grandparents and great grandparents will be proud of you for being patriotic and supporting the country they love. American cars are fiercely styled and spectacularly fast, they are purely emotional and indisputably American creatures that will make anyone proud to be from America and trust, it can make anyone happy when he or she is behind the wheel. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
Since the experience properly assimilated things the character with caution and the speech with reticence, even the right thing if said at an unpropitious time may too easily become the wrong thing. Please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. If the energy is often squandered in needless talking and trivial babble, the capacity to concentrate the mind on deeper levels becomes weakened. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. Do not allow a single word to fall from your lips which does not fall in harmony with the ideal in your mind. Even the slightest deviation from this ideal may be followed by uneasiness. Speech brings down to the physical level, and so puts into swifter activity, what thought has initiated. To slight or large extent—depending on the individual power—it may be creative. Hence a person whose daily talk is mostly negative, filled with reports of dislikes and aversions, wrongs, evils, mishaps, and sickness is a person who is better avoided by those whose own inner weakness makes them susceptible to the influences carried by others. If evil things are falsely said about a person, he is neither to be surprised nor be annoyed. People see themselves in him, as in a mirror, and he must learn to accept what must needs be. Instead of feeling insulted or hurt, he should thank those who criticize him, for letting him see what may be true about himself and therefore need correcting. And remember to “Just Say ‘No’ to Drugs.” Even marijuana can be deadly. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
The Winchester Mystery House
Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the most festive of them all? 🎄✨
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Beautiful, with a Beauty Unknown on this Earth
Romeo Montague was a romantic idealist and tragic hero who is well-known from William Shakespeare’s, “Romeo and Juliet.” He considers himself compelled to do evil by his nostalgia for an unrealizable good, and while exploring love, youth and human nature, Romeo meets with a tragic fate. Likewise, Satan rises against his Creator because the latter employed force to subjugate him. “Who reason hath equal’d,” says Milton’s Satan, “force hath made supreme above his equals.” Divine violence is thus explicitly condemned. The rebel flees from this aggressive and unworthy God, “Farthest from him is best,” and reigns over all the forces hostile to the divine order. The Prince of Darkness has only chosen this path because good is a notion defined and utilized by God for unjust purposes. Even innocence irritates the Rebel in so far as it implies being duped. This “dark spirit of evil who is enraged by innocence” creates a human injustice parallel to divine injustice. Since violence is at the root of all creation, deliberate violence shall be its answer. The fact that there is an excess of despair adds to the causes of despair and brings rebellion to that state of indignant frustration which follows the long experience of injustice and where the distinction between good and evil finally disappears. Vigny’s Satan can no longer find in good or evil any pleasure nor of the sorrow that he causes take the measure. This defines nihilism and authorizes murder. Murder, in fact, is on the way to becoming acceptable. It is enough to compare Lucifer of the painters of the Middle Ages with the Satan of the romantics. An adolescent “young, sad, charming” (Vigny) replaces the horned beast. Beautiful, with a beauty unknown on this Earth” (Lermontov), solitary and powerful, unhappy and scornful, he is offhand even in oppression. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
However, his excuse is sorrow. “Who here,” says Milton’s Satan, “Will envy whom the highest place…condemns to greatest share of endless pain.” So many injustices suffered, a sorrow so unrelieved, justify every excess. The rebel therefore allows himself certain advantage. Murder, of course, is not recommended for its own sake. However, it is implicit in the value—supreme for the romantic—attached to frenzy. Frenzy is the reverse of boredom: Lorenzaccio dreams of Han of Iceland. Exquisite sensibilities evoke the elementary furies of the beast. The Byronic hero, incapable of love suffers endlessly. He is solitary, languid, his condition exhausts him. If he wants to feel alive, it must be in the terrible exaltation of a brief and destructive actions. To love someone whom one will never see again is to give a cry of exaltation of as one perishes in the flames of passion. One lives only in and for the moment, in order to achieve “the brief and vivid union of a tempestuous heart untied to the tempest” (Lermontov). The threat of mortality which hangs over us makes everything abortive. Only the cry of anguish can bring us to life; exaltation takes the place of truth. To this extent the apocalypse becomes an absolute value in which everything is confounded—love and death, conscience and culpability. In a chaotic Universe no other life exists but that of the abyss where, according to Alfred Le Poittevin, human beings come “trembling with rage and exulting in their crimes” to curse the Creator. The intoxication of frenzy and, ultimately, some suitable crime reveal in a moment the whole meaning of life. Without exactly advocating crime, the romantics insist on paying homage to a basic system of privileges which they illustrate with the conventional images of the outlaw, the criminal with the heart of gold, and the kind brigand. Their works are bathed in blood and shrouded in mystery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
The soul is delivered, at a minimum expenditure, of its most hideous desires—desires that a later generation will assuage in extermination camps. Of course, these works are also a challenge to the society of the times. However, romanticism, at the source of its inspiration, is chiefly concerned with defying moral and divine law. That is why its most original creation is not, primarily, the revolutionary, but, logically enough, the dandy. Logically, because this obstinate persistence in Satanism can only be justified by the endless affirmation of injustice and, to a certain extent, by its consolidation. Pain, at this stage, is acceptable only on condition that it is incurable. The rebel chooses the metaphysic of inevitable evil, which is expressed in the literature of damnation from which we have not yet escaped. “I was conscious of my power and I was conscious of my chains” (Petrus Borel). However, these chains are valuable objects. Without them it would be necessary to prove, or to exercise, this power which, after all, one is not very sure of having. It is only too easy to end up by becoming a government employee in Algiers, and Prometheus, like the above-mentioned Borel, will devote the rest of his days to closing the cabarets and reforming morals in the colonies. All the same, every poet to be received into the fold must be damned. Charles Lassailly, the same who planned a philosophic novel, Robespierre and Jesus Christ, never went to bed without uttering several fervent blasphemies to give himself courage. Rebellion puts on mourning and exhibits itself for public admiration. Much more than the cult of the individual, romanticism inaugurates the cult of the “character.” It is at this point that it is logical. No longer hoping for the rule or the unity of God, determined to take up arms against an antagonistic destiny, anxious to preserve everything of which the living are still capable in a World dedicated to death, romantic rebellion looked for a solution in the attitude that it itself assumed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
The attitude assembled, in aesthetic unity, all mankind who were in the hands of fate and about to be destroyed by divine violence. The human being who is condemned to death is, at least, magnificent before he disappears, and his magnificence is his justification. It is an established fact, the only one that can be thrown in the petrified face of the God of hate. The impassive rebel does not flinch before the eyes of God. “Nothing,” says Milton, “will change this determined mind, this high disdain born of an offended conscience.” Everything is drawn or rushes toward the void, but even though man is humiliated, he is obstinate and at least preserves his pride. A baroque romantic, discovered by Raymond Queneau, claims that the aim of all intellectual life is to become God. This romantic is really a little ahead of his time. The aim, at that time, was only to equal God and remain on His level. He is not destroyed, but by incessant effort He is refused any act of submission. Dandyism is a degraded form of asceticism. The dandy creates his own unity by aesthetic means. However, it is an aesthetic of singularity and of negation. “To love and die before a mirror”: that, according to Baudelaire, was the dandy’s slogan. It is indeed a coherent slogan. The dandy, is by occupation, always in opposition. He can only exist by defiance. Up to now man derived his coherence from his Creator. However, from the moment that he consecrates his rupture with Him, he finds himself delivered over to the fleeting moment, to the passing days, and to wasted sensibility. Therefore, he must take himself in hand. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The dandy rallies his forces and creates unity for himself by the very violence of his refusal. Profligate, like all people without a rule of life, he is coherent as an actor. However, an actor implies a public; the dandy can only play a part by setting himself up in opposition. He can only be sure of his own existence by finding it in the expression of others’ faces. Other people are his mirror. A mirror that quickly becomes clouded, it is true, since human capacity for attention is limited. It must be ceaselessly stimulated, spurred on by provocation. The dandy, therefore, is always compelled to astonish. Singularity is his vocation, excess his way to perfection. Perpetually incomplete, always on the fringe of things, he compels others to create him, while denying their values. He plays at life because he is unable to live. He plays at it until he dies, expect for the moments when he is alone and without a mirror. For the dandy, to be alone is not to exist. The romantics talked so grandly about solitude only because it was their real horror, the one thing they could not bear. Their rebellion thrusts its roots deep, but from the Abbe Prevost’s Cleveland up to the time of the Dadaists—including the frenetics of 1830 and Baudelaire and the decadents of 1880—more than a century of rebellion was completely glutted by the audacities of “eccentricity.” If they were all able to talk of unhappiness, it is because they despaired of ever being able to conquer it, except in futile parodies, and because they instinctively felt that it remained their sole excuse and their real claim to nobility. That is why the heritage of romanticism was not claimed by Victor Hugo, the epitome of France, but by Baudelair and Lacenaire, the poets of crime. “Everything in this world exudes crime,” says Baudelaire, “the newspaper, the walls, and the face of man.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
The conflict we see going on in this World is a conflict that too often goes on in all of us. It is a battle between the way things are and the way they “ought to be.” People move to rich and expensive communities to escape the problems of the World. Early in life, many develop some firm notions of the way things ought to be. Going with those notions, people set about the task of making them look that way. As long as their conditions in life conformed to these notions, they are able to be happy. However, when things change and are no longer the way they feel they ought to be, their problems begin. One of the problems most people have is their inability (or at least unwillingness) to admit that things are not all right. They prefer to live with the illusion that they are. Yet living with this illusion takes a heavy toll on people, physically and psychologically. An important aspect of the concept of being is that it is “now-oriented.” Being implies being in the here and now, in this moment, with things just the way they are. You can think about the way things used to be or wish that they be different in the future. However, you can only be—here and now—with things as they actually exist. When people refuse to admit that things are not all right, they are refusing to be with them exactly the way they are. They are trying to impose their own notions upon reality. This effort is doomed to failure because the unalterable fact of life is that things are the way they are. They are not the way they once were and they are not the way they are going to be—but they certainly are the way they are. A man’s refusal to accept this does not change anything. At most, his refusal just changes the way they look. Then a problem arises when people by choice or necessity choose to ignore the dysfunction and start taking medication to cope with life. This can put one in danger because they are turning off their senses and boosting their serotonin to help project an image of peace, happiness, and normalcy. However, it may leave them open to become victims of crime because they are not really being. It is important to see the World as it is and take action to better manage situations. The acceptance that things are the way they are is an act of surrender. When you see that things are the way they are and that there is nothing you can do to make them different, you give in to them. This does not mean that you do not have the power to change things in the future. This simply means that you do not have the power to change the way things are right now. All you can do, is just be with things the way they are. All you can do is surrender to being. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
For a long time, many men do not allow themselves to do this. They are more concerned with trying to make things the way they ought to be—a futile effort, at least in the context of right now. There are two phrases which can guide us in allowing being to happen. One is “Let go and let be,” and the other is “You do not always have to do something.” Doing is an attempt to change things, which is all right when the situation is mainly external. However, when the situation is internal, it requires the use of an inner process which does not respond to external effort. With the inner process, results are obtained by feeling, and feeling takes place within: in the heart, the soul, the guts, call it what you will. Thinking is a more indirect way of handling reality than feeling is. Our feelings tell us when something is painful, because our feelings are hurt, directly. Our thinking explains the hurt, justifies it, rationalizes it, analyzes it. In the intellectual sphere, words—not feelings—are used. On the other hand, feelings—the subjective awareness of an emotional state—are internal directives essential for human life. They are means and ends in themselves. All pleasure and pain are perceived in the realm of feelings. Now, to tie these ideas together, being is equated with feeling. You cannot make, generate, or manufacture a feeling any more than you can make being. Feelings and being must arise spontaneously. They are involuntary. When an activity has the quality of “flow,” it belongs to being. When it has the quality of “push,” it belongs to doing. All productive activity requires doing, but creativity also requires an element of being. A healthy person, a master, finds a rhythmic balance between thinking and feeling, doing and being. If, for example, you are a secretary typing a letter for your supervisor, using shorthand notes, you are engaged in a process of doing. If you are asked to correct the sentence structure, grammar, and wording, you are also doing, but to accomplish it, you must draw from your own personal knowledge, experience and taste to create a more understandable communication. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
If you are composing the letter yourself, taking it a step further, you are creating a communication in your own unique way and allowing the activity to become a part of your self, of who you are. This is what is known as creative endeavour. However, if you are doing the activity because you have to, because you are forced to, you are in a state of doing. If you are doing it because you enjoy the activity, you are in a state of doing and being. We are taught early in life that feelings are dangerous and that some feelings are undesirable, even taboo. Values are attached to them, both good and bad. An emotion with an intellectual element attached is, according to our definition here, a value. However, we are afraid of these values. If we give in to sadness, we are afraid we will fall into a fit of despair. We fear that in giving in to anger, we might kill someone. This is what we were taught to think. However, each emotion we are capable of expressing has a purpose and an intrinsic worth. Each is valuable, and to deny an emotion exists deprives us of the value which it can bring. When we become afraid of these values, afraid of being, we mask the fear by doing. We become busy, busy, busy so we will have less time available for feeling, being, living, contacting. We measure our lives by what we accomplish rather than by the richness of our experiences. I remember having read in the verbatim reports of the Utah Conferences on Creativity, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, that an air force testing officer reported that in their search for creative men they found that “those who get the answer without knowing how they got it are the ones we want.” The usual insistence on figuring things out first results in many things not being done because we have not got them altogether figure out first. In an education seminar a psychologist asked, “How is it that we know so much and nobody does anything?” We cannot always take credit for our “smartness.” We cannot feel proud, just happy, when things work out especially well. Many of us like the feeling of happiness better—a word that springs from another word, “happenings.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
When people live this way, the World seems so full of happenings. We do not always figure out how to do things first. This is just the way some people live. The following anecdote illustrates how easy it is for a Martian to understand the concept of psychological trading stamps. A woman came home from a group meeting one day where she had heard it for the first time, and explained it to her twelve-year-old son. He said, “Okay, mom, I’ll be back soon.” When he returned, he had made a small roll of perforated paper stamps and a little dispenser to hold them, together with a paper book with the pages ruled off into squares. On the first page he had written: “This page when full of stamps entitles you to one free mad, hurt, guilt, or fright, and a few of these add up to one free suffer.” He understood perfectly. If people do not spontaneously provoke you, insult you, entice you, or frighten you, then you start a game in order to make them do it. In this way you collect a free mad, hurt, guilt, or fright, and a few of these add up to one free suffer. There is another similarity between psychological trading stamps and commercial ones. They are both canceled once they are used, but people still like to talk nostalgically about the ones they turned in. They key word here is “recall.” Real people, in ordinary conversation, say, “Do you remember when…” whereas “do you recall…” is usually used in referring to trading stamps that were used up and canceled long ago. “Do you remember the good time we had in Yosemite?” is reminiscence, whereas: “Do you recall what happened at Yosemite? First you dented the fender on the BMW, and furthermore you forgot to…and then, as I recall, you…and in addition…” etcetera is a worn-out reproach which is not good for a justified anger any more. Lawyers habitually used the word “recall” rather than “remember” in the exercise of their profession, when they bring out the plaintiff’s often faded and sometimes counterfeit trading stamps to show the judge or jury. Lawyers are, in fact, philatelists, connoisseurs of psychological trading stamps; they can look over a collection, large or small, and estimate its current market value at the big redemption store in the courthouse. Crooked spouses can con each other by pulling out used or counterfeit trading stamps. Thus, Francisco discovered that his wife Angela was having an affair with her employer, and in fact, rescued her when the employer threatened her with violence. After a tempestuous scene, she thanked him and he forgave her. However, afterward, whenever he got drunk, which was often, he brought the matter up again, and there was another scene. In trading-stamp language, in the first scene he got a justified anger, she genuinely thanked him, and he generously forgave her. That was a decent settlement, and all the trading stamps were canceled. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
However, as noted, “forgive” in practice means to put the stamps in the drawer until they are needed again, even though they have already been cashed in. In this case, Franciso pulled out the old canceled stamps every Saturday night and waved them in Angela’s face. Instead of pointing out that they had already been used, Angela would hang her head and let Francisco have another free anger. In return, she would fob off on him some counterfeit thank-you stamps. The first time she thanked him, she gave him true stamps of golden gratitude, but after that her thanks were tired and spurious, “fool’s gold” or iron pyrites, which he, in his drunken foolishness, cherished like the real thing. When he was sober, both of them could be honest and regard the matter as settled. However, when he was drinking, they became crooked with each other. He blackmailed her with phony reruns, and she paid him off in kind. Thus, the analogy between commercial and psychological trading stamps is almost perfect. Each person tends to handle both kinds in the same way, according to his upbringing. Some people are raised to cash them in and forget it. Others are taught to save them and savour them; they keep their paper stamps and gloat over them as they mount up in anticipation of the day when they will be able to cash them in for a big prize; and they deal the same way with their angers, hurts, fears, and guilts, keeping them bottled up until they have enough for a really big payoff. Still others have permission to cheat, and sue considerable ingenuity in doing so. Psychological trading stamps exist as emotional memories, which probably take the form of molecular patterns in a continual state of agitation, or electrical potentials which go round and round in a circle of Jordan curve; and neither of them is completely exhausted until there is some kind of discharge of the piled-up energy. The rate at which the configurations or the potentials decay is probably based partly on genes and partly on “early conditioning” which in our terms falls into the category of parental programing. If a person brings out the same old trading stamps again and again to exhibit to his audience, they begin to look more and more tired and shopworn, and so does the audience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
The new culture which emerged from the 1960s was fabricated by newly activated teenage nervous systems. These nervous systems had been printed by signals urging self-indulgence, self-discovery and self-actualization. This generation was caste-out far beyond hive limits where reputations, and at the times, bodies were placed on the lines. The first benefit of this out-caste behaviour was that college education is better today. There is a caste which benefits from anger and stirring up trouble. It is called the legal profession. Left-wing lawyers say, “Well, what’s wrong with the college students today? They are not angry as they were in the 1960s.” Well, some might say they are even more angry today. Much like in the 1960s, we have some very irritable and irritating bureaucrats running the colleges, and running the country. In the 21st Century, some college administrators, college presidents, and college professors are allowing students to be threatened and harassed on campus, and encouraging students to change their genders. They have become more tolerant of, sometimes even more supportive of abnormality, than of normalcy. Young people should enjoy a certain serenity and relaxation that is becoming impossible. People have been fighting hard to end peace and quiet. Some people say these cultural changes are phases, temporary hula hoop fads. However, they are not. You cannot go back. The culture changes of the first quarter of the 21st century is irreversible. There many aspects of this gender confusion and male gentile mutilation that did not exist before the Obama administration. I am sure no parent wants their son to chop off his private parts, and this is why so many people are upset that youth are being exposed to atypical sexuality in the classroom. They are also upset that this is a political agenda that is being hyped up by the media and celebrities. And this gentile mutilation is irreversible and will cause much unnecessary pain. It is good to accept others and protect their rights, but we also must accept boys are boys and girls are girls and teach them proper gender roles, so not to confuse them. Even young adults of legal age are still figuring themselves out and are young and impressionable so it is important that are not persuaded or convinced to make changes to their bodies that they may regret later in life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Emotionality represents a heightened state of being, but use of “cold logic” with an absence of emotion may also be thought of as a heightened state. In the midst of an emotional experience, a person will show definite physiological symptoms: flushing, tremours, and increased heart rate, according to Isaacson and Hutt. However, the physiological symptoms are not necessarily different for each different emotion. Emotion may be defined as a group of organized feelings, all heightened or strengthened, either in reaction to a threat to the person (such as in anger or indignation) or in reaction to a perceived enhancement of the person, as in joy or ecstasy. Whereas the use of cool objectivity also has survival value for the person, the inhibition of emotion or the overcontrol of emotional experience is often associated with adjustment problems. The free expression of one’s feelings or emotions—as long as it is within control of the person—is considered to be a characteristic of the healthy person. A high-level state of humanness includes the opportunity for the person to express self emotionally, as freely and spontaneously as a hearty laugh, for example, and with a reasonable level of control, as in the case of an angry parent who refrains from physical punishment of a child, and who rather chooses to explain and reason with the child concerning the misbehaviour. Emotions assists life’s intensity and meaning. We are amused and we laugh; someone insults us and we become angry. A young woman has just received a proposal of marriage from the man she loves; her excitement and joy are dramatically evident. Emotion is a quality of experience and an expressive quality of action. We can speak thus of emotional experience and emotional expression. The former is emotion viewed from a phenomenological perspective, that is, from the standpoint of the person, whereas emotional expression is the way emotional experience appears to an observer. Some may still believe that caste is a fact in Nature, but man will be without that pride in social rank which has too often ended in some sort of arrogance or even cruelty to those of lower status. The refinement, manners, and culture which Jesus Christ wishes to see in a properly developed human being may be different in outer form from those which a modern Christian would wish to see, but they are not different in spirit. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Those who now denounce them angrily as class-marks must therefore praise grossness, crudeness, coarseness, and ignorance as ideal. And others who can see no spiritual usefulness being served by fine quality simply do not look far enough. The practice of true philosophy should reduce, or remove, coarseness of character, behaviour, and speech. He will find less and less pleasure in the chatter of society, clubs, and drawing rooms, which when it is about self, is quite inane, and when about other people, is often cruel. In this World he has to deal with people. To deal efficiently with the, he needs to understand their characters. However, to turn a blind eye towards their weaknesses will only mar this understanding and spoil this efficiency. Even where he seeks to help them, such results will only hinder is compassionate aim. The range of his goodwill excludes none, includes all. He recognizes on enemies, only unevolved men. By “good manners” is not meant “formal etiquette” although the two may often coincide. Teach elementary manners, that is, a warm smile. In a truly civilized society, courteous manners and refined tastes would be the rule. One mane can hate another man, but if the first has renounced his ego—the source of hatred—how can he continue to do so? A smile will say to others what words may fail to do, will express your basic attitude of, in Jesus’ phrase “good will unto all men.” He will in the end unfailingly draw to himself what he gives out. If hate, hate returns; if love, love returns/ We may dislike a man and disapprove of his opinions but this ought not prevent us from giving him our goodwill. If thought irritates and feeling boils, it is not enough to show an outward good temper, excellent discipline though that be. There is a tolerance which springs from mere indifference, but there is also a tolerance which springs from inner largeness of spirit. Differences between men—whether in external things or internal thinking—there must be. However, they need not become the occasion of hate between men. With enough goodwill on both sides, a compromise can usually be reached in most disputes. By refinement, I mean a quality of good breeding, either natural or acquired. The easiest way to express this feeling, described by Jesus as “goodwill unto all,” is to be courteous to all. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The Sacramento Fire Department delivers fire suppression, emergency medical services (EMS), technical rescue including urban search and rescue, hazardous materials mitigation, fire prevention, domestic preparedness, fire and EMS safety education, and fire investigation programs. Choosing to be a firefighter or to work in the Sacramento Fire Department means someone is dedicating their life to protecting and serving others. Frontline staff members put their lives on the line every day, and that selflessness extends outside the workplace. “It was about nine-thirty in the evening. I was getting ready to go to my job at midnight. The phone call said it was an explosion. There were some fuel storage tanks in the area, and I thought it might be one of them. I drove to the station, and some of the guys were already getting the engines out. I told them I’d go on ahead to the site in my own car. We arrived there together, and the guys hooked the engine to a hydrant. I didn’t know it was a plane crash until we got there. The only thing that was really identifiable as part of a plane was the front part of it, the cockpit area. I was kind of shocked. I didn’t know what to expect. I grabbed a fire hat off the engine, and I ran down to the scene itself. I had the line, and I put the nozzle on and was spraying the whole area. The water came down like an easy rain. It wasn’t like a major fire, like from fuel. I just found the little hot spots. Actually, all it was was bodies burning as far as I could see, the little bits of clothing that was left on them. It was dark, but I could see about a dozen bodies that were recognizable as people. I didn’t really know how many were scattered all over the place. I didn’t see that until daybreak. I felt I was in kind of a helpless situation, just knowing that nobody was going to survive. I had never seen anything like that before. I was standing there hosing the area down in a fog spray, and I didn’t hear anything. Then I thought I heard the moaning, and I shut the water off to make sure I wasn’t hearing things. It’s possible that the water squirted on the litter girl and revived her. Anyway, I heard what sounded like moaning. All I could see was a pile of rubber with a few bodies here and there, but mostly rubble. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I called my partner over, and I point to the spot where I thought the moaning was coming from. I thought it was a man. I could see a guy right there. I thought it was him. Well, my partner, X, started moving things around, and I took the hose and went off, thinking that maybe somebody would survive, though it wasn’t likely. X heard the moaning, then it quit and he didn’t hear it. He checked the bodies for any sign of life. He moved things aside to get to some of them. There wasn’t much light there, and everything was black and charred. Meanwhile, I put out the rest of the fires on the bodies. X moved aside a charred airplane seat. Then he heard the moaning again and saw that it was coming from the seat he had put aside. It was upside down, and he pilled it up, and there was the little girl strapped in it. He called our EMT over, and he did a quick survey of her body to see if there were any broken bones. Then they cut her out of the seat belt, put her on a backboard, and rushed her to the hospital. There was some controversy about whether she was on the plane or a passenger in a car that was on the ground. About four or five hundred feet away was a Blazer. The thing was on fire from bumper to bumper when we got there, and there was somebody inside it. They thought she might have been a passenger in that car. They didn’t listen to us. It was an airplane seat that she was strapped into. Her mother was there, too. The little girl was facedown on top of her mother. The report was that the mother was trying to shield her from the flames. Nobody could hold onto something in the kind of impact. It may have been a freak thing that she landed on top of her mother. We didn’t want to debate anybody on that point, so we just left it at that. I was there for twenty-two hours. This was in our station area, so we were more or less a standby unit until everything was pretty much cleared up. I did a lot of walking. I couldn’t sit still. I couldn’t sleep, that’s for sure, because of the smell and the things running through my mind. We had a command post with a catering van and Red Cross wagon, giving out coffee and food. I walked back and forth to there quite a bit, but I really couldn’t eat. I don’t know how you describe a lot of burning bodies. We knew enough not to touch anything until the FAA and the other people got there in the morning. They came in and went over some of the bodies, covering them up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“Three other stations were there, plus the airport fire department and other fire departments from other communities. We were scattered all over the place, squirting down the whole are. We weren’t specifically prepared for anything life this, but everybody kept their cool, saw what they had to do, and did it. We didn’t think about the plane crash until later. Everybody there did a heck of a job. We knew this sort of thing would probably happen someday, we just didn’t know where or when. It was the EMTs and the coroners who put the corpses in body bags, and then we took the body bags and put them in the coroner’s van, which took them to the temporary morgue. The smell there was unbearable. They had lain there all night, and then in the morning the sun started hitting them. Some bodies were pretty much intact, just burned real bad. But they could tell if they were male or female. Both others, all they had was just parts, like a hand or a foot or a leg. The parts were lying all over the place. My wife called my company that I wouldn’t be to work that night because of the plane crash. They marked it down as leave without pay. I think that in all the commotion, they weren’t thinking. I had to put in a grievance to get my pat. It was hard for me to talked about what I saw. I could relate to everything that was splattered all over the ground there. It kind of threw me off there for a little bit. I had recurring memories of what I did at the scene. I think the thing brought all the guys in the department closer together, since we were all in it together. They have a counseling team for this kind of traumatic situation. We had a guy come in about two weeks after a crash, a cop with thirty years behind him. He met with us to get us to talk about it. Most of the guys really didn’t want to say anything because you don’t want to talk to them if you don’t know them personally. The guy had good intentions, but unless it was somebody like your pastor, it was kind of hard to open up to him. He said it himself: he had thought he had seen it all, until he came to the crash. He said, ‘I guess I didn’t see everything.’ I guess there are guys who are still having a hard time with it. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
We may practise goodwill untainted by selfishness towards all mankind without becoming mushily sentimental about “universal brotherhood.” The hermit who behaves rudely may be showing his individualism, as he believes, but he is also showing his lack of spirituality. Polite manners imply thought for others. Nor is his tolerance grown out of laziness. It is grown out of understanding mated to kindliness. In his upward climb, he should slowly learn to drop the emotional view of life and to replace it by the intelligent view. Thus, he will show his passage from a lower to a higher level. However, it is to be an intelligence that is serene in activity, impersonal in judgment, warm in benevolence, and intuitive in quality. There should be no room in it to hold bias or bigotry, one the other hand, or dead logic. He will not only take care not to exceed his own rights, not only be scrupulous not to invade other people’s rights, but he will even take care not to interfere with their free will. Be strong without being stubborn. Much good behaviour is thinly veneered, being the consequence of social prudence rather than personal virtue. Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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The Who-Done-It Mystery is Solved!
Regardless of education, geography, faith, calling, or family, mental health challenges can impact anyone; they are nothing to be ashamed of and should be met with love. As for “schizophrenic person”—there is no such thing. A person scared out of his wits is not a person at all. I was with some people labeled “schizophrenic” in a mental hospital recently. One of them was a woman in her middle years, of outward composure and grace. She was wearing a gingham dress—blue and white checks—with some sort of kerchief around her shoulders, but she sat as though wearing velvet and a cashmere shawl—as though these things belonged to her as a matter of course. She answered all questions, conveying complete confidence in her answers. However, they went like this: “Do you know the date?” “Yes, I’ve studied that. It’s November 19th.” “Do you hear voices?” “Yes, don’t you?” “No, I do not hear them. Are the voices male or female?” “That depends on the wiring in the building.” Her face was delicate, her eyes tender, with a hint of pain. When she was asked, “Where do you live?” she did not say “here” or “in a hospital,” or even “California” where she was, but referred to a farm in Illinois where she was “so lonely.” That loneliness is where she lives. This woman’s tenderness was very clear—but she never showed any response to any of us around her. She was caught in egocentricity, selfishness, and uselessness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Another woman, thirty-one, came in and walked to the window, looked out, then back, and there was something haunting or haunted in her eyes. She seemed to have no awareness of any of us, either then or when she suddenly became quick and like a child rushed to the light switch near the door and flicked it on and off. From there she went skippingly to another door and opened it, and flipped the light switch inside it on and off. Then to another door, where she did the same. Back and forth, from one to another, without end. When the psychiatrist called to her to “come and sit down” she obediently did—but in just a few seconds she hopped up and went from light switch to light switch again, always flipping them twice. When she did it only once, in a moment she turned and did it again. When the psychiatrist called to her to leave, she came, and as she went through the door, she said to him, making it a statement with a question in it, “I’m not a bad girl.?” When I remember that thought in myself as a child, I know her terrible unhappiness. She was caught in egocentricity, selfishness, and uselessness. These people are painfully trapped. I no longer know what the technical definition of schizophrenia is. Certainly it includes a wide variety of conditions of varying severity. Some could be genetic and/or metabolic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
The key for me is that schizophrenic has found some of his subjective inner World in the outer World—colouring it—distorting it—concealing some aspects of reality from his vision. This may or may not lead to social difficulty. It can extend from mild degrees on up to the whole of the outer World becoming diseased and disturbed, flooded with the unrecognized inner. A touch of this inner is recognized by a young woman when she writes: “The main indication to me of how and where I’m goofed up is how and where I try to goof up others. One thing I’ve learned. I have very little self-confidence and so operate on the defensive and resent suggestions and even help, seeing it as criticism and/or competition. I think I’ve had this brilliant insight before—I’ll probably keep having it until I can learn it in myself as well as in my head. Essentially, the word schizophrenic means that here is a person who is highly sensitive to his own inner experience and also to interpersonal relationships with others, who has been so defeated and traumatized in endeavouring to make use of his sensitivities that he has retreated both from his own experiencing and from any real contact with others. In addition to this fairly basic understand, the word schizophrenic also means to me that anyone whose behaviour is deviant and who cannot easily be understood is tossed in this all-encompassing basket. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
I try to remain open-minded to the possibility that there may be specific genetic, chemical, nutritional, or environmental factors which may bear some causative relationships to the behaviour that is called schizophrenic. A more comprehensive definition of schizophrenia is the absence of (or great narrowing of) that felt experiential interaction process which we are as people and which we feel as our concrete selves. When an individual is stuck in a hurtful relationship situation so that he can neither leave it nor feel and relate himself sufficiently to it, then he becomes deadened and empty inside, reports that he is “not himself.” The ongoing feeling process on which we all rely inside becomes muddy, swampy, unreliable, or stopped, and feeling contents become stuck, frozen, unowned, seemingly alien, static places, rather than fluidly functioning feeling. I deny that psychosis is psychotic content that are in all of us and can “erupt.” I believe instead that such “psychotic contents” are really a certain manner of being alive. Past LSD and other drug experiments have strongly confirmed this view. It seems that whether an individual under the influence of drugs comes up with horrible experiences or with wonderful experiences depends not on him (as a self-enclosed piece of well or poorly working machinery) but on the relationship situation in which he is (and feels himself to be) when he takes the drug. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
If he takes it in a friendly situation close to someone he trusts, he has a wonderful experience. Early psychological experiments which attempted to test LSD under carefully pure circumstances (the subject alone in an otherwise empty room!) produced something very like schizophrenia. The flap over recombinant DNA research, life extension and cloning is a wonderful sign that neurogenetic consciousness is emerging. Nothing can happen in evolution until the dom-species gets upset and worried. When the misguided politicians and the liberal agitators moralize about “monster escaping from the laboratory and being unleashed on the unsuspecting public,” the out-caste intelligence operative perks up interest. The “monsters,” of course, are us in the future. Evolutionary Agents reassure the dom-species about future-phobias and point out that allowing the next mutation to occur is the best way to avoid past terrors, because past-terrors are wors than future fears. Thus domesticated adult capitalists realized that some social-welfarism is the only way to avoid a return to barbarian-dictatorships. The communist stage ten dictators realized that some individual consumerism is the only way to avoid a return to tribal anarchy. It is the Evolutionary Agents’ role to demonstrate that civilian voluntary space migration is the only way to deal with the tensions of nationalism, tribalism and self-actualization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Similarly, homophobes come to see that the only way to keep homosexuals away from their children is to allow gay societies in post-terrestrial plan-its. Racists of all colours realize that the only way to preserve discrimination and racial pride is in High Orbital Mini Earths-HOMEs. It is becoming obvious that the only solution to hive terrors, both past and future, is migration to space plan-its. The past always migrates behind the future. Today’s future taboo is tomorrow strict and rigid doctrine. Liberals are alarmed that nuclear energy, brain-changing drugs, radiation-control of brains, genetic engineering might fall into the hands of barbarian territorial dictators. Cloning, the key migratory technique for a post-terrestrial species, was first discussed in fearful terms of Hitler-like revivals. The hive custodians frighten people with mad scientist Nazi-devil rumors and thus concealed the possibility that you can clone yourself and friends. The same taboo-terror is projected on post terrestrial intelligence. We are warned that Martians were coming to harm us—not to enlighten or entertain us. Such natural hive fears can be assuaged by the realization that nuclear energy, brain-changing drugs such as LSD, cloning, and genetic research can only be safely employed in frontier, experimental communities—which can be found only in HOMEs. The first signs of neurogenetic consciousness are communities that are into self-actualization and states where the governors are space plan-it enthusiasts. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The human brain is programmed by RNA-DNA to fabricate technological realities and to build environments and new plan-its. External technology produces the pollution that activates the next brain-circuit. DNA is not concerned with evolving new anatomical-physiological forms adapted to a heavy 1-G planet. Terrestrial evolution is over-irrelevant. Now that high orbital migration is beginning, now that the futique species are moving into their designated ecological niche-high orbit-the goal of DNA is to create technologies adapted to multiple-G living. DNA is an evolutionary acceleration tool. The current survival problems on planet Earth are due to overpopulation swarming and cannot be solved by anatomical mutations. The next stages are neurological—neurotechnological. Encourage the appropriate castes of the human species to decode DNA and increase altitude and mobility. Life is no longer a disaster movie. The Who-Done-It mystery is solved! You are responsible. You are the hip-robots who are going to take over the Master-Designer role. It is your job to fabricate improved mini-Worlds. Who are you? You are those who recognize this signal and self-select yourselves as Future Builders. Continued feeling of freedom from obsessing desires, inordinate urges, and undue craving is generally a suitable indication that the character is sufficiently purified to enter a further stage. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
It is men who condemn themselves to this abject, undisciplined servitude of the passions and senses; so it is men themselves who must seek and win freedom from it. It is hard to do so, but it is also hard to suffer the consequences of not doing so. If you recognize that the feeling, the desire or body-sensation is pulling you away from the ideals set up for the Quest, hoist yourself out of it at once. Let others look for the second-rate and third-rate: let him be more discriminating, more fastidious, and seek the best alone. If he lets them go beyond his control, the senses will stupefy a man into foolish desires. Wisdom and security alone dictate that he shall become self-mastered. For this it is necessary to call up the will and to practise using it until it is developed into something strong. If before performing an impulsive, undisciplined, and irresponsible deed he would remember what the consequences are and that he will have to bear them, then he will have taken the first step towards self-mastery. The rising generations have legitimate complaints against their ancestors. However, in the matter of winning full freedom to follow their desires and upset the old Christian moral codes, the Mosaic decalogues, Confucian precepts, and the Indian taboos, they need to pause. Puritanic ideals are denounced but are not entirely inhuman: they have to be sifted and the good in them taken out. Stoic, simple living and self-discipline can be softened, its harshness also taken out, and the residue will be what the moderns need of they are to travel up higher and not sink lower. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
In what manner are men free who, in some way, to some extent, are enslaved by pleasures of the flesh, society, ambition, swelling desires, possessions, neighbours, associates, and family? Only by releasing ourselves from our desires can we hope to find lasting peace. If this seems like a heavy price to pay, we have only ourselves to blame. When terrestrial desires rage in a man, each satisfaction of them seems to be an asset, something gained; but when he is more awakened and freer from them, he begins to see how much of a liability these desires are, how wise and prudent it is to check them and finally transmute them. If he is no longer a victim of passions or at the mercy of emotions, it will not be because his blood temperature is too low, but because his control of himself is high. The animal gives way to its desires and feelings more quickly than the human because it acts by instinct. The animal gives way to its desires and feelings more quickly than the human because it acts by instinct. The human, so far as he is an animal, also acts by instinct. However, to the extent that he has developed reason and will he has developed a counter to that instinct which moderates or controls his desires and his feelings. Those humans who are nearer on the scale of evolution to the animal kingdom give way to passion and anger more readily because they have less self-control. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
A silent but self-declaring presence comes into knowledge whenever he puts a brake on that downward and Earthward movement of daily life which is the common lot—not to stop it altogether but to halt it for short periods or to slow it down so that he is not wholly carried away. The control of the lower nature which society may demand and religion may encourage, which makes a good man by conventional standards, is not enough for philosophy. It is only a stage of the mountain’s ascent: the summit has yet to be conquered. The transformation of this nature, making it utterly responsive to the Overself, is the philosophic goal. Self-effort can lead to its control but only Grace can lead to this transformation. All this does not imply that he is to become perfect and faultless before he can see the Overself, but that he has to become much more developed before he can stay in the awareness of it. Sometimes men get caught in traps. He might be faced with a situation which he can do absolutely nothing about. Yet his whole life, he had done something about every situation he found himself in. This constant doing, constant effort, makes his life one long struggle with the World and with other aspects of his own self. Man sometimes denies the underdog side of his nature—choosing, as a top-dog, to manipulate rather than to lose, to dominate rather than surrender. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, in so doing, he denies a simple fact of life, which, as trite as it may sound, is still true. And the truth is, “You cannot win them all.” His refusal to lose or be wrong leads him eventually to a position in which he has to lose and no amount of effort can help him win. The top-dog is useless in this situation. Abraham Maslow points out that our Western culture is built generally on Judeo-Christian theology which places great emphasis on what one does rather than who one is. The United States of America in particular is dominated by a Puritan ethic of doing, of applying effort, and working hard. We come to believe that in any given situation, there is always something we can do about it. There is a paradoxical nature of being and impossibility of striving for such qualities as wisdom, dignity, courage and humility. Understanding this concept is extremely important in your journey toward mastery, because it means that the most profound qualities of mastery cannot be striven for. They are qualities of being. You cannot do courageous, you can only be it. You can do a courageous act, but only after you have become courageous. The way to do is to be. In the summer of 1776, when the representatives of the American colonies were at the point of total frustration as to what to do about their differences with the British, they issues a declaration, which read, in part: “We…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be FREE AND INDEPENDENT STATES…” #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Note that this is a state of condition, of being. The signers of the Declaration did nothing more than state who they were and what they were all about. It is significant that only after these words did they say: “…and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” First they made a statement of being, then they said what they were going to do about it. The doing followed out of the statement of being. And indeed it can be no other way. Had the colonies simply started making war, lining up allies, printing money, and doing all the things a free country can do, there would have been mass confusion among the colonists and among the people of the other countries. The first question would have been, “What are you, a British colony, a state, a country? What are you all about?” The statement of being, the Declaration of Independence, made clear what the colonies were all about and provided a firm foundation upon which the new nation could carry out its activities. Being, then, is not as un-America as it once looked. We can be vigorous, we can be dynamic and active, but our activity must flow out of our being, out of what we are and what we are all about. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, there are some people who rebel against their scripts, apparently doing the opposite of what they are “supposed” to. Common examples are the “rebellious” adolescent and the woman who says, “The last thing I want to do is be like my mother.” Such cases have to be evaluated very carefully, as there are several possibilities. They may have been living on their counterscripts, and the apparent rebellion is merely “an outbreak of script.” Conversely, they may have been living on their scripts, and shifted to their counterscripts. They may have found the spellbreaker, and be released from the scripts. They may have different script directives from each parent, or from two different sets of parents, and are shifting from one set to another. They may be merely following a special script directive that tells them to rebel. The person may be a “script failure” who has despaired of carrying out his script directives and has simply given up. This is the cause of many depressions and schizophrenic breakdowns. On the other hand, he may have freed himself and “got out of his script” through his own efforts or with the help of psychotherapy. However, this must be carefully distinguished from “going into an antiscript.” These many alternatives emphasize how thorough the script analyst must be if he (and his patient) are to understand correctly the origin of certain changes in behaviour. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
An antiscript resembles closely what Erikson calls “identity diffusion.” If the script is compared to a computer punch card, then an antiscript is attained by turning the card around. This is a very rough analogy, but it makes the point. Where a mother says, “Do not drink,” the man drinks. Where she says, “Take a shower every day,” he does not wash. Where she says, “Do not think,” he thinks, and where she says, “Study hard,” he drops out. In short, some men are meticulously defiant. However, since he has to control his programing to know precisely how and where to be defiant, he is just as surely programed by disobeying each instruction as if he obeyed them all. Thus, where “freedom” is really defiance, it is only an illusion. Inverting his programing still leaves him programed. Such an inversion, turning the card around rather than tearing it up, is called an antiscript, and antiscripts offer a fertile field for further study. The war is against the machine. To the American middle-class, destruction of property is violence. Every American is protected by arms. There is no piece of land in the World not under the protective surveillance of someone’s guns. The writer, of course, has no need to refuse himself anything. For him, at least, boundaries disappear and desire can be allowed free rein. In this respect Sade is the perfect man of letters. He created a fable in order to give himself the illusion of existing. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Sade put “the moral crime that one commits by writing” above everything else. His merit, which is incontestable, lies in having immediately demonstrated, with the unhappy perspicacity of accumulated rage, the extreme consequences of rebellious logic—at least when it forgets the truth to be found in its origins. These consequences are a complete totalitarianism, universal crime, an aristocracy of cynicism, and the desire for an apocalypse. They will be found again many years after his death. However, having tasted them, he was caught, it seems, on the horns of his own dilemma and could only escape the dilemma in literature. Strangely enough, it is Sade who sets rebellion on the path of literature down which it will be led still farther by the romantics. He himself is one of those writers of whom he says: “their corruption is so dangerous, so active, that they have no other aim in printing their monstrous works than to extend beyond their own lives the sum total of their crimes; they can commit no more, but their accursed writings will lead others to do so, and this comforting thought which they carry with them to the tomb consoles them for the obligation that death imposes on them of renouncing this life.” Thus his rebellion writings bear witness to his desire for survival. Even if the immortality he longs for is the immortality of Cain, at least he longs for it, and despite himself bears witness to what is most true in metaphysical rebellion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Forgetting of Intensions, Names. I once forgot to write a letter of recommendation for a graduate student whom I disliked for personal reasons that had nothing to do with his ability. Fortunately, the student received the position without the benefit of my letter. Accidents. Accidents may result in disadvantage either to the person having the accident or to others, depending upon the unconscious motivation—guilt in the former case, hostility in the latter. A colleague’s wife spilled ink on a manuscript her husband was working on (neglecting her as he did the work) as she cleaned his study. A student broke his hand shortly before he had to taken an examination for which he felt unqualified. Examples from Projective Test (those in which the person projects hidden aspects of self into pictured situations). A twenty-two-year-old undergraduate student once consulted me for help with vague guilt feelings, inability to study, and fierce headaches that occurred whenever he went home or was obliged to spend any time with the dean, one of his professors, or his boss at a part-time job. He appeared to be extremely polite. (He used the word sir in almost every sentence when talking to me.) In the test, many of his stories included some expression of violence and hatred toward authority figures. The student told this story about a pictured situation that show an old man stretching his hand toward the reclining figure of a younger man: #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
“This boy is having a nap. The old man, his father, is coming in to get him out of bed so he’ll get back to his studies. His father has been nagging him for ages about how lazy he is. The boy has been putting up with this for a long time. This is the last straw. When he wakes up, he’ll be so mad he’ll start beating up on his father. He’ll grab a chair and start mashing in his head. When he finishes, his old man will be a bloody pulp. The body will get the electric chair, but he won’t care, it was worth it.” It is not too farfetched to infer at least some unconscious hostility toward authority figures in this young man. There is no discovered way, as yet, to prove that an inference of unconscious motivation is warranted. Nevertheless, it can be shown that the motives a person will consider as possible influences upon his action will change under special circumstances. A patient entering psychotherapy may act in ways that humiliate his wife; yet at the outset he may vigorously deny having hostile feelings toward her. Finally he can admit having hostile feelings, without guilt or anxiety. In addition, his hostility, if rational and warranted, may come to be expressed much more openly than it was before. It often happens that recognition and understanding of irrational hostility will reduce or eliminate it. Repression, obviously, is not an effective way to deal with problems of existence. People sometimes repress experience because they have a strict conscience; it is often healthier to attempt to change the conscience or to accept the fact that one is not as “good” as one would like to believe. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Repression is a way to ward off anxiety, but there are more effective healthier ways. Repression may ward off painful frustration, but there are healthier ways to avoid frustration, such as learning skills. Only where repression is temporary and permits important action to be completed, or where it forestalls psychosis, can it be regarded as good for healthy personality. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department and Emergency Medical Service Department is to preserve life and property and promote health and safety through excellent pre-hospital treatment and transportation, fire prevention, fire suppression rescue activities, and homeland security awareness. The department is responsible for providing fire suppression, ambulance service, and hazardous materials containment for Sacramento City. “So I became an EMT (Emergency Medical Technician). I was worried about it. Blood and stuffy really bothered me if it was somebody else’s, but not when it was mine. At the hospital, as long as I has a full stomach, I could watch everything except the initial cutting open of a person, even at an autopsy. I would have had to look away. Once they’re open, it doesn’t bother me. After I found out I could handle blood, I went ahead and became a paramedic. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“We had two nurses teaching the EMT class. The first night they gave us a whole list of medical terms. One was “blood pressure.” Until that day, I never knew what blood pressure was. So I asked, and a lot of the guys in the class laughed at me, but I found out what I wanted to know. The fire department gave me a direction that I was really enjoying. I was headstrong, real hyper. I tried to do everything. Every time I had a chore to do, or a fire to do, I tried to do everything as fast as I could. The worst one before I really got into paramedic was a two-year-old baby. The mother was fixing to take an older child in a station wagon to some kind of meeting. She was also close to nine months pregnant. The father, who was a preacher, was in the house, and the two-year-old was supposed to stay there. The mother got in the car and didn’t notice that the baby had gotten out of the house and was standing behind the car. She backed down the drive, hit the baby, and a wheel went right over the little girl’s head. The father ran out and did CPR (cardiopulmonary resuscitation) and mouth-to-mouth on the baby, and got her going again. We got there just before the ambulance crew, and we helped them. You couldn’t really tell if the baby’s head was deformed, but she was bleeding from her nose, mouth, and ears. It was just real sad. One paramedic was pretty freaked. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“During transport to neurosurgery the baby died. That affected me for a long time. That was before I had any children. It really gave me doubts as to whether I wanted to be a paramedic or not. They took the mother with them in the front of the ambulance. They were worried about her as well as the baby, because she was freaking. She totally lost everything, which I would, too. Any normal parent would have, after running over her own child. The father kept his composure. At first, the accident was called in as a 1050, a car wreck. And the father had blood around his mouth and on his nose when we arrived, and I thought there had been some type of care wreck. I didn’t know until later that he had done CPR on the child. He also did his best with his wife. At the hospital, of course, she had to be sedated and all that. I really care a lot about people—whether it’s putting out their fires, trying to save their lives, or getting a baby out of a well.” The Sacramento Fire Department is led by an extraordinary team of individuals who are dedicated to providing Sacramento City with World-Class safety services. Remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ, to honour law and order, and treat all people, property and living beings with dignity. It is also important to buy American made goods and services, such as American made cars, clothes, meat, produce, dairy, and more. Our goal is to leave things better than we received them. 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 Justic for all. Father of Peace, please grant us Thy peace, please Grant us Thy blessing, Thy blessing of peace. Wherever they be, please great America peace; Merciful One, Thou art He who grantest Thy people peace. O may we see our children, our children, and their children Devoted to the Lord, to the scripture—yea, please grant America peace. Thou wondrous Counsellor, mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace! #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Morally Outraged Citizens
You have more choices and more opportunities than ever before. Like so many things in life, this is both a blessing and a curse. Too many choices and the fear of making bad decisions often lead to decision paralysis, which is one of the challenges of your generation. Only when the gathering of Earthly gains seems futile, and the gains themselves mere dross, will he stop bartering his precious years for them. When a desire lurks hidden in the heart, it may sway actions or influence thoughts without resistance. However, when it rises to the surface and is seen for what it is, then it can be fought and conquered. As his desires quieten, he finds to his surprise that many things hitherto thought indispensable to existence, he can do well without. He who submits his emotions and passions to reason, and his reason to intuition, will save himself from many regrets. So long as he is buffeted between his passionate desire and his self-hating guilt, so long will a distressing tension be sustained. So far they distract the mind and disturb its peace, the struggle against the passions must go on. If he is willing to be instructed–when passion, uncontrollable and blind, irrational and violent, is behind action, the consequences may be harmful to its owner but they may also be instructive. For life is an educational process, which everybody has to undergo whether the pupils like it or not. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
We are not always the same person. At one period of life, a desire may almost enslave us which has no power over us at a later period. The World can be overcome only to the extent that we overcome ourselves, our endless desires and snaring ambitions, our passions and habits. He has not only to deal with his tendencies but also with his compulsions. However, passion is an insurgent, a rebel against reason whose counterbalance it fears and avoids. Even such normal factors as curiosity and ambition become disturbing when they become excessive, unbalanced, and drive the enslaved mind. As the heart opens to this call of the inner self, the demand comes to the will for a more austere habit of living. It is the difference between gentle austerity and harsh asceticism. We continuously try to “read” our own and others’ motives. The most common bases employed for inferring the intentions, feelings, and need of the other people are observation of facial expression, tone of voice, and gestures, which generally disclose what the person is feeling; and observation of the person’s actions and its consequences, from which we try to infer what he or she is up to. Ordinarily, we can check our inferences about the other person’s motives by asking a direct question. When are we justified in assuming that our own or another person’s motives are unconscious? #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We can never be absolutely certain, but we can entertain the hypothesis of unconscious motivation when the person acts in ways that produce consequences he or she denies intending to produce; when the person shows many signs of emotion without admitting he or she is experiencing strong feeling; and when there are obvious inconsistencies in action at different times, for example, kindness and brutality, intelligent and stupid behaviour. In addition to these general signs of unconscious motivation, there are other more subtle indicators that a person is not conscious of real influences upon his or her behaviour. These include: Dream content that seems bizarre and incomprehensible to the dreamer. Daydreams that surprise the daydreamer. Errors and “slips” in speech and writing. Body postures and evidence of bodily tensions. The forgetting of intentions, and of the names of people and places. Accidents of all kinds. Performance on certain projective tests of personality. When I am surrounded by pretending people, I sometimes feel so swamped by meaningless two-dimensional cardboard characters that I feel I may be on my way to the madness that is recognized in madness. I think that this may be the way that some of it comes about. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Nothing has to come about in one way only, and the discovery of one way eliminates others because then they are not explored. That does not put them out of existence—just out of mind, like all the other possible approached to bodily illness which the American Medical Association will not admit. I think that when we have found one way, we should use it tentatively, as the best that we have latched onto at this time, and at the same time should go on exploring other ways—with the same tentativeness. It sometimes seems to me that madness that is called insanity may sometimes be a reaction produced by the madness (as I see it) that is called sanity, or “realism.” A patent in a mental hospital told a therapist, “You want me to come into your World, but I lived there for twenty-three years and I don’t like it.” The patient was a very mixed up person, but I don’t think that he was mixed up about that. The more mentally ill a person is, the more they are caught in egocentricity, selfishness and uselessness. As for a “schizophrenic person”—there is no such thing. A person scared out of his wits is not person at all. The mission of the Sacramento Fire Department is to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information in personnel matters relating to the fire service; provide a forum for the exchange of ideas and information; to advocate for the fire service in public matters; promote a modern fire; develop general improvement in fire services throughout that state and encourage a fraternal friendship among firefighters and their families. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
“When the alarm came in at nine-thirty that Wednesday morning, we were in class about the enhanced 911 system. All we knew was it was a baby trapped down a well. We were all told to go back to our stations and wait. Only our captain, X, was taken out there, possibly because he’s a small-boned man, yet real aggressive at whatever he does. We just got bits and pieces of what was going on out there during the rest of the day and through the night. We kept calling the dispatcher and asking is they needed relief people, and they never would let us go over there. I got to bed at the station at about two A.M. and got up at seven, so I had five hours’ sleep. Thursday was supposed to be my day off, when I was going to take care of our youngest child. But my wife, Y, got him ready and took him to the sitter’s. The more I thought about the baby in the well, the more I though I should be out there: I’m skinny, and they’re going down holes, and I can fit down holes. So I loaded up and told the dispatcher they probably needed a paramedic, and he agreed. I just went over there on my own. You could say I volunteered myself. This was about eight-thirty Thursday morning. I had to park two blocks away because all the cars and trucks. There were a could of hundred people there, trying to help. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
“The news people were starting to come in. The well was in the backyard of a house in the middle of the block. Z was already there, standing by the air cascade system they were using to send oxygen down to the trapped baby. The battalion chief and the EMS chief and everybody else were listening to the microphone they had lowered down the well. I saw the hole they had drilled down the day before, about five and a half feet from the well, and they were sending guys down there to drill horizontally across to the well. The well itself was just a metal casing sticking up about two or three inches above ground. It was about eight inches in diameter. They had a yellow tent over it like workers use over manholes in the streets. A fire captain was guarding the air house, a real Mr. By-the-book type guy, who just broke out and started jumping all over anyone who came close to it. Actually, he did a good job. Police officers A and Officer B did all the monitoring of the hole. The baby in the well” (will remained unknow and be called “C” for privacy). “Her parents lived out in the country, and this well was in the backyard of her sister’s house, where she was operating an unlicensed day care center. There were five or six kids in the backyard when C went down the well. The older kids were playing by themselves, and the younger kids were playing by themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
“There was supposed to be a rock over the hole, and I saw some big rocks near there. Then we heard that there was a potted plant sitting on it, and I observed a bucker with what looked like a cactus plant in it that had been turned over and pushed out of the way. They couldn’t tell exactly how far down the well the baby had fallen, because the other small children threw stuff in after her, foliage from the yard. So we could only seen down eighteen feet and lower the mike that far. They were afraid to disturb the plant material, for fear they would make more stuff fall on C. They had lowered flashlights, and when I looked down I saw the lights shining on the green foliage stuff. I listened at the mike and could hear her moaning. That was the last time I looked down the well, but I kept going and checking with the officers on what they were hearing. Supposedly the night before she had slept for about three hours because they didn’t hear noises from her in that time. I don’t know why the kids threw the stuff down the well after her. They were so young they didn’t know the gravity of the situation. Perhaps they were just being playful. There was a story that two older kids put the baby in there, or she might have been pushed. But from the position in which I found her, I feel that she stepped in with one foot, lost her balance, and went down, because one foot was down and one was up. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
“My captain, X, had twice been down digging and hard worked for a day and a night, and he had been ordered to go home because he looked exhausted. He could have kept going, he’s in excellent condition, but they felt they had to order him to leave. Chief K of the fire department and Chief D of the police department were pretty much in control of the whole operation. The drilling engineer, Mr. L, was in charge of the digging. And Captain E was a coordinator. There was talk that the first person to reach the baby should take her out. But because there might have been serious injuries to the baby’s neck and back, we thought it should be a paramedic. We talked to the doctors there, and Dr. F and Dr. H, and Dr. I talked to the chiefs for us, and it was agreed it would be a paramedic who would bring the baby out. The only exception would be if, when they broke through to her, she just kind of grabbed somebody and she looked good and healthy, then they could bring her out. We had the smallest backboard all ready, cut down still further in size. The hole they drilled straight down was about thirty inches wide, a pretty good-sized shaft, big enough for two small, skinny guys like Z and myself to stand in it side by side. The tunnel they were digging across to the well was much narrower, but some pretty big guys were doing the drilling. One guy had a forty-six-inch chest, so we figured we shouldn’t have any trouble at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
“They were digging through hard rock to a point in the well below where the baby was wedged, then coming up vertically beside her, and a window between the two was being chopped out to get to her. They put a sort of bubble or inflated air bag below her to protect her from the drilling. It wasn’t until one o’clock on Friday that the drillers told us they were ready for us to go down. We went over to the hole. Any time we moved toward it, the media went crazy, thinking the rescue was coming up. But the chiefs made us go back to the ambulance. We were brought over to Chief D’s motor home for a last conference, Z and myself and this other guy, J, who was a rapeller, a rope man. Then we went down. I went in first. I was real apprehensive. I don’t go into caves a lot. I’ve been in tight places, but usually by choice, not by need. I’m real cautious, aggressive but cautious. I try to evaluate everything before I do it. Mr. L was still in the hole. He took the bubble out and talked to me for a minute. Then I went into the tunnel. I had no room at all. I had to decide whether to go on my stomach or my back. My shoulders were pressed on both sides. I had to position the light so it would shine up into the well. I got my first look at her. But I couldn’t touch her. To get my arm in there, I had to crawl back out and start back in with my arm ahead of me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“The width of the tunnel was probably fifteen to sixteen inches, and its height was no more than twelve to fourteen inches. I had no headroom. When my head was at the back of the tunnel was the only time I could see up into the well. I got scratched all over my forearm and elbow forcing my arm up into the well. I though, ‘Oh, God, how am I going to do this?’ All I saw dangling down was her left foot. So first off, I started an evaluation of her physically. How is she doing? What can she move? What can’t she move? People had told us they thought she was horizontal in some kind of widening of the shaft. So I couldn’t just start pulling because I was afraid I would snap her back or her neck. They had said I could reach her. But reaching up with my right arm, I could feel her left leg and her buttocks, and that was it. I couldn’t reach any higher or find her right leg or anything else. She was conscious. Not crying, but moaning. I got her to move her left foot for me. She did that. I told her to move her upper body, and I could feel her move somewhat. It looked like she was trying. I told her to push as hard as she could with her right foot, and it seemed that she went up a little bit. I communicated all this to the doctor by the phone line they had down there. They gave me a wedge made of a two-by-four and a round piece of plywood on top, supposedly to push her up and feel around her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
“I was able to push her no more than three inches. It sounded like she was throwing up. I told her to turn her head to the side and spit it up. I didn’t want her strangling on her own throw-up. I determined that we couldn’t get her out right then. I didn’t know what position she was in, and I didn’t have enough room. So I told her we’d be back. To me, on God’s green Earth, that’s the hardest thing I ever did in my life, leave that little girl in the well that first time. I came back out. We went into conference, and all the chiefs and doctors were there. And every time I would get close to talking about having to leave her there, I would get teary-eyed, and my voice would crack. The doctors took this as a sign of emotional instability or whatever. It was the first time I had been in a situation like that, and with me, the first time I go into something, as a paramedic or firefighter, I always get real emotional. When we got out of the hole, Z was first, and his face was so solemn that people thought it meant that the baby was dead. This big water drill had been there since early in the morning, but they hadn’t put it in use because Mr. L thought it was too dangerous. They had flown it from Memphis to Huston on a United Parcel 747. It took a place that size to carry it. So Chief A and Chief D insisted that Mr. L use the water drill. So they took it down there, and they really did a good job with it. Meanwhile, the doctors were talking to the chief, expressing their concern about whether I was emotionally and physically able to go back down in. #RadolphHarris 10 of 17
“He took me aside. He said, ‘We don’t need any macho trips. There’s no shame. If you can’t go down in, just tell me, just be honest with me.’ I told him, ‘Chief, I can go down one more time. If we don’t get her out this time, there is no way I can go down again. I would be mentally, emotionally, and physically wiped out.’ So he understood that, and he backed me. Assistant Chief M backed me. Evidently Chief D did, too. And N, the EMS chief, really backed me. He said I was the one to do it. They had confidence in me. We had plenty of guys in the department who were willing to go down, so they really had to feel good about me or they wouldn’t have let me. We went down a second time. I’m not really sure of the time, I know it was still daylight, six-thirty or seven. We had done a lot of sitting around, waiting. Everybody was saying, this is our last chance. Nobody said it to me personally, but the word was, if we had to break bones, break bones. Whatever we had to do to get her out. J, the rope man, came up with a device I could lift her with, a tripod pole maybe an inch wide, with the tape on the top. He was the guy who did all the rigging in the hole. He helped us a lot. Down in the tunnel, Mr. L said, “This is it, O. This is the best it’s going to get.” They had chipped away with the water drill and give me some headroom and more shoulder room. So he went to the surface, and Z came down with the stuff we thought we were going to need. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
“I had the tripod pole with me. I went into the hole and talked to baby C. I tried to lift her with the tripod pole, and it was too short. So Z got J on the phone, and he found me a longer tripod pole. This one had a rubber stopper on the tip of it. I tried to push the baby with it, and I couldn’t move her at all. I was lying there trying to figure out what to do. Looking at the tripod pole, I saw that the other end of it had a rubberized point that couldn’t hurt anybody. So I used it as a probe to see if I could figure out the position of her body. I poked it up the wall of the well shaft along her spine. I knew if I encountered anything solid, that would give me some indication of what body part was where. I ran it up along her spine past her head, and air rushed down at me from the well above her. That meant she was in a vertical position. Her back was straight up and down. I did the same thing with the pole at the side of the shaft where the right leg should be. It went all the way up, and air rushed through again. So I knew her right foot was up by her head somewhere. I went all the way around her body with the pole. Then I knew that she wasn’t in any crevice or bubble-shaped position. The metal casing I had seen at the top of the well didn’t go very far down, and the rest of the well was lined with a sticky petroleum-type substance. It was like glue or tar. I had it all over my hands. If you got into the stuff, you just stuck to it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
So then I knew she wasn’t lying down and I could pull on her without breaking her back or injuring anything. I talked to Dr. P and the female pediatrician, Dr. Q, and I called for the K-Y jelly. They sent down some baby forceps that they use at childbirth, but they were useless in this tunnel. Earlier I had tried to use goggles to keep stuff from falling in my eyes, but they fogged up immediately. It was real warm and humid down there. I was down there close to an hour and a half. All activity above the hole had totally ceased. Z opened the K-Y jelly and gave it to me, but there was a seal that had to be broken, so I had to throw it back to him to break that. This whole time he was doing great. He was having to deal with those at the top on the phone, and he was having to deal with me, because when I wanted something I wanted it two seconds ago, not later. And his legs were cramping real bad at the same time, and I didn’t know it. I smeared the K-Y jelly over the walls of the well all the way up to the baby’s bottom. Now I needed paper towels because I’ve got this stuff all over the place. I told Z that is the paper towels hit him on the head and knocked him out, I was going to kill him. My attempted at a joke. Now came the pulling time. I was totally confident. I felt we were going to get her out, no matter what it took. And I wasn’t going to some out of that hole without her, unless they came and dragged me out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
“She had on snap-on pants. They had come undone from the left leg, and I was using them to pull on. She was stuck to the walls, and she was crying and whining. I would pull as hard as I could, and she would tense up; then as soon as she would relax, I would pull again. The first couple of inches were the hardest to get her to move. They were really pressuring us from the top. I had Z tell them we had moved her a quarter of an inch, to get them to leave us alone for a while. I was pulling as hard as I could, and she kept tensing up. Both of my arms were exhausted. My right arm went numb two or three times. Once I got her started in the K-Y jelly, I was able to move her a half inch at a time, and she would tense up again. I knew she was coming down. Z got the backboard ready. When I got her all the way into the K-Y jelly, I had no more problems. I got her out of the hole and turned over on my stomach. I reached for the backboard, but there wasn’t room for it, because her right leg was beside the right side of her head. All the time I was telling her to stay calm, that we were going to get her out, we weren’t going to leave her again. When I got her in the K-Y jelly, she was quieter, because it wasn’t hurting her anymore. She didn’t say a word. Of course, she was only eighteen months old. She made different sounds, but nothing I could understand. She knew someone was there trying to help her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
“I couldn’t get her out on the board, so I pulled her onto my right arm, supporting her back and neck. The light hit her left pupil and she reacted, which was great. It was a good sign. I pulled her right leg in far enough so I could get her on the backboard. Z was getting stuffy out of the way, and while I was waiting, I said something like ‘Great’ or ‘Fantastic.’ I said it too loud, and she jumped a little bit. To me that was a good sign, too. But all she was doing was lying on the board, just looking around, real relaxed. I slipped her out, supporting her with my legs, and Z wrapped her waist to her chest. We used a Velcro strap across her chest to make sure she stayed on the board. Z put a towel on her neck, because the cervical collar was too small. I took white surgical tape and went all around the board and around the towel. Her hands were welded to her temples by the sticky substance. We left her right hand where it was. We didn’t try to straighten out any limbs. We finished getting her strapped. Then Z stood in the shaft holding her. I secured her to him with seat belt straps. I secured them both to the tether line of the back board, and I attached him to the main cable of the rig. So he went up with her. The only thing that fell down from her was a pair of toy binoculars and a few twigs. When I first got her, there was a big twig between her right arm and her chest. I thought it was embedded, but when I moved her arm I saw that it wasn’t, so I threw it out of the way. Nothing else, none of the green stuff. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
“I heard them yell and scream up top, everybody was just ecstatic. I was yelling, too. Nobody could hear me, but I didn’t care. I was totally calm. As a matter of fact, I was totally exhausted, mentally and emotionally. I was light-headed, I was having a hard time focusing. I just felt I needed oxygen. So I was trying to get stuff together, and the chief said, ‘Come out now.’ He meant now, and he said it a couple of times. So I said, ‘The heck with this stuff.’ They brought me out, and I shook the chief’s hand. He’s a big man, and I just laid my head on his shoulder for a minute. I did see little C and her parents at the hospital. She looked a lot different, a lot better. She looked somewhat swollen, and I hadn’t realized that mark on her forehead was such a bad scrape. They planted a tree in that backyard that will live as long as she does. And we’re going to put a plaque on that backboard and put it in our museum. It was great to be part of it. The next time I might not be so lucky. I know that the job I do is well worth all the time and all the nonsense we go through, and the good times and the bad times. If I end up dying of cancer because of the smoke, or if I end up dying in a fire, I never think about that. I know it can happen, but that’s my job, and I love doing it. I’ve thought in the past about switching, but this guy’s going to be there until they run me off. Until I can’t do it anymore.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The Sacramento Fire Department provides the citizens of Sacramento with the ability to create safer communities; they assist and support the fire service community and the protection of life and property; and they promote and enhance firefighter safety; the Sacramento Fire Department also provides a fire service leadership presence in the Executive Office of Public Safety and Security in order to direct policy and legislation on all fire related matters. Their core values are innovation, inclusivity, dedication, courageousness, excellence, ethicality, professionalism, and transparency. You can help save lives by making a donation to the Sacramento Fire Department. In an effort to keep the country cohesive, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus Christ and buy American cars and other American goods and services. As along, respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. And to ensure you have a bright future, please take your education seriously. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. O beautiful for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain, for purple mountains majesties above the fruited plain! America! America! God shed His grace on three, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! O beautiful for pilgrim feet, whose stern, impassioned stress, a thoroughfare for freedom beat across the wilderness! America! America! God mend thine every flow, confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law! O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years, Thine alabaster cities gleam, undimmed by human tears! America! America! God shed His grace on thee, and crown thy good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea! God never gave us express allowance, only He gave us reason, charity, nature and good example to bear us out. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
The Winchester Mystery House
Our exclusive Flashlight Tour is back for one night only this December, Friday the 13th! 🔦🌙
Venture through the dark, winding halls of the mansion at night—armed only with a flashlight and your courage. And when the lights go out… there’s no turning back! (link in bio)
Please come and enjoy a delicious meal in Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, and wonder through the miles of hallways in the World’s most mysterious mansion. For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Lord, Don’t Let Me Die Like this
There is the blindly instinctive and passioned terrestrial will in man, which violently drives him to seek and be satisfied with bodily satisfactions. There is also a higher will which gently draws him to transcend the body altogether. If the only enjoyment a man knows is that of physical sensations, he is only a dressed-up, walking, and thinking animal. The law of chastity requires that sexual relations be reserved for marriage between a man and a woman. In addition to reserving sexual intimacy for marriage, we obey the law of chastity by controlling our thoughts, words, and actions. Jesus Christ taught, “Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: but I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart,” reports Matthew 5.27-28. It is an essential part of the Quest’s work to separate the man from his passions, to subjugate the animal in him so as better to cultivate the godlike in him. Both desires and fears bind a man to his ego and thus bar the way to spiritual fulfilment. They could not exist except in relation to a second thing. However, when he turns his mind away from all things and directs it towards its own still center, it is the beginning of the end for all desires and all fears. The end of all this long self-training to cast out personal grief and terrestrial passion is blessedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
The heart must become empty of all desires. This brings about the emotional void, which corresponds, in its own place, to the mental void experienced in the depth of mystical meditation. To this emptiness he must give himself, with it he must satisfy himself. In this way he obeys Jesus and becomes “poor in Spirit.” Poor in Spirit refers to a spiritual state of humility and dependence on God. It is a recognition of one’s need for God and a growing dependence on Him. It is also a sense of spiritual bankruptcy, powerlessness, and unworthiness before God. What is it worth to a man to be free from the passions, and free from the inner divisive conflicts which their activity must necessarily produce in him? Are they not the chief obstacles which prevent him from attaining that inner calm wherein alone the ego can be faced, caught, and conquered? And this done, what is there to keep the Overself from taking possession of him? Few men are moved by a single motive. For most men the contrary is the fact. This is because first, the ego itself is a complex and second, the higher and lower natures are in conflict. Discrimination is needed to penetrate the thin surface of so many pleasures, while the strength is needed to say “No” when this is wiser than accepting them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
It is not only needful to understand the characteristics of one’s desires but also their source. This knowledge will help him to improve character and attain true self-reliance. It is a strange paradox that on whatever desire a man wields the axe of non-attachment, he will thereafter become possessed of the power to attain it. There is this great paradox on the Quest: that the more the disciple obtains the power to bring about the fruition of his desires, the more he loses those desires! If we lack the willpower to overcome bad habits that have become popular and conventional, at least let us try not to justify our indulgence by specious reasons. The blind impulses must be checked by willpower, the lower nature must be disciplined and the lower energies directed into higher channels. It is perfectly possible, where fate ordains, to live continently and chastely, however strongly sexed a man may be. However, to achieve this, he must utilize the analytic reason, the creative imagination, and the active will in understanding and disciplining his energies and then he must redirect them towards aspirational, intellectual, or moral ideas or transmute them into practical work. He who begins by refusing to be a slave to the palate’s perverted appetite will find it easier to go on to refusing to be a slave to lust. A triumph over the one prepares the way for, and helps in the achievement of, a triumph over the other. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It is true that we all share a terrestrial body with the lower creatures. However, that does not force us to stay on their level emotionally. Every desire conquered feeds his strength and fortifies his will. The man who has made his way to the top of his profession but failed to make the conquest of his passions, is still an unbalanced creature, an unsatisfied human being. The extremes of abstention which follow repugnance, indifference, or self-struggle and the satiety which follows helpless yielding are both undesirable. The necessities of Nature hold us in their thrall but there is first, a difference between them and the desires of the ego and second, a difference between the true necessities which are inescapable from physical existence and the false ones which have been imposed on us by age-old habits, traditions, environments, and outer suggestions. That desire is a true one whose source lies in a genuine need, not in mere greed. Repentance redeems man, lifts him above the lustful dog to the loving human being, distinguishes him from the mere animal. We are cast out of Heaven by our own passion and kept out by our own attachments. If today we are miserable exiles, the way to remedy such a situation is clear. We must free ourselves from the one and disentangle ourselves from the other. He should desire that which will itself cut off all desires. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“Experiencing” is defined as an inner stream of feelings to which you can every moment attend inwardly. It is simple, effortless and available to us all. Yet it is maddeningly elusive. Try these experiences: Feel your body from the inside. Is there tension in your muscles? Is your stomach wound tight like a watch spring? Take a deep breath and feel what happens to that tension. Sit a while without moving. Does some prickliness begin to form just under the skin? Recall the full feeling you once had after overeating. Recall the heaviness, the discomfort, the difficulty in breathing. What does being bored really feel like? That strained, impatient deadness almost hurts, does it not? Something deep down screams soundlessly at you to get out of the boring situation. Can you recall feeling that? These are but three examples of experiences. They do not involve learning or doing. You can have them instantaneously. And there are thousands more available to you—each distinct from all the others. To have an experience, to really “get into” a feeling, involves a release or surrender. Behind the surrender is a basic willingness to trust, to accept that the inner core “knows what is best” for you. Thus experiencing holds the solution to all your internal mysteries, the truth of your existence. If experiencing is so wonderful and useful, why is it so elusive? Who do we shun the prospect of getting to our inner core and discovering our true being? Probably because we are afraid. We anticipate the truth will be too painful, that when we look inside at what really is, we will not like what we see. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Ironically, by trying to avoid the pain of looking within, we virtually guarantee the continued pain of our incomplete, manipulative behaviour. True, some will shed some tears on the way into their core, but compared to the tears of helplessness one has already shed, they are a few random raindrops in a storm. And who knows how many future tears he has avoided by reaching down and finding his inner source of power—a source which he can use to untangle the painful web of helplessness his life has become. People who benefit most from therapy are those who are “experience-oriented,” who subjectively follow their feelings even though they have not explicitly thought them all out. Being willing to let your experience talk to you is the first significant step from manipulation to mastery. There are some common ways people approach a problem. One way is to belittle the problem. This is when one says, “It really is nothing…I should not let a few pains bother me.” Such an approach will get you nowhere. If pains are important enough for your body to feel, they are important enough to look into, get inside of, and get clear. You do not make a problem go away by belittling it. In fact, by pushing it aside, you probably make it worse. Often times people analyze their problems. We might assume someone has something to do with our problem. However, the analysis may or may not be correct, and it does nothing to change the feeling. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
You can analyze furiously the whole time you are having the feeling, but if it is there in your guy, with its inexplicable discomforts and tensions, your analysis will not ease or make it disappear. A lot of people also face down the feeling. Some say to themselves, “I will have to grit my teeth, stand up to it, walk through it,” which sounds courageous and noble, but is actually false bravado. This approach does not work because when you do it, you do not touch the place where change takes place: in your body. You are just mouthing a courage which can only be found deep inside, at your core. Another method is lecturing yourself. The script often goes like this, “If I could just grow up and be adult about this, I am sure everything would be all right.” This does not work either. The lecture is based on the mistaken notion that adults do not have feelings, or if they do, they do not have the right to the feelings. When you lecture yourself, all you do is pile guilt on top of whatever the problem is. And the guilt just makes it worse. Drowning the feeling is another method. When you try to tune the problem out because it makes you feel worse, you sink into the discomfort, hoping you will find it less painful, but knowing deep down that you will not. Whenever you sink into this unchanged feeling, it makes you feel as bad as the last time. You are no further ahead. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Since these five approaches are not physical, they cannot work. The feeling is physical and can only be changed by a physical process, such as focusing. When a man finally focuses, a very real change happens in him, something which he can build on. Even though it appears that some people play the victim in life, that circumstances seem to be manipulating him, they are still manipulators. Some people may stay married to a homosexual husband, playing upon one’s own helplessness and their husband’s sense of guilt to take care of her, even though they both resented it. The unspoken (and sometimes even spoken) message is, “I am too weak and helpless to take care of myself and the boys, so you have to.” This manipulation is rewarded by his grudging support, but it has its price: It traps her in an unhappy marriage, it prevents her from going out and learning to make it on her own, it reinforces her own feeling of helplessness. How can you deal with this type of manipulator in your everyday life? Well, for starters, you will have to fight the temptation to take the easy way out. You will have to refuse to do things for the weakling and instead, encourage him or her to be strong and self-directed. I once had a friend whose wife was afraid to go to the store and buy a newspaper. She said she did not like the way the clerks leered at her. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
So my friend would stop in his way home from work and buy the newspaper himself. It was easier than arguing with his wife about it. Finally, he said, “I do not read the evening newspaper, I watch the news on TV. If you want the paper, buy it yourself.” She refused, but she still wanted the newspaper. So my friend began by accompanying her to the store the first few times until she felt more comfortable about it. In time, she went to get the paper without a second thought. My friend used this same technique when it came to his wife’s getting a driver’s license. At first, he refused to drive her places, even though he had been chauffeuring her for years. When she grew tired of taking buses and cabs, he offered to teach her how to drive, and she eventually accepted the offer. Now she had her own car and capably goes wherever she wants. In refusing to be manipulated, my friend made his wife angry and perhaps caused her some pain. However, in the end, he helped her gain strength—and helped free her from a continuing life-script of manipulation. The criminal who acts according to nature cannot, without betraying his office, range himself on the side of the law. “If you want to be republicans, one more effort” means: “Accept the freedom of crime, the only reasonable attitude, and enter forever into a state of insurrection as you enter into a state of grace.” Thus total submission to evil leads to an appalling penitence, which cannot fail to horrify the Republic of enlightenment of natural goodness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
By a significant coincidence, the manuscript of One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom was burned during the first riot of the Republic, which could hardly fail to denounce Sade’s heretical theories of freedom and to throw so compromising a supporter into prison once more. By doing so, it gave him the regrettable opportunity of developing his rebellious logic still further. The universal republic could be a dream for Sade, but never a temptation. In politics his real position is cynicism. In his Society of the Friends of Crime he declares himself ostensibly in favour of the government and its laws, which he meanwhile has every intention of violating. It is the same impulse that makes the lowest form of criminal vote for conservative candidates. The plan that Sade had in mind assures the benevolent neutrality of the authorities. The republic of crime cannot, for the moment at least, be universal. It must pretend to obey the law. In a World that knows no other rule than murder, beneath a criminal Heaven, and in the name of a criminal nature, however, Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. However, to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate. The law of this World is nothing but the law of force; its driving force, the will to power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When it comes to therapy, we really want to think of that person as a person—someone unique with dignity and capacity, worthy of our unreserved respect. If we must have a word for it, “client” seems more expressive of that. Why “client-centered”? This matters much more. Again, the negative purpose is only to distinguish between this and “therapist-centered,” “theory-centered,” “society-centered,” etcetera. There are such things. The positive meaning is immense. It expresses the major goal of the therapist; to understand and accept the perception and feelings of the client; to share the client’s view of reality rather than to impose his own. It follows than that we rely heavily upon the growth capacity of the individual. The therapist is an active and significant person, but he cannot heal—he can only help to create conditions in which the natural regenerative powers take effect. As for motive, the drive toward self-actualization is a primary one; every human being would rather be better than worse, and strives toward the enhancement of self even though the strivings may often be thwarted and regressive. These assumptions about motive and capacity combine into a general ethic, which can simply be called self-determination. Client-centered therapy is founded on the conviction that man should be free, and to this end makes freedom a major means in the therapeutic experience. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
This is not, as some think, a reflection of political attitudes which supposedly prevail in America. It is a personal psychological conviction that the man who is most free will be most healthy. Freedom means the widest scope of choice and openness to experience, therefore the greatest probability of an adaptive response. For the individual, it seems that the urge to freedom is an urge to health, and precedes, rather than reflects, a political order. It is common for a person to experience conflict between wishes. He or she may want to study and also to go to the movies. Someone may want to marry one person and at the same time be in love with another. A person may want to have fun but also to be “good.” The healthy thing to do with conflict is to acknowledge its existence within the self, study all the alternatives as rationally as one can in the light of one’s value system, make a decision, act on it, and accept all the consequences. Among the consequences to be accepted are regrets over what one has lost in connection with the abandoned alternatives. No decision can ever be made without some fear that it is the wrong decision. There is nothing inconsistent with healthy personality in the idea that a decision, once made will still leave the person uncertain that it is the best or “rightest” one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Existential conflicts frequently arise where each choice has positive values and negative implications associated with it. Any alternative, if chose, will affect one’s life profoundly. To make decisions, such as whether to marry or not, to take this job or that, calls for courage. The ability to decide such conflicts is an attribute of healthy personality. Such courage seems to grow out of past experiences at decision-making, experience that fosters independent security. The younger generation is generally viewed as being too laid back, apathetic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and sensual. There are periods when a species or an individual or a nation needs to lay back, mellow out, cocoon-quiescent and recoup. Intelligent pursuit of happiness is a challenge of the human experience. However, this quiescence is more apparent than real. The spellbreaker, or internal release, is the element which lifts the injunction and frees the person from his script so that he can fulfill his own autonomous aspirations. It is a pre-set “self-destruct” which is obvious in some scripts but has to be hunted for or decoded in others, much like the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle which served the same function in Ancient Greece. Not much is known about it clinically, because people come for treatment just because they cannot find out. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
For example, in a “Waiting for Rigor Mortis” or “Sleeping Beauty: script, the patient thinks she will be freed of her frigidity when she meets the Prince with the Golden Apples, and may very likely feel that the therapist is that Prince. However, he declines the honour, mainly for ethical reasons, but also because when he previous (unlicensed) therapist took on the job, his Golden Apples turned to dust. Sometimes the spellbreaker is merely ironic. This is a common situation in losers’ scripts: “Things will be better after you are dead.” The internal release may be event-centered or time-centered. “When you meet a Prince,” “After you die fighting,” or “after you have three children” are event-centered antiscripts. “When you pass the age at which your father died,” or “After you have stayed with the company thirty years” are time-centered. Whoever puts a moral purpose into life automatically lifts himself above the physical level of mere animality. For him begins a struggle between the slavery of sense and the freedom of enlightenment, between blind emotion and deliberate will, between inward weakness and inward strength. Henceforth, he seeks happiness rather than pleasure, the calm of a satisfied mind rather than the excitement of satisfied senses. If this is a stoic ideal, it is a necessary one, for he must conquer himself. He hates himself, and no man can live in peace with what he hates. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The Sacramento Fire Department protects the people of Sacramento with public education, fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services. The Sacramento Fire Department partners with the community to mitigate risks, and responds to all calls for service with skill, dedication, and compassion. “We were asleep, and the alarm came at about 5.55 on a Sunday morning. My company, Engine XX was first in. It was a one-family row house, two floors and a basement. It started as a fire in the basement and had spread to the first floor. I was the nozzle man. We knocked down the floor fire on the first floor, then we tried to find the entrance to the basement. We stumbled around in the living room because there was so much furniture in it and we couldn’t see in the smoky darkness. The family had redone the basement, and instead of opening a door and going down steps to the basement, you had to open the door and walk about eight feet before you came to the steps. We didn’t know that at the time. It’s an unusual arrangement for that kind of house. Anyway, we couldn’t find the basement. It started getting real hot in there, and everything started cracking. The lieutenant, Y, said, ‘Too hot. Let’s get out of here.’ Before we could make a move, the floor collapsed and knocked us down. The fire just took off, and we were trapped in there. I was slightly unconscious for a while, then I had to pause a little while to get my senses together, because I was burned on my forehead. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
“Lieutenant Y was in worse trouble. He was dazed. I had to get him out of there. I grabbed him under the arms and started to lead him toward the back door, but we stumbled over the furniture, and we tripped and fell. So I grabbed him by the hand, and my glove came off. The next thing I knew, my hand was badly burned. Then I started dragging him along the floor, and the next thing I knew, I was stuck. My air mask had stuck on a table or chair or something. I was stuck, and I couldn’t move. It was real scary. It was like being in hell, really. I thought, ‘Lord, don’t let me die like this. I deserve a chance.’ I thought about my wife. We were only married a year. I said, ‘Wow, I’m going to leave my wife right now, and my family.’ The way it happened, it was unbelievable. I was totally stunned. I didn’t believe I would be in a situation like that. From my training and previous experience in other fires, I knew we had to get out of there. I tired as hard as I could to get us out, but every time I tried to move, somehow I was getting weaker and weaker. I thought it was hopeless. Then my air bottle ran out of oxygen. I thought I was going to die of suffocation. I was just hoping I wouldn’t burn to death. But the fire didn’t seem like it was coming toward us anymore. I could hardly breathe in my air mask, and I had too much smoke in my chest. Just then, the other guys managed to get back in there and pull us out. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
“At the hospital they put a tube into my lungs. They could hardly get it down there, my throat was so swollen. It had been burned by the heat. They were showing it down there, and I was scared. They finally got it down. I don’t remember much of my first three days in the hospital. A lot of people said they came up to see me, but I don’t remember who. I asked somebody if everybody had made it out od the fire all right, and they said no. I saw the other two firefighters who were hurt, but I didn’t see Lieutenant Y. I kind of figure he had died. After the third or fourth day, everything started hurting real bad. My hand. My face. I was in a lot of pain. It took me a while to get over that. The first day was hardest for my wife. She was really hurt to see me, but she tried to hold it back. Afterwards, she didn’t want me coming back to the department, but I told her that that was what I wanted to do. So she respects that, and she supports me. I was in therapy for a year and a half for my hand, using grips and putty. Then I went to this physical therapy center and did all sorts of other things, exercising every day, working with my hand to build things. Today my hand is not as good as it was, but it’s okay. The department was excellent, supportive in every way. Everybody came up to see me, even guys I didn’t know. It seemed like the whole fire department was at the hospital. Anything I wanted or needed, they got for me. They treated me excellently. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
“I was off the job for about five and a half months, then I was put on light duty for about a year. Now I’m back on the job full-time. Everything is pretty cool. I’m lucky to be alive, right?” Professionalism leads the Sacramento Fire Department to continuously improve their knowledge and skills, always striving to be “first in” with excellent service. The Sacramento Fire Department also strives to sustain and improve the health, safety, convenience, and welfare of the citizens of Sacramento and to plan for the future development of the community. You can help save lives and property by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. And remember parents, please raise your children to love America, to be patriotic, to love God and Jesus, respect law and others, treat others with dignity and respect, and remind them of the importance of education. To help America survive the global recession and bring manufacturing jobs back to America and to get American wages at pace with inflation, it is important to buy America cars, American meat, American produce and other American made goods and services. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic, for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with Liberty and Justice for all. Our Father, our King, be gracious unto us and answer us, for we are wanting in good deeds; deal with us in charity and lovingkindness, and please save us. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Winchester Mystery House
The Menagerie Oddities Market is back this Holiday season!
On every Saturday from November 30 to December 28, from 11am to 5pm, Winchester Mystery House will host the 6th annual Menagerie Holiday Oddities & Curiosities Market, with new vendors every week. Join the Yuletide Oddventure and stuff those stockings with something weird they won’t forget this holiday season! 🎄
Link in bio for more information! https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Does it Feel that Way to You?
Through life, some people have as a dominant value their strength. A man’s physical strength is sometimes obvious. However, he also may use his intelligence as an asset to do what his physical strength cannot do. After an injury, a man may no longer be able to come out on top by using his physical force, when this happens, he must use his acumen successfully. Due to addictions that sometimes occur when a person is disabled or because of physical constraints, some men find that they are no longer able to manage their money, and they have no where to turn. He may perceive that inability as a weakness, and rather than admit the weakness and deal with it, he might decide to avoid it, pretending that it is not there. Thus, his money situation will simply get worse. Viewing strength and weakness as a duality, a man might believe that his only choice is to have one or the other—not both. In his mind, to admit weakness is tantamount to giving up his physical prowess. And from a man’s point of view, strength is what has kept him alive. He is therefore a slave to brute force. He cannot abandon it. He is “stuck” on it. It takes courage to move from strength to weakness and back again. It takes a brand of courage some men do not have. Many men are “stuck” on strength because of their inability (or at least unwillingness) to experience weakness by going through and getting in touch his inner core, his being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
A man who is not able to use his physical strength to support himself or his family may see himself as a spaceship without a pilot—in a sense, empty. He does not see himself as having a core, or essence. In his mind, he is not a complete human being. He is no more than a shell he carries himself around in. That is why some men who become disabled have the constant, gnawing feeling that “something is missing.” Since men with physical limitations see themselves, and therefore others, as “things,” their lives can become an endless round of manipulation, using his own “strengths” and others’ “weaknesses” to constantly come out on top. This, then, is how some men become manipulators. And their styles of manipulation may be quite simple. He merely overpowers people in getting what he wants. As boys growing up in less affluent neighbourhoods, some of them overpower people with their superior body strength. However, as men in business and in marriage, they overpower people with what they believe to be their superior intelligence. A man becomes a walking embodiment of his own attachment to strength. What a man is looking for, though he does not have words for it, is a balance between the values of strength and weakness—a state of emotional mastery, where he can be in touch with his own core, his real self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Whereas a man, the manipulator, is saying, “I am out here, all alone, and I have to be strong to survive,” a man who is a master would say, “I am a man, and I am tough and strong. I have strength and I have weakness. Even thought I am strong sometimes and weak other times, the real me always survives/ It is OK for me to be weak; it is OK for me to need people. I am not my strength, nor am I, my weakness. I am something more. I am me, and that is enough.” This is the essence of a man’s journey. It is a journey which might very well resemble your own. The strength/weakness polarity is a common one, especially among men. How does it apply to where you are, in your World? Well, your life is like a stream. And if you are a manipulator, the twigs and rocks are the values to which you cling so desperately. If you are like most people, security is what prompts you to keep clinging. The polarity in life is that it consists of clinging to your security—your dubious, unwanted yet comfortable situation, and taking a chance by opening up your innermost self, making yourself vulnerable, risking insecurity. In choosing to take a risk, you go to your core, you find your being, you become what others will call “Messiah.” You become a master. However, those who cling to their comfort zones tend to become manipulators. They are “stuck” on their exaggerated values. Though unwilling to risk letting go themselves, they nevertheless condemned the “Messiah” creature for his willingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
A man who lets of what does not strengthen him is not necessarily smarter, stronger or better than any of the other men. What separates him from the rest is his willingness to risk. In risking, he goes into his core, finds courage, and through it becomes truly free. This is something that manipulators—and indeed all of us—have yet to learn fully. When you truly learn to take strength, you take the first step on your journey from manipulation to mastery. This allows a man to experience the loss of his physical strength and survive it. He is able to see that there is still a whole, completely person left, a person who can be weak and still exist. Men will also find that weakness—which they avoid and deny their whole life—also has power to it. Men learn their weakness has the power to make them more “real” and brings people closer to them. For many men, weakness opens the door to power of loving, the power which comes from letting others be strong. Weakness enables us to relax, stop competing, let go and regain our strength for another time. When a man learns to have an encounter with weakness, sometimes people will offer to help him get his finances straightened out. However, it is difficult for most men to admit to others that they are in financial trouble and that they cannot handle it themselves. It is an admission of weakness. Yet it is something that a man is able to do when he confronts his weakness in Church and/or therapy. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
A real man can survive weakness. However, this weakness still may cause a man to withdrawal from his friends and loved ones because he still cannot face himself. For many, his strength is still too important to him and discovering more weakness would be too uncomfortable. Yet once his journey has begun, and once begun can never be turned back. For a brief moment, some men are able to give up strength, retreat to their inner core and find something there. It is something he will never be able to “unexperience.” And it will assist him in his journey many times in the future. However, other men continue to grow. Man’s true intelligence is feeble while it remains imprisoned in egoism and narcotized by sensuality. He must liberate it by the philosophic discipline before it can become strong. So many of our feelings and so many of our thoughts have until now been dictated by the body. Is it not time to think and feel also as the true self would have us do? The terrestrial heritage has given him instincts, appetites, impulses, and desires; the human holds out higher possibilities to be worked for and realized. One message of the Sphinx is to balance the human mind with the brutish terrestrial being in us. This is not the same as the ascetics’ message, which is to exterminate the terrestrial being altogether. He who has not overcome his passions finds himself compelled to act against the clearest warnings of his reason. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
What really moves a man to act is his feeling; that is why the passion which are strong feelings, need more deliberate effort of the will to bring them under restraint. An action which is spontaneous and not a calculated one—that can be safe only for the enlightened man. For others it may be mere impulse or mere passion. The point is not that natural impulses of the body are wrong—how could that be?—but that men have made them wrong. Originally the satisfaction of the pleasure-instinct was in harmony with higher will as a lesser part of a greater function. However, now human will have reversed its role and exaggerated it to first place. The result is disharmony and disease. On one thing all men in all lands are agreed, that it is immeasurably more preferable to be released from anxieties than to suffer them. Yet, these same men throw themselves into situations or bring about events which will rivet the chains of anxiety upon them. How is it that such a contradiction exists everywhere? What causes them to do this? It is the strength of their desires, the power of their ambitions, the tendencies inherited from past births. This being the cause of the trouble, the remedy for it becomes plain. The more a man frees himself from desires, that is, the more he masters himself, the more is he freed from numerous anxieties. And even if he too is subject to the painful tests and unpleasant ordeals which inescapably affect human existences, he does not consider them to be misfortunes but as devices to draw out his latent qualities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The way out from tyrannical desires may have to be staged. First becomes a witness—indifferent and dispassionate—every time there is a surrender. This way is taking a new direction, starting to disidentify from the desire. On the one hand, he must tear himself away from his Earthly passions. On the other hand, he must give himself up to his sacred aspirations. The eagerness of desire betrays him into romantic self-deceptions and leads him into wounding frustrations. The ego lures his hopes constantly onward only to lacerate them in the end. Whilst we are still limited by the body and its inescapable needs, it is an impossible task to extirpate desire and negative self-interest. Philosophy adds that it is also an undesirable one. Only, put desire and self-interest down in their proper place, it says, do not permit them to obstruct higher and spiritual needs. It is not that they have to abandon joy but to purify it. If the joy which comes from debased pleasures is thereby lost, the joy which comes from ennobled thoughts and refined feelings is gained. When Earthly desires are extinguished, calm befalls a man. He must needs declare open war on his own passions, for he now sees that he cannot have them and peace too. Like all war this one will witness both victories and defeats, hardships and sufferings. However, out of these battles with himself he may progress, learning discrimination and gaining willpower. If uncontrolled, he realizes that he has to break his passions, or they will break him. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
In this work of purification, the need for mortal intellectual and emotional honesty will have to be stressed. It is satisfied by discriminating examination of thoughts, feelings, and motives, with constant self-distrust as a guide in the work. The more he trains himself to recognize and reject the impulses that come from his lower nature, the more will clarity of comprehension become his. The brute creature that he is most be kept at bay; his freedom as a man must be gained by degrees. Personally, I knew about my wife’s World to understand something of how life was to her. I even knew the terror of it because once, before we were married, I got swept into her agony, his suicidal chaos, and all the World became morbid to me in a most frightening, unmitigated and unmitigable way—everything was going haywire and out of control. I wanted to kill myself. I said so. She spoke to me as though I were a peasant who thought she new the passions of a kind. She thrust me out. In two shakes I thought, “Whew! I will never get into that again.” In thrusting me out, she got out of it herself (when she became the King?” but to be in it at all was too dangerous for me. Of course, I have wondered through the years since her suicide whether there was anything I could have done to help her. Everything I read or heard of psychotherapy I thought of in relation to my wife, questioning, and always I got the same answer: “With her, it would not have worked.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
This made me wonder whether I was white-washing my own failure. However, if so, why could I not ever be satisfied? Why did I not let it drop? Did I know that I was guilty, deep down in some sub-non-unconscious way? (When I mistrust me, there is no end to it, because then what I live with is mistrust.) If I were guilty, why could I not feel that?—instead of living with the knowing that I had tried very hard, I had loved her very much, and I had stayed too long. I received a latter from a man who stayed too long with his wife, in which he said “I have tentatively concluded (for me) that more time and more suffering than make sense are required to get on top of the mores and our personal motivations and unenlightened advice, to work through to the point where you can know yourself free of guilt for the life you can’t save.” It was only last spring, nearly twenty years after my wife’s suicide, that I understood something that I might have done. My relief expressed itself in a sign (letting go). I felt better about it. Not good, but better, and better is a kind of good. And then I knew—by feeling it clearly within myself—that the “bad” that I had been feeling was not guilt but sad. My “better” feeling was because it was not solidly inevitable that people like my wife must suffer so much all their lives and wipe out other people along the way. I do not know that I could have helped. However, I could have been more in touch with my thoughts and feelings (acceptance of myself) and more acceptant of his distress, sharing it her. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Instead of both of us trying to shove out her distress and replace it with a happiness which was phoney, I could have let her agony be, and then there might have been the beginning of change. Where to everything else I had said, “No, it would not have worked. She would not have let it,” when I thought of this in relation to my wife, I remembered the times when I might have got through to her. Even if I had not, I would have been more me and that would have been better for all of us. The most beautiful times that I remember with my wife are the many hours that we spent together saying only a few words now and then, like a touch on the shoulder or a hand touching hand. Our chairs were yards apart, but we were together. At such times she was in touch with the wordless resonance, the love that was in her and in me, and let it live awhile. However, then I would be sure that I, eighteen years younger, must be unhappy, must want to be “doing something,” and then I lost my awareness of all that was going on in myself and between us, and the sensing with all my senses that I had been enjoying, and I thought that I had to reassure her. She never did entirely take my word for it, and I never asked her, “Does it feel that way to you?” My wife was exceptionally good at explaining astronomy, anthropology, medicine, English literature and history, Greek and Latin poetry, and probably some other things which I have forgotten. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
However, in the person sense, my wife explained nothing. Perhaps she was so out of touch with herself that she could not. There were times and ways in which I understood (or heard) her no better than she did herself, and that was because at those times I did not hear me too. The human needs varied stimulation, not just to avoid boredom but actually to preserve the ability to perceive and to act adequately. When a person is radically deprived of the customary variety of sights, sounds, smells, conversation, and so on—as happens in solitary confinement—he or she begins to feel strange and may show signs of deteriorating as a person. “Sensory deprivation” experiments show that when volunteer subjects are placed in a special room that is soundless, with their vision closed off by special goggles, and immersed in warm water kept at body temperature (to reduce the experience of tactile stimulation), some begin to hallucinate and go through other psychoticlike experiences. I have been in such an isolation chamber, and I found it tranquil and conducive to meditation. Variety in “stimulus input,” then, may be regarded as a basic need, even though deprivation as extreme as that produced in the laboratory seldom occurs in everyday life. The “evil twin” of varied experience is boredom—a form of dispiriting in style of life. Travel, risk-taking, excitement, and simply trying something new in the way of clothes, reading, vacations, or challenges are the antitheses of boredom—varying one’s experience of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Even moonrises and sunsets can get monotonous for the jaded tastes of the daily skywatcher. The healthy personality is also nurtured by meaningful variety. Excitement has often been thought of as a need for the young only. We now recognize that it is part of the fullest of lives in all generations. The excitement experience is one of the most difficult to create. Not all excitements involve risk-taking, and excitements are quite individually determined. One person may be thrilled by the firs parachute jump—another is equally excited about the first sighting of the sandhill crane. The Correspondence Principle requires that every new theory contain a limiting transition to the old theory it replaces. Insofar as the old theory has fitted some sound experiments, the new theory must concur. If Planck’s constant h tends towards zero, the quantum equations become just the classical ones. If the speed of light approaches infinity, Einstein’s kinematic and dynamical equations go over to Newton’s, and so on over a large number of examples from contemporary physics. As we apply the Correspondence Principle to sociobiology and exo-psychology, we expect that each new Einsteinian, relativistic theory of human behaviour and neurogenetic evolution will include a translation back to the old theory it replaced. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Darwinians are clearly in violation when they fanatically summarily reject the Monotheistic Creation theories of the Judeo-Christian Bible. Newer theories of evolution must provide new insights into the validity of the older theories—specifying the historical neurotechnical factors which limited the earlier metaphours. Any new theory of neurogenetics must relate to and lovingly demonstrate why the previous philosophic theory was “right” for its time arid its gene-pool—knowing that those to come will affectionately do the same for our theories. Historically speaking, the first coherent offensive is that of Sade, who musters into one vast war machine the arguments of the freethinkers up to Father Meslier and Voltaire. His negation is also, of course, the most extreme. From rebellion Sade can only deduce an absolute negative. Twenty-seven years in prison do not, in fact, produce a very conciliatory form of intelligence. Such a long period of confinement produces either weaklings or killers and sometimes a combination of both. If the mind is strong enough to construct in a prison cell a moral philosophy that is not one of submission, it will generally be one of domination. Every ethic based on solitude implies the exercise of power. In this respect Sade is the archetype, for in so far as society treated him atrociously, he responded in an atrocious manner. The writer, despite a few happy phrases and the thoughtless praises of our contemporaries, is secondary. He is admired today, with so much ingenuity, for reasons which have nothing to do with literature. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
He is exalted as the philosopher in chains and the first theoretician of absolute rebellion. He might as well have been. In prison, dreams have no limits and reality is no curb. Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a philosophy, but pursued a monstrous dream of revenge. Only the dream turned out to be prophetic. His desperate demand for freedom led Sade into the kingdom of servitude; his inordinate thirst for a form of life he could never attain was assuaged in the successive frenzies of a dream of universal destruction. In this way, at least, Sade is our contemporary. The militaristic history of Germany has many imagines of a strong silent sentry soldier on guard, watching, protecting, which made the Germans feel secure and strong. The content of the American news media was once honourable, but most of the enterprises are managed in a way that has made it impossible for them to function as a business. The first duty of TV news media has become that of the propagandists, to win over people who can subsequently be taken into the organization. And they train men and women to carry on their propaganda. The second duty of the TV news media has become to disrupt the existing order of things in America and thus make room for the penetration of the new teaching of sin, lawlessness, and corruption. The organizers of the propaganda department (the TV News media) have been fighting for the purpose of securing power, so that their doctrine of sin and corruption may finally triumph. After propaganda has converted the entire population over to an idea, only a handful of men are needed to finish the job. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Great theorists are rarely great organizers. The greatness of a theorist lies in his ability to understand and establish correct, abstract laws, while the organizer must primarily be an expert in understanding the human mind. The script controls are inserted and take effect early in life, while the counterscript slogans only become meaningful later. Added difficulty are scripts that tell it like it is: people really do act clumsy, as the child well knows; while the counterscript is usually square as far as his experience is concerned: he may or may not have seen someone attain happiness by working hard, being a good person, saving money, or being on time, not eating starches, avoiding public toilets, taking laxatives, and not masturbating. The problem we are having in America currently is that American people are being ignored and public works projects that have been in desperate need of completion are being ignored to add things like new bike lanes that people do not use anyway. Also, democrats are teaching Americans to expect everything for free, to feel entitled, to ignore the law, to rebel and be destructive and that breaking the law and discrimination is acceptable. The way you live your life determines your ultimate destiny. If you are harmonious, you may pass by unnoticed on the inside of the pages, but if you are in conflict, you may bring surprises and make headlines. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Thus, Hard-Working Church Deacon may end up President of Council, Retires After Thirty Years, or Jailed For Embezzlement, and Devoted Housewife comes out Mother of the Year, Celebrates Golden Anniversary, or Leaps From Roof of Building. In fact, it seems as though there are two kinds of people in the World: real people and plastic people, as the Flower Children used to say. The real people make their own decisions, while the plastic people are run by fortune cookies. The Fortune Cookie Theory of human living says that each child gets to pull two cookies from the family bowl: one square and one jagged. The square one is a slogan, such as “Work hard!” or “Stick with it!” while the jagged one is a scripty joker, such as “Forget your homework,” “Act clumsy,” or “Drop dead.” Between the two, unless he throws them away, his lifestyle and his final destiny are written. The conflict which we have sought to avoid is upon us. It is a comfortable, self-indulgent cop-out to look for conventional economic-political solutions. This is a war for survival. There is no choice left but to defend life against the genocidal machine. There are no neutrals in genetic warfare. Do not be deceived. It is a classic stratagem of genocide to camouflage their wars as law-and-order police actions, but democrats are telling illegal aliens how to evade ICE. Remember the Sioux and the pogroms and the African slaves and the indignation over airline hijackings and 9/11! If you fail to see that we are the victims of genocidal way you will not understand the rage of the oppressed, the fierceness of the Weathermen, and the pervasive resentment of the young. We cannot allow our government to become a lethal instrument. Remember the buffalo, the Iroquois, and the deer in the Sacramento Valley! #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
The members of the Sacramento Fire Department are professionals dedicated to providing services that are innovative and progressive, ensuring the safest environment for their community. “I’m going through EMT right now. I was an ECA, that’s emergency care attendant. With that I could run first aid for the fire department. There are widespread deaths from vehicle accidents in the Sacramento area. We have a lot of busy intersections, and we also have people who go out and party, and they get on the roads and bring death with them. I have handled a lot of situations. We had a baby born on one run. It was pretty exciting, even though I’ve done it with my wife. We were called out to a house, and a lady was having good contractions. She was in the third stage of delivery. So, in the ambulance, I assisted a paramedic and we delivered the child. We set him up on the mother’s stomach so that the two of them could be pretty comfortable together, for the hospital was maybe seven miles away.” “We responded to a fire at an apartment. On arriving at the scene, we saw black smoke billowing into the sky from the nineth floor, and tenants were out on the balconies waving for help. Our company, Engine X, entered the lobby just as Rescue Y brought down a lady who was pretty charred. This was the first time that the seriousness of the fire dawned on us. We went to the fifth floor and took a lone up to the nineth. There we searched and found about five occupants whom we helped to exit the fire. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
“It appeared to be a racing fire, which engulfed the elevator and much of the nineth floor. The carpets and wall coverings were involved. A flash fire raced down the corridor. There was a lot of heat and smoke. They had a lot of plastics, and the smoke was black and thick, like flowing oil. If you held your hand in front of your face, you couldn’t see it, the smoke was that bad. The exit lights couldn’t be seen. We could hear people talking, and we could hear people screaming. People were trying to find their way out. They were helpless. We led some of them back into their rooms and out onto their balconies. Others we led to the fire escape that came down through the entire building. Some of them were in wheelchairs and could not walk. Then, as our air pipes were running low, we came across a man in one of the rooms. He was wedged under a vanity or dresser of some type. He appeared to be dead, so Lieutenant X took his self-contained and gave the guy some air. We saw his lips move a little, so we knew he was alive. Our next thought was to rescue him. The exit we wanted to take him to was about seventy-five feet away. When we tried to remove him from under the vanity, it was quite a tug. We realized that he had been burned through his clothing, and his skin was stuck to the carpet. We managed to pull the guy up and drag him down the floor. He was a large individual, weighing about 300 pounds. We started the three-man carry and got him down the hallway about fifty feet from the exit, when we ran out of air. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
“Our oxygen supplies ran out simultaneously because we had all entered the building at the same time. It was his only chance, now or never. I helped carry the guy maybe twenty feet from the exit. I knew the smoke was filled with PVC, and I knew it was toxic. So what I did was hold my breath while we were carrying him, until I couldn’t hold it anymore. I told Lieutenant X and Y that I had to leave. I dove out of the exit, but not before I did breathe in some of it, and I went through the coughing and the spit and that stuff. Lieutenant X and Y succeeded in carrying the guy the rest of the way out. A relief crew was there to resuscitate him. X and Y were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation. Since then, Y has retired from the department for respiratory problems, and Lieutenant X is still on the job. So it affected one firefighter enough to end his career. I didn’t take nearly as much smoke as they did, but it had some effects on me. I have sore throats and a skin problem, but all in all, I don’t think it had too much of a lasting effect. The victim’s name was O.G. That’s all I know, we called him The O.G. What his real name was, I have no idea. I never got to talk to him, but he sent us some letters, saying that he was grateful for what we had done. I think he was a veteran, and, as far as I know, he is alive and well. If you weren’t spiritual before, this job would probably make you that way. It has made me appreciate life, believe me. If you asked if I would do it again, I would tell you yes. I know I would do not again. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“After that, going on fires, it isn’t the fire I worry about, it’s finding somebody in that same position again. I think that bothers me more than anything else. Because that stuck with me for a long time. To see an individual I rescued, see him that close to death, it really bothered me for a long time. one time I went on a call to that building there was a big guy. We all knew he had been dead for at least twelve hours. His body was cold, but there were about ten of us. A few of us guys spent nearly an hour trying to resuscitate the body. There was a little boy and a distraught woman there and I guess we wanted to give them hope. We all knew he was dead. That building is like a warzone. A lot of people end up dead, there are a lot of suspicious fires, a lot of crime and an extremely large number of emergency calls. I worry about the people who live there. Something is wrong. The building constantly wreaks of drugs and foul odors and is filthy.” Because of the Sacramento Fire Department, Sacramento City has been blessed with a great and noble heritage that offers a pathway to salvation. The dedicated EMTs, Fire Fighters, CHP and Police risk their lives to protect that community and keep people safe. The people of Sacramento do not underestimate the worth of emergency services. The Sacramento Fire Department has a firm adherence to a code of moral and ethical standards: Honesty, Trust, and Accountability. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. It is also very important to raise your children to love America and to be patriotic. By having pride in America, and purchasing American made cars and other goods and services, we can make America a creditor nation again and ensure that this sacred land will be enjoy by your family for generations to come. Teaching children to love God and Jesus Christ will also preserve our American heritage and allow us to make sure our children are set on a path that will lead them to success and help them reserve a seat in Heaven. The Ten Commandments in the Christian Bible are a good guideline of how everyone should live. Furthermore, by respecting law and order, we will ensure the tranquility of this great nation and make sure that we are setting an exemplary example for other nations to follow. And by treating others with dignity, respect, and compassion, this will ensure that we are following the golden rule, “Do on to others as you would have them do on to you,” reports Luke 6.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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An Altar Boy Just Escaped from Mass or Something
The choices you make—mission, education, marriage, career, and faith in God—will shape your eternal destiny. Much has been written and said about today’s generation of young adults. Research shows that many resist organized religion. Many are in debt and unemployed. A majority like the idea of marriage, but many are reluctant to take that step. A growing number do not want children. Without the gospel and inspired guidance, many are wandering in strange paths and losing their way. However, your righteous choices will keep you from getting off course. Think of it: If you choose not to take a drink of alcohol, you will not become an alcoholic! If you never choose to go into debt, you will avoid the possibility of bankruptcy! The Lord will always keep Hos promise: “I will lead you along.” The only question is, will we let ourselves be led? Will we hear His voice and the voice of His servants? If you are there for the Lord, I testify that He will be there for you. If you love Him and Keep His commandments, you will have His Spirit to be with you and guide you. “Put your trust in that Spirit which leadeth to do good…By this shall you know, all things…pertaining unto things…pertaining unto things of righteousness.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
If we are steadfast and immovable in doing good, our customs will help us to stay on the covenant path. We all have customs and traditions that are personal, from our family, or from the community in which we live, and we hope to keep all those that align with the principles of the gospel. Edifying customs and traditions are fundamental to our efforts to stay on the covenant path, and those that are an obstacle, we ought to reject. A custom is the practice or the frequent and habitual way of thinking for a person, culture, or tradition. Frequently, the things we think and do in a habitual way we recognize as normal. Few people know what love really means because with nearly all it is filtered through the screens of bodily and selfish considerations. In its pure native state, it is the first attribute of the divine soul and consequently it is one of the most important qualities which the seeker has to cultivate. The love for which man is searching exists; it is as perfect, as beautiful, as perpetual, and as healing as he can imagine it to be. However, it does not exist where one wants to find it. Only the inner kingdom holds and gives it at the end of his search. No other human being can do so unless he or she has previously entered the kingdom, and then only through all the limitations and colourings of the Earthly consciousness. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Although we have learned that a love restricted to the limited circle of wife, family, or friends is unphilosophic and should be extended in universal compassion to all mankind, this should not be mistaken to mean that such a restricted love ought to be abandoned. On the contrary, it should have its fullest place within the larger one. We also believe that “love” is one of the most misused words in English. We may now add that it is also one of the most debased words. Why? Because, very often, it is based on sheer self-interest and not on the beloved’s interest and gives only so lang as it gets; because, not seldom, the greater the ardour with which it begins, the greater the antipathy with which it ends; and because it frequently mistakes the goading of animal glands for the awakening of human affection. True love does not change or falter because the beloved has changed and wavered or because the physical circumstances wherein it was born have become different. It cannot be blown hither and thither by the accidents of destiny. It is not merely an emotional attraction, although it will include this. “Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds, …O no! it is an ever-fixed mark…” wrote Shakespeare. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
It expressed itself outwardly in an exceptionally kindly behaviour. He will not hurt others unnecessarily. He feels that one of the best pieces of advice he can give others is: “Be kind.” In this way you abrase your own egoism and show forth something—just an echo—of this love which emanates from the indwelling spiritual self. The cost in thus weakly and briefly identifying yourself with others is little: the gain in moral growth is large. When your duties, activities, or responsibilities in life call for critical judgment of any person, that is allowable. However, when you fall into it for the sake of idle gossip or, what is worse, when you are nastily censorious, slanderously back-biting, for the sake of malice, that is unkind and unpardonable. Above his own deliberate willing or wishing, quite spontaneously and impulsively, a feeling of pure love begins to well up within him. It is unconnected with physical or egoistic causes, for all those who touch his orbit benefit by it. If they are foolish or dreadful, sinful or deformed, unclean or disagreeable, it does not stop flowing. No one has ever unraveled the mystery of love as it exists between a man and a woman. Since it is usually beyond our power to accept or reject, we should regard it as a Divine Message and seek out its meaning to our spiritual life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
What is normal for some may be odd for others, depending on their customs and traditions. Which customs and traditions are normal in our lives? Today, we often hear about “a new normal.” If you really want to embrace a new normal, I invite you to turn your heart, mind, and soul increasingly to our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus as the Christ. Let that be your new normal. If there is anything virtuous, lovely, or good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things,” reports Articles of Faith 1.13. At its peak moments, which can arise only in its first or last stages and which belong only to its affectional rather than passional side, human love catches and reflects feebly the nature of divine love. The romantic aureole which young persons put around love, the demands made on it for that which it cannot give, point to the need of maturer instruction. Yet there is a relationship where two can grow in virtues side by side, learning wisdom from one another, harmonizing more and more with each other. However, this calls for self-control, eliminating negatives, cultivating positives. No one has the right to bind, hinder, or restrict the free spiritual movement of another person—no matter how close his blood, contractual, or emotional relationship may be—who enters into the pursuit of higher well-being. If it is done in the name of love, then that word has its meaningly sorely misrepresented, for it is really being done in selfishness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
This quality of “love” is not to be measured by the exhibitions of effusiveness on the part of its possessor; it is to be measured by the presence or absence in him of egolessness. Whoever talks of his love for mankind will reveal it better by positive deeds than by sentimental displays. When brought down to individuals, the fact is, however, that such love is hard to feel. Only the actualized Christian really possesses it. Our Heavenly Father’s love for each of His children is real. He is there for each one. The eternal principle of love is manifested by living the two great commandments: love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength and love your neighbour as yourself. We are willing to help each other because we love one another, and our loved one’s needs become our needs, and ours become theirs. No matter what language a child of God speaks or what country he comes from, we love each other because we are brothers, children of the same Father. It is not enough to avoid being a stumbling block for others; it is not enough to notice the needy on the road and pass by. Even if it is the first and only time, we meet him or her in this life, let us take advantage of every opportunity to help our neighbour. By loving the Overself within you in worship you are loving it in all men, because it is present in them, too. Hence, you do not have to go out of your way to love any individual specially, separately, although you will naturally feel affection for some. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Adversity in our lives can cause doubt about the fulfillment of the promises that have been made to us. Please trust in our Father. He always keeps His promises, and we can learn what He wants to teach us. Traces of earlier customs survive in present-day cultures. According to the Doctrine of Survival, meaningless customs must be survivals. When and where they first arose, they had a practical or at least a ceremonial intention, but are now fallen into absurdity from having been carried on into a new state in society where the original sense has been discarded. If we can accept the conclusion that every established and settled institution is justifiable, in its setting, as an adaptation, it seems to me that we are thereby accepting the extension of the Darwinian theory to the field of science and society. Sociology is a psychology rather than a biological science. The consciousness of kind, which is the basis of all social organization, is a mental state and not a biological process. Although the fittest is not always the best, the characteristic of the social process makes them identical. Society, however, in selecting the best, gives weight to such qualities as sympathy and mutual aid. It usually eliminates the incompetent and the irresponsible. The improvement of society must be a slow evolutionary process waiting upon the gradual increment of personal characteristics “adapted” to the life conditions of modern industrial society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
The individual is a product of his social life and society is an organization of such individuals. Man’s psychical outfit is not divisible into the social and the non-social; but that he is all social in a large sense, is all a part of the common human life. We may desire abolition of war, industrial justice, greater equality of opportunity for all. However, no amount of preaching good will or the golden rule or cultivation of sentiments of love and equity will accomplish the results. There must be change in objective arrangements and institutions. We must work on the environment, not merely on the hearts of men. The prevailing code of morals fails to pierce the veil of the impersonal corporate relations of modern society, and the blame for social ills must be fixed on the absentee malefactors. If we were to cut back unnecessary dehumanizing consumption today, it would mean less production, less employment, and less income and less profit generated in certain sectors of the economy. Clearly, if this were done willy-nilly, with no planning, etcetera, it would cause extreme hardship for the economy as a whole and for specific groups of people. What would be required is a planned process of spreading the increased leisure across all areas of work, retraining of people, and a redeployment of some material resources. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Time would be needed, and planning would of course have to be social rather than private, since no one industry could organize and implement a plan affecting wide sectors of the economy. Given proper planning, the reduction in total income and profit would not seem to be an insurmountable problem, since the need for income would have been reduced with the lowering consumption. As our productive potential has increased, we have been faced with the choice of much less work with a much higher production and consumption with a steady level of work. Somewhat begrudgingly we have chosen a mixture of the two. Production and consumption have been increased, and at the same time work hours have been reduced and child labour largely abolished. This choice was not dictated by technical necessity, but was the result of changing social attitudes and political struggle. Whatever the merits of theses suggestion are, they are of little importance in comparison with what economists can suggest in response to the question, Is a stationary technological society possible? The important point is that the specialists address themselves to this problem, and they will do so only if they see the relevance of the question. One should not forget that the main difficulty may be found not in the economic and technical aspects of the problem but in its political and psychological aspects. Habits and ways of thought do not bend easily, and since many powerful interest groups have a very real stake in maintaining and speeding up the consumption treadmill the struggle to change the pattern will be hard and long. As have been said many times, the all-important point at this time is that we make a beginning. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
We are not alone in our fixation on material consumption—other Western nations, Russia, China, Japan, and East European nations also seem to be caught in the same destructive trap. Witness the Chinese claim that they will bury us in washing machines, cars, minerals, refrigerators, etcetera. The real challenge would be not to engage them in the wrong race, but to transcend this stage of social development and challenge them to build a truly human society—which will not be defined and measured by the number of Smart TVs or cars. If the consumers were to reduce their consumption to satisfy their real needs as living human beings, while this question of an eventually stationary production level is at the moment an essentially theoretical one, there is a very practical one which would arise. If this were to happen, if we redirected and transferred production from certain “unnecessary” private consumption to more humane forms of social consumption, the present rate of economic growth could be maintained. The needs here are clear and have been noted by many contemporary analysts and writers. A partial list of activities would include: a reconstruction of much of the nation’s living spaces (millions of new housing units), a vast expansion and improvement in public education and public health, development of urban and intercity systems of public transportation, tens of thousands of small and large recreation projects in American communities (parks, playgrounds, swimming pools, etcetera), a major beginning in the development of cultural life—brining drama, music, dance, painting, movie making, etcetera, into hundreds of thousands of communities and millions of lives which currently have no real sense of this dimension of human existence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
All these efforts involve physical production and the development of vast human resources. Such projects have the immediate virtue of attacking the problems of the impoverished minority, at the same time engaging the imagination and energies of the non-poor. If not completely eliminate, they also soften the problems created by cutting back on consumption. If major programs of this kind were to be undertaken, national economic and social planning would, of course, be required since substantial shifts in the use of human and material resources would be involved. A prime result of such efforts would be to show that we were indeed moving toward a genuinely human community. If we guaranteed that in each aspect of such programs the people and communities involved would be responsible for project development and implementation, this would be another great step in the direction of creating an alive, involved society. At the national level, enabling legislation is necessary plus adequate financing, but given this all-important minimum, maximum public participation and project diversity should be the prime principle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In such a shift from the private to the public sector of consumption, private spending would be restrained as more income was diverted to higher taxes, and there would be a measurable shift from deadening, dehumanizing private consumption to new forms of public consumption that would involve people in creative community activities. Needless to say, such a shift would require careful planning to avoid severe upsets in the economic system; in this respect, we face the same problem in the convention from armament to peace production. For man, inasmuch as he is man—that is to say, inasmuch as he transcends nature and is aware of himself and of death—the sense of complete aloneness and separateness is close to insanity. Man as man is afraid of insanity, just as man as terrestrial being is afraid of death. Man has to be related, he had to find union with others, in order to be sane. This need to be one with others is his strongest passion, stronger than pleasures of the flesh and often even stronger than his wish to live. It is this fear of isolation and ostracism, rather than the “castration fear,” that makes people repress the awareness of that which is taboo since such awareness would mean being different, separate, and hence, to be ostracized. Even if his own eyes could convince him that it is false, for this reason the individual must bling himself from seeing that which his group claims does not exist, or accept as truth that which the majority says is true. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The herd is so vitally important for the individual that their views, beliefs, feelings, constitute reality for him, more so than what his sense and his reason tell him. Just as in the hypnotic state of dissociation the hypnotist’s voice and words take the place of reality, so the social pattern constitutes reality for most people. What man considers true, real, sane, are the clichés accepted by his society, and much that does not fit in with these clichés is excluded from awareness, is unconscious. There is almost nothing a man will not believe—or repress when he is threatened with the explicit or implicit threat of ostracism. Retuning to the fear of losing one’s identity, for the majority of people, their identity is precisely rooted in their conformity with the social clichés. “They” are who they are supposed to be—hence the fear of ostracism implies the fear of the loss of identity, and the very combination of both fears has a most powerful effect. Let us imagine a person who has observed that in certain situations in which he would like to participate in discussions he is tongue tied because he is afraid of possible criticism. If he allows this observation to take root within himself he will begin to wonder about the fear involved, since it is out of proportion to any real danger. He will wonder why the fear is so great that it prevents him not only from expressing his thoughts but also from thinking clearly. He will wonder whether the fear is greater than his ambition, and whether it is greater than any consideration of expediency, which for the sake of his career, would make it desirable that he produce a good impression. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Having thus gained an interest in his problem, he will try to find whether similar difficulties operate in other areas of life, and, if so, what form they take, He will examine his relations with women. Is he too timid to approach them because they might find fault with him? What about his life that involves pleasures of the flesh? Was he once important for a while because he could not get over a failure? Is he reluctant to go to parties? What about shopping? Does he buy an expensive house because otherwise the real estate agent might think he is too economical? Does he tip too generously because the waiter might look down upon him? Furthermore, exactly how vulnerable is he in regard to criticism? What is sufficient to touch off an embarrassment or to make him feel hurt? Is he hurt only when his wife overtly criticizes his necktie or is he uneasy when she merely praises Justin for always matching his tie and his socks? Such considerations will give him an impression of the extent and intensity of his difficulty and of its various manifestations. He will then want to know how it affects his life. He knows already that it makes him inhibited in many areas. He cannot assert himself; he is too complaint with what other expect of him, and therefore he can never be himself but must automatically play a part. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Not being able to be himself makes him resentful against others, for they appear to dominate him, but it also lowers his own self-esteem. Finally, he looks out for the factors that are responsible for the difficulty. What made him so fearful of criticism? He may remember that his parents held him to very rigid standards, and may recall any number of incidents in which he was scolded or made to feel inadequate. However, he will also have to think of all the weak spots in his actual personality which, in their totality, render him dependent on others and therefore make him regard their opinion of him as of compelling importance. If he can find the answers to all such questions his recognition that he is afraid of criticism will no longer be an isolated insight, but he will see the relationship of this trait to the whole structure of his personality. It may well be asked whether I mean by this example that a person who has discovered a new factor should deliberately ransack his experiences and feelings in the various ways indicated. Certainly not, because which a procedure would involve the same danger of merely intellectual mastery that was discussed before. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, he should grant himself a period of contemplation. He should mediate on his finding in much the same manner as an archaeologist who has discovered a buried statues, badly mutilated, looks at his treasure from all angels until the original factor that a person recognizes is like a searchlight turned on certain domains of his life, lighting up spots which have hitherto been dark. If only he is vividly interested in recognizing himself, he is almost bound to see them. These are point at which the guidance of an expert would be particularly helpful. I hypothesize that growth and change are more likely to occur the more that a counselor is experiencing a warm, optimistic, acceptant attitude toward what is in the client. It means that he prizes his client, as a person, with somewhat the same quality of feeling that a parent feels for his child, prizing him as a person regardless of his particular behaviour at the moment. It means that he cares for his client in a non-possessive way, as a person with potentialities. It involves an open willingness for the client to be whatever feelings are real in him at the moment—hostility or tenderness, rebellion or submissiveness, assurance of self-depreciation. It means a kind of love for the client as he is, providing we understand the word love as equivalent to the theologian’s term agape, and not in its usual romantic and possessive meanings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
This description is a feeling which is not paternalist, not sentimental, nor superficially social and agreeable. It respects the other person as a separate individual, and does not possess him. It is a kind of liking which has strength, and which is not demanding. We have termed it a beneficial regard. Consciousness is awareness, the state of or faculty of being mentally cognizant or aware of anything. This important state of being not only refers to the unique capacity to perceive, remember, think about, and imagine the World in its many realities and possibilities. It includes a special human capacity—to reflect upon the person’s immediate way of being aware. Thus, you can engage in remembering the past; of someone asks, “What are you doing right now?” you can reply, “I am trying to remember something.” You can tell the difference, through such reflection, between perceiving, remembering, and imagining. Indeed, loss of the capacity for such discriminating reflection, confusion of seeing with imagining, is one of the signs by which students of abnormal personality identify psychosis. The first property of human consciousness to which we call attention, then, is that it can be reflected on. Humans are capable of being self-conscious, as well as conscious of the World beyond themselves. This strange ability of the human to “clamber outside of self” and look back at self is a valuable tool of consciousness expansion. It enables the person to see self as others see the person. In gives one an added foothold on reality. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
We do not have to be hindered by self-judgment. Compassion is an attribute of Christ. It is born of love for others and knows no boundaries. Even when we do what is right, the circumstances in our life can change from good to bad, from happiness to sadness. God answers our prayers according to His infinite mercy and love and in His own time. Our Saviour’s plea is to “let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father which is in Heaven,” reports Matthew 5.16. We want to see Jesus for who He is and we want to feel His love. Worthiness is a process, and perfection and an eternal trek. We can be worthy to enjoy certain privileges without being perfect. There is a natural, probably a mortal, tendency to compare ourselves with others. Unfortunately, when we make these comparisons, we tend to compare our weakest attributes with someone else’s strongest. Obviously these kinds of comparisons are destructive and only reinforce the fear that somehow we do not measure up and therefore we must not be as worthy as the next person. We need to come to terms with our desire to reach perfection and our frustration when our accomplishments or behaviours are less than perfect. Salvation does not come all at one; we are commanded to be perfect even as our Father in Heaven it perfect. It will take us ages to accomplish this end, for there will be greater progress beyond the grave, and it will be there that the faithful will overcome all things, and receive all things, even the fulness of the Father’s glory. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
As California’s Capitol City fire department, it is the Sacramento Fire Department’s mission to provide unparalleled fire, rescues, and emergency medical services to their community. “Firefighters are individuals unto themselves, with a tremendous sense of humor. I think you need it in this type of job. I don’t think there is another occupation where a sense of humor is so important. The pranks that are played on one another, the fraternity house atmosphere at times, is necessary to cut both the tension of what it is you actually do when you go to work and the tedium in between. Sometimes you meet guys in the job who think they know everything, but the job doesn’t let them get away with it for every long. There was this kid, one of those people who don’t know anything but think they have it all together. He was a probie, a probationary fireman, and he looked like an altar boy just escaped from Mass of something. When you tell him something, he says, ‘I know that. I know that. I’ll tell you something. My friend X and I have been tight because we work together in the same station. I’ve never been to Vietnam or anything like that, but they say that when you are close to death and you’re with somebody, it makes you closer. Well, I know that since we found that baby in that collapsed building, X and Y and I are a lot closer than we were. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“I guess just knowing that you could die, just that fact does something to bring you together. We knew that is something happened we were all going together.” California’s Capital City fire department stives to maintain a focus on providing value to the residents, business owners, and visitors who live, work and play within in boundaries. The Sacramento Fire Department promotes safety and assists people in their time of crisis. They seek not only to make a good impression, but to provide the public piece of mind that their fire department is capable, ready, and willing to help them when they need it. You can help save lives by donating to the Sacramento Fire Department. As this is a community of family values, it is essential to raise your children to love America, be patriotic, love God and Jesus Christ, respect and obey law and order, and treat others with dignity and kindness. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, One Nation under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all. God of the World, eternity’s sole Lord! King over kings, be now Thy name adored! Blessed are we to whom Thou dost accord this gladsome time Thy wonderous ways to scan! This is the day bless above all others, for the Rock of Ages rested thereon. Six days are days for toil and labour, but the seventh day is a day unto the Lord. Toil not! This day is not for labour! In six days was the World created. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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11977 Cobble Brook Drive, Rancho Cordova, California 95742
4 Home Design(s) Available Starting from $625,990
Experience modern designs and affordability in our upcoming new homes for sale. Ascent at Montelena in Rancho Cordova is near major employers and premier shopping. https://www.pulte.com/homes/california/sacramento/rancho-cordova/ascent-at-montelena-210916
Randolph Harris II International 