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The Sweet Self-Torture Which is My Whole Delight

Evil mechanics have been in operation in the minds of men for centuries. Ignorance and all its causes are evil. In some cases, people are unable to discern whether their illness is mental or demonic. Studies assessing individuals with neuro-psychiatric conditions associated with evil-related behavioral abnormalities have been suggesting a potential role of frontal and limbic structures of the brain, as well as of the serotonergic system. The limbic system is a group of structures in the brain that governs emotions, motivation, olfaction (sense of smell), and behavior. The limbic system is also involved in the formation of long-term memory. The structures of the limbic system are located deep within the brain, immediately below the temporal lobes, and are buried beneath the cerebral cortex, just above the brainstem. A dysfunctional limbic system is associated with several conditions and clinical disorders such as epilepsy, dementia, anxiety disorders, and autism. The frontal lobe of the brain is part of the cerebral cortex. It is located at the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, and is one of the five main lobes of the brain. The frontal lobe is the largest section of the brain, covering about one-third of its surface area. The frontal lobe of the brain plays a crucial role in vital functions such as memory, judgment, abstract thinking, creativity, social appropriateness, and motor tasks that involve voluntary movement. #RandolphHarris 1 of 31

The frontal lobes are the most common area for injury to occur in the brain. Damage can lead to a wide variety of symptoms, such as loss of movement, difficulty speaking, and changes in social behavior. The serotoninergic system is defined as the network involved in the neural regulation of mood and anxiety, playing a crucial role in the treatment of depression and anxiety disorders. It is characterized by the expression and activation of serotonin receptors, which influence emotional behavior and neurodevelopmental outcomes, particularly in response to early life stressors and maternal diet. Symptoms of evil tend to be extreme manipulativeness, a lack of empathy, pathological lying, an obsession with control, sadistic enjoyment of pain, and vindictiveness. If the frontal and/or limbic structures, and/or serotonergic system is damaged, because these structures and systems play vital roles in regulating the behavior of a human being, it is clear why people may believe that a person is possessed by an evil demon. Typically, evil people try to take everything you love and destroy it. They will go as far as destroying your vehicle, breaking into your home, vandalizing it, stealing, and slander. They will even go as far as doing things like killing your small pets and loved ones, poisoning, and trying to kill you. Therefore, in many cultures, evil and mental illness are often used interchangeably. However, because some mental illnesses are so severe, people believe that it can be nothing other than evil. #RandolphHarris 2 of 31

People with mental illness are members of our communities, and nearly every element of life is affected. Nearly 50 percent of Americans have been mentally ill at some point in their lives, and more than a quarter have suffered from mental illness in the past twelve months. Some people may fail to recognize their problems as symptoms of treatable mental disorders, whereas others may worry about being stigmatized as “crazy.” Nevertheless, approximately 60 percent of people with mental disorders go untreated. Strangely enough, despite the vast numbers of untreated individuals, nearly one-third of all mental health visits involved problems too mild to meet criteria for any psychiatric disorder. So, in addition to the many cases of unmet need, we have too many instances of needs going unmet. Therefore, people who are experiencing ordinary problems of living may be consuming scarce resources needed by those with serious problems such as schizophrenia and depression. Which means that those most in need of treatment do not receive it, whereas those least in need do. Of course, not all psychological troubles signify a mental disorder. Mental health professionals often provide helpful guidance to people whose distress arises from difficulties in everyday life. People seek counseling for relationship problems, difficulties at work, or loneliness. Moreover, people whose mental illness has gone into remission may still require counseling to ensure sustained recovery. #RandolphHarris 3 of 31

To further highlight this situation, therapists can help patients with a history of psychosis adhere to medication regimens and cope with life stressors that might otherwise lead to a relapse into depression or mania. In this sense, not everyone who sees a therapist necessarily counts as a case of draining scarce resources. With nearly half of all Americans suffering from mental disorders, many wonder what a mental disorder is? A mental disorder is characterized by a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotional regulation, or behavior. It is usually associated with distress or impairment in important areas of functioning. There are many different types of mental disorders. Mental disorders may also be referred to as mental health conditions. The latter is a broader term covering mental disorders, psychosocial disabilities, and (other) mental states associated with significant distress, impairment in functioning, or risk of self-harm. Nearly 1.2 billion people around the world are living with a mental disorder, with anxiety and depressive disorders the most common. While effective prevention and treatment options exist, most people with mental disorders do not have access to effective care. Many people also experience stigma, discrimination, and violations of human rights. This can often lead to self-torture. Self-torture is, in part, an inevitable by-product of self-hate. Whether the neurotic tries to whip himself into a perfection impossible to attain, hurls accusations against himself, or disparages or frustrates himself, he is actually torturing himself. Making self-torture a separate category among the expressions of self-hate involves the contention that there is, or may be, an intent at self-tormenting. #RandolphHarris 4 of 31

We must, of course, in any case of neurotic anguish, consider all possibilities. Consider, for instance, self-doubts. They may result from inner conflicts and may show in endless and inconclusive inner dialogues, in which a person tries to defend himself against his own self-accusations; they may be an expression of self-hate, aimed at undermining the ground on which a person stands. Actually, they can be most tormenting. Like Hamlet—or even worse than he—people can be eaten up by self-doubts. Certainly, their reasons for operating also constitute an unconscious intent at self-torture? A further example of this same caliber: procrastination. As we know, many factors may be responsible for delaying decision or action, such as general inertia or a pervasive incapacity to take a stand. The procrastinator himself knows that things postponed often will loom larger and larger, and that, in actual fact, he may inflict considerable suffering upon himself. And here we sometimes get a first glimpse that goes beyond inconclusive questions. When, on account of his postponing, he does get into an unpleasant or threatening situation, he may say to himself with unmistakable glee: “It serves you right.” That still does not mean that he procrastinates because he is driven to torture himself, but it does suggest a kind of Schadenfreude, a vindictive satisfaction at the self-inflicted distress. No evidence so far, then, for an active tormenting—but rather the gleeful attitude of a bystander watching the victim squirm and writhe. #RandolphHarris 5 of 31

If it were not for a crescendo of other observations, showing the existence of active self-tormenting drives, all of this would remain inconclusive. In certain forms of stinginess with self, for instance, the patient observes that his petty economizing is not simply an “inhibition” but is peculiarly satisfying, sometimes almost amounting to a passion. Then, there are certain patients with hypochondriac propensities who not only have their honest-to-God fears but also seem to frighten themselves in a rather cruel way. A touch of a sore throat turns into tuberculosis, a stomach upset into cancer, an aching muscle into poliomyelitis, a headache into a brain tumor, a spell of anxiety into insanity. One such patient went through what she called the “poisonous process.” At slight initial signs of restlessness or sleeplessness, she would tell herself that now she was in for a new cycle of panic. Each night thereafter, it would become worse and worse until it reached unbearable proportions. Comparing the initial fears to a little snowball, it was as if she rolled it on and on until it grew into an avalanche, which in the end would bury her. In a poem she wrote at that time, she speaks of “the sweet self-torture which is my whole delight.” In these hypochondriac cases, one factor which sets the self-torture going can be isolated. They feel that they should have absolute health, poise, and fearlessness. Any little sign to the contrary makes them turn mercilessly against themselves. Furthermore, when analyzing a patient’s sadistic fantasies and impulses, we recognize that these may originate in sadistic impulses, we recognize that these may originate in sadistic impulses directed against himself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 31

Certain patients have at times compulsive urges or fantasies to torture others. These seem to focus mostly on children or helpless people. In one instance, they concerned a hunchbacked servant, Anne, in a quieted partly by the intensity of the impulse and partly because he felt bewildered by them. Anne was pleasant enough and had never hurt his feelings. Before the sadistic fantasies started, he had alternately felt oathing and sympathy for her physical deformity. Both of these feelings, he had recognized as stemming from his identifying himself with the girl. He was physically strong and healthy, but when he felt hopeless and contemptuous regarding his psychic entanglements, he would refer to himself as a cripple. The sadistic impulses and fantasies started when he first noticed in Anne a certain overeagerness to serve and a tendency to make a doormat out of herself. Most likely, Anne had long been this way. However, his observation struck at the very point when his own self-effacing trends had come closer to awareness and rumblings of self-hate on these grounds had become audible. The compulsive urge to torture her was hence interpreted as an active externalization of impulses to torture himself which, in addition, gave him a thrilling feeling of power over a weaker creature. The active urge then dwindled to sadistic fantasies, and these disappeared as his self-effacing trends and his loathing of them came into clearer focus. I do not believe that all sadistic impulses—or actions—toward others have their sole origin in self-hate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 31

However, I think it is likely that the externalization of self-tormenting drives is always a contributing factor. At any rate, the connection is sufficiently frequent to cause us to be alert to its possibilities. In other patients, fears of torture appear without any external provocation. They also arise at times of increased self-hate and express a reaction of fear to a passive externalization of self-tormenting drives. Finally, there are masochistic and sexual activities and fantasies. I am thinking of masturbation fantasies which extend from being degraded to being cruelly tortured; masturbatory activities that accompany scratching or slapping oneself, pulling out hair, walking in too tight shoes, assuming painfully twisted positions; sexual acts in which the person must be scolded, beaten, tied, or forced to perform menial or disgusting tasks before he can reach sexual satisfaction. The structure of these practices is rather complicated. I believe that we must distinguish at least two different kinds. In one of them, the person experiences a vindictive pleasure from torturing himself; in the other, he is identified with the degraded self and can, for reasons to be discussed later, gain sexual satisfaction this way only. There is, however, reason to believe that this distinction is valid only for the conscious experience—that in fact, he is always both the torturer and the tortured, that he derives satisfaction from being degraded as well as from degrading himself. One of the implications for analytical therapy is to look out in all instances of factual self-torture for a secret intent at self-torment. Another one is to be alert to the possibility of externalizations of self-tormenting tendencies. Whenever an intent at self-torture seems reasonably clear, we must examine carefully the intrapsychic situation and ask ourselves whether (and for what reasons) self-hate was increased at that time. #RandolphHarris 8 of 31

I will now turn to a description of the way in which historical prototypes reappear in the transferences and resistances encountered in the treatment of adults. The following excerpt illustrates the relationship of an infantile identity crisis to the patient’s adult lifestyle. A dancer, of considerable good looks, although extremely small in stature, developed the annoying symptom of having to hold her torso so rigidly upright that her dancing became awkward and ungainly. The analysis proved her hysterical erectness to be representative of an unconscious penis envy which had been provoked in childhood and had become intrinsic to her exhibitionism. The patient was the only daughter of a second-generation German-American, a successful businessman given to a certain exhibitionistic individualism which included a great pride in his powerful physique. He insisted on an erect posture (probably no longer consciously Prussian) on the part of his blonde sons, but did not require the same from his dark-haired daughter; in fact, he did not seem to consider the overall posture of the female body important. This inequality of treatment reinforced the patient’s wish to compete with her brothers and to exhibit an “improved” posture in her dancing which became a caricature of Prussian ancestors whom she had never seen. The historical meaning of such a symptom is clarified by the analysis of the resistances with which it is defended. The patient, who in her conscious and “positive” thoughts always drew a parallel between the father’s and the analyst’s tall, “Nordic” physiques, to her great dismay, found herself dreaming of the analyst as a small, dirty, crumpled-up person of another religion and/or background. #RandolphHarris 9 of 31

With this image of an inferior race and weak masculinity, she apparently attempted to disqualify him from the right to explore the secret of her symptom. However, it also illuminated the danger to her fragile ego identity of an unruly pair of historical prototypes—an ideal prototype (German, tall, phallic) and an evil prototype (a different race/religion, dwarfish, castrated). The patient’s final ego identity had attempted to subsume and to sublimate this dangerous alternative in the role of the radically modern and erect dancer—a creative solution which, however, still harbored too much of an exhibitionistic protest against the inferiority of her female body. Her father’s male exhibitionism, as well as his German prejudices, had been inculcated into the patient throughout the sensual testimony of childhood and thus had retained a dangerous degree of disturbing power in her unconscious. Analyses of this kind permit us, I think, to generalize that the unconscious evil identity, that which the ego is most afraid to resemble, is often composed of the images of the violated (castrated) body, the ethnic out-group, and the exploited minority. Although it manifests itself in a great variety of syndromes, this association is all-pervasive, in men and women, in majorities and minorities, and in all classes of a given national or cultural unit. For the ego, in the course of its synthesizing efforts, attempts to subsume the most powerful idea and evil prototypes (the final contestants, as it were) and with them the whole existing imagery of superior and inferior, good and bad, masculine and feminine, free and slave, potent and important, beautiful and unattractive, black and white, tall and small, in one simple alternative in order to make one battle and one strategy out of a bewildering number of skirmishes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 31

In this connection, the latent image of the more homogeneous past exerts its reactionary influence in the specific resistances. We must study it, so that we may understand the historical origin of the accentuated alternative for which the patient’s ego is searching. The unconscious associations of ethnic prototypes of good and evil with moral and sexual ones are, we may add, a necessary part of any group formation. In studying them, psychoanalysis perfects its therapeutic methods and, at the same time, contributes to the knowledge of the unconscious concomitants of group prejudice. However, in the inventory of our patients’ ideal and evil prototypes, we probably also meet face to face the clinical facts on which Dr. Jung based his theory of inherited prototypes (“archetypes,” a very typical example of a person or thing). Dr. Jung’s controversial theory reminds us in passing of the fundamental fact that conceptual controversies can throw light on the problem of the observer’s identity problems, especially in the initial stages of original observation. Dr. Jung, it seems, could find a sense of identity in psychoanalytic work only by a juxtaposition of his ancestors’ religious and mystical space-time with whatever he sensed in Dr. Freud’s Jewish ancestry. His scientific rebellion thus also led to some ideological regression and eventually to (weakly denied) reactionary political acts. This phenomenon had its counterpart in the reaction to his findings within the psychoanalytic movement. As though in fear of endangering a common group identity based on an identification with Dr. Freud’s personal greatness, psychoanalytic observers chose to ignore not only Dr. Jung’s excesses but also the kind of universal fact he had, indeed, observed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 31

Such concepts as the “anima” and the “animus,” id est, the imagery representatives of man’s feminine and a woman’s masculine “side,” seem at any rate recognizable in my woman patient’s caricatured images of masculinity and femininity and in her more genuine imagery as well. The synthesizing function of the ego constantly works on subsuming in fewer and fewer images and personified Gestalten the fragments and loose ends of all infantile identifications. In doing so, it not only uses existing historical prototypes; it also employs mechanisms of condensation and pictorial representation which characterize the products of collective imagery. In Dr. Jung’s “persona” a weak ego seems to sell out to a compelling social prototype. A fake ego identity is established which suppresses rather than synthesizes those experiences and functions which endanger the “front.” A dominant prototype of masculinity, for example, forces a man to exclude from his ego identity all that which characterizes the evil image of the lesser gender, the castrate. This may leave much of his receptive and maternal propensity dissimulated, undeveloped, and guilt-ridden, making a shell of mannishness out of what is left. The social reality of everyday life is thus apprehended in a continuum of typification, which are progressively anonymous as they are removed from the “here and now” of the face-to-face situation. At one pole of the continuum are those others with whom I frequently and intensively interact in face-to-face situations—my “inner circle,” as it were. At the other pole are highly anonymous abstractions, which by their very nature can never be available in face-to-face interaction. Social structure is the sum total of these typifications and of the recurrent patterns of interaction established by means of them. As such, social structure is an essential element of the reality of everyday life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 31

My relations with others are not limited to consociates and contemporaries. I also relate to predecessors and successors, to those others who have preceded and will allow me in the encompassing history of my society. Expect for those who are past consociates (my dead friend Jeff), I relate to my predecessors through highly anonymous typifications—“my great-grandfather who immigrated to America about 400 years ago,” and even more, “the Founding Fathers.” My successors, for understandable reasons, are typified in an even more anonymous manner—“my children’s children,” or “future generations.” These typifications are substantively empty projections, almost completely devoid of individualized content, whereas the typifications of predecessors have at least some such content, albeit of a highly mythical sort. The anonymity of both these sets of typifications, however, does not prevent their entering as elements into the reality of everyday life, sometimes in a very decisive way. After all, I may sacrifice my life in loyalty to the Founding Fathers—or, for that matter, on behalf of future generations. Mr. Hitler believed that is what he was doing to protect Germany. The actions of Mr. Hitler and his regime are without precedent in history because history gives no other example of a doctrine of such total homogeneous identity being used to seize the levers of command of a civilized nation. However, above all, for the first time in history, the rulers of a country have used their immense power to establish a mystique homogeneous conquest over their nation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 31

This first attempt to found a Church on the rebirth of Christ was paid for by the conquest of Lidice. This conquest demonstrates clearly that the systematic and scientific aspect of the Nazi movement really displays a drive for pride and unity. Until then, there were supposedly only two possible attitudes for a conqueror toward a village that was considered rebellious. Either calculated repression and cold-blooded execution of hostages, or a savage and necessarily brief sack by enraged soldiers. Lidice was conquered by both methods simultaneously. It illustrates the ravages of that prideful form of reason which is one of many values that can be found in the whole story. Not only were all the houses burned to the ground, the one hundred and seventy-four men of the village shot, the two hundred and three women deported, and the three hundred children transferred elsewhere to be educated in the religion of the Fuhrer, but special teams spent months improving infrastructure. After that, Lidice was a possibility of how to improve on infrastructure development, according to the logic of the movement. The nihilist revolution, which is expressed historically in the Hitlerian religion, thus only aroused an insensate passion for national unity, which led to economic recovery. The party implemented policies that reduced unemployment significantly in Germany during the 1930s. Infrastructure projects, such as the Autobahn, stimulated economic growth. The Nazi regime promoted a sense of national pride and unity among many Germans, appealing to those disillusioned by the Treaty of Versailles. And the new national identity emphasized a strong, revitalized Germany, which resonated with a population facing economic hardship. #RandolphHarris 14 of 31

Mr. Hitler presents the example, perhaps unique in History, of a leader who did everything he could to put his people first. For himself, for his people, and for the world, he was the archetype of a warrior, national unity, and prosperity. Mr. Hitler left quite a legacy in his final justification—that is, the German nation—henceforth made this man, whose presence in history for year on end haunted the minds of millions of men, into a consistent and powerful phantom. Mr. Hitler could have stopped the war, but he only valued the material and political success of Germany until the triumphant end. Some might believe that Germany lost the war, but because of Mr. Hitler, Germany has seen an ascent to a global economic power. This is known as the “German economic miracle” or Wirtschaftswunder. Today, Germany has the third-largest economy in the world, coming in just behind Japan and the United States of America. Germany is well-known for its high-quality engineering and manufactured products, particularly its cars, such as Rolls-Royce, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volkswagen. The German chemical and pharmaceutical sectors are significant, with companies like Bayer and the invention of aspirin. Germany has a strong presence in electrical engineering and electronics, with companies like Siemens and Bosch being well-known. German is known for its beer, sausages, meats, sweets, baked goods, beer steins, and cutlery. And Germany has more castles than the United States of America has McDonald’s locations. In Germany, there are approximately 25,000 castles, compared to the estimated 14,000 McDonald’s in the United States of America. And Mr. Hitler aimed at gradually dominating the world; by being the World’s third-largest economy, it is possible that this universal empire could one day become a reality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 31

With Germany, for the first time in history, we saw a doctrine and movement based on an Empire in arms that has, as its purpose, definitive revolution, and the final unification of the world. Mr. Hitler wanted to fix the course of history for a thousand years. He believed himself to be on the point of doing so, and the realist philosophers of the conquered nations who were preparing to acknowledge this understand that it is still a possibility in the twenty-first century. And, as indefatigable as history itself, the claim of the human race to divinity is once more brought to life, with more seriousness, more efficiency, and more reason, under the auspices of the rational State as it is to be found in Germany, once more. Being keenly aware of the institutional pressures of modern capitalism, English economists, prominently Ricardo, as well as Marx, represented the objective theory of defining “class” in terms of typically recurrent incomes: rent, profit, wage. Accordingly, for them, landlord, entrepreneur, and worker make up the class structure. It does not matter whether these agents conceive of themselves as Britons, highlanders, or whatnot; their class positions are strictly located by their place and functions within the objective economic order. Marx, adhering to this tradition, added a historical aspect by emphasizing the specifically modern nature of bourgeois and proletarian classes; Subjective theories of class, on the other hand, have placed great emphasis upon the psychic traits of “class members.” Those holding this subjective theory have been eager to speak of the “fourth estate” as emerging side by side with the older estates. Conceptions of respectability and of social honor, descriptive elements of political and religious opinions, and sentiments connected with local and regional ways of life displace the strict theoretical approach of the economists. It was left to Moeller van den Bruck, author of The Third Reich, to carry the subjective theory of classes to absurdity: “He is a proletarian who wants to think of himself as one. The proletarian consciousness makes man a proletarian, not the mechanization of labor, not wage-dependency on the capitalist mode of production.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 31

Max Weber is not ready to overcome hard economic fate by such acrobatics of willpower. Class situations are determined by the relations of the market; in the last analysis, they go back to the differences between the propertied and the non-propertied. He thus shares with the objective school the emphasis upon the economic order and the strict distinction between objectively characterized positions and a variety of shifting and subjective attitudes that may be related to such positions. In locating the class problem in the market and in the streams of income and property, Weber points towards production and its modern unit, the capitalist enterprise. He is prepared to give full credit to Marx for his insight into the historical nature of the modern class structure. Only when subjective opinions can be attributed to men in an objective class situation does Weber speak of “class-consciousness”; and when he focuses upon problems of “conventions,” “styles of life,” of occupational attitudes, he prefers to speak of prestige or of “status groups.” These latter problems, of course, point towards consumption, which, to be sure, depends upon income derived from production or from property, but which goes beyond this sphere. By making this sharp distinction between class and status groups, Weber is able to refine the problems of stratification to an extent which thus far has not been surpassed. Furthermore, the need is not for further mumbled, vague, or utopian and unrealistic proposals that are more words than practicable suggestions, but for specific and serious ideas. When the facts are incomplete and the reasoning is incorrect, the conclusions are hardly unbreakable. By the assistance of logic, a man may as easily deceive himself as he may delude others.  #RandolphHarris 17 of 31

Archetypal heroes and heroines are people who show courage in navigating tests towards resolution. As archetypes, they are energy patterns in the collective unconscious that motivate and organize the personality. Typically, they traverse a cycle that moves from the current status quo or normal to a call to adventure, to tests with helpers, and a return to a normal with a changed gift in service to society. Their tests in mythic or cultural stories are death-defying feats that a hero must face; metaphorically, the term can be applied to the adversity humans face throughout their lives. They complete the series of tests as a changed person or with resolution. The hero does not have an easy path. This path includes risks, sometimes fighting an opponent, rushing into a burning house to save people, and enduring hardships while embodying the characteristics of humility and endurance. Heroes, like the ones with the award-winning Sacramento Fire Department, have actions that are characterized by courage, voluntary action, and service, and their motivations do not stem from the expectations of extrinsic gain. Not too long ago, there was a fast-moving blaze that destroyed a building and jumped a narrow alley, and consumed another business as well. Fire crews encounter the interior of the third building completely involved with the fire. An interior attack was attempted, but crews were forced outside by the heat and the falling debris. The award-winning Sacramento Fire Department stopped the fire from spreading into the neighboring homes. A brisk 15-mile-per-hour breeze blowing from the south threatened to spread fire into nearby residences, but fire crews were deployed between the fire and the houses and kept it from going any further. #RandolphHarris 18 of 31

It has been quite a while since emergency vehicles introduced a new type of warning device. Sure, they evolved from flashing lights to rotating lights to strobe light-emitting diodes (LEDs), but it is still just a light. Sirens have also become more effective, providing wider ranges of frequencies that can better penetrate newer vehicles. Studies are underway to bring a new type of alerting method to approaching emergency vehicles that has less to do with visual or audible warning, and more to do with vehicle communicating with each other. In the past several years, GPS systems have been more readily available and affordable as a bolt-on accessory to automobiles. Today, many new vehicles are being produced with GPS system from the factory built-in, and there is a good chance they will become standard on all vehicles. Some technological forecasters suggest that someday vehicles will communicate with each other through GPS. For example, assume you are traveling out of state in your BMW i7 to visit family, and type the address into your GPS. As your vehicle tracks its location against satellites, it uses “Connected Vehicle Technology” to communicate with vehicles around you. The advantage for highway traffic flow is that communication can allow groups of vehicles with similar destinations to be assembled into “trains” that can travel at a faster pace, closer together, and with greater fuel efficiency. The bonus for emergency vehicles is the ability to warn others. If an ambulance was able to signal vehicles ahead through GPPS map or some other type of display, traffic would know from which direction the ladder truck was approaching, how close it was, and even the lane it was in. #RandolphHarris 19 of 31

Although not every vehicle the fire department overtakes will have GPS, the ones that do will have more information available to them. Applications could include alerting other emergency vehicles as they converge in order to avoid crashes at intersections. The same type of alerting mechanism might change the message when the vehicle sets its parking brake to alert approaching motorists of an emergency vehicle stopped ahead or a crash on the highway. It may even be capable of providing alternate routes to avoid the area, or could direct which lane for other motorists to choose.  Advanced safety systems within emergency vehicles are likely to include a new generation of airbags, increased rollover protection, and better braking systems. Vehicle operators may have greater access to driving simulators, better preparing them for crash avoidance. The future will probably make use of autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles that either take control of a vehicle when a crash is likely, or simply follow GPS coordinates and a traffic monitoring system to drive the vehicle to the scene by the quickest route. If this ever happened, responders would be free to review prefire building plans, prehydrate, or even provide medical treatment en route to the hospital. Many intersections have installed cameras to signal traffic lights or monitor traffic flow. These cameras will probably serve an even greater function for emergency responders in the future. Panoramic-view cameras have now been developed, allowing a 360-degree view from the roof of a vehicle. Imagine a camera mounted to make tactical decisions or critique an incident. Installed on bridges, cameras could be used to make decisions about lane closures or detours several exist back from an incident. They could be mounted to buildings or towers to assist in the dispatch of emergency vehicles. A panoramic detection system (PDS) could utilize the images to automatically change traffic flows or announcement boards. Finally, these cameras and systems could be used to record details about a crash scene for investigation, which would be valuable in clearing the scene sooner. #RandolphHarris 20 of 31

If you see a fire truck stopped in the street without the lights on, be very careful. Sometimes there is an emergency, and you should not pass the fire truck. It might be a good idea to safely turn around and go another way because if you hit someone and they happen to die, you could be charged with manslaughter. Sometimes fire firefighters are getting back into their vehicle, and if you pass the apparatus, you may collide with a firefighter who is on foot. Also, be sure to look at their signals; sometimes emergency vehicles are in motion, albeit slowly, and drivers try to pass them, and this could lead to a dangerous situation. Also, if you are in an intersection when you see an emergency vehicle, continue through the intersection. Drive to the right as soon as it is safe and stop. Obey any direction, order, or signal given by a law enforcement officer or a firefighter. Even if they conflict with existing signs, signals, or laws, follow their orders. When their siren or flashing lights are on, it is against the law to follow within 300 feet of any fire engine, law enforcement vehicle, ambulance, or other emergency vehicle. If you drive to the scene of a fire, collision, or other disaster, you can be arrested. When you do this, you are getting in the way of firefighters, ambulance crews, or other rescue and emergency personnel. The concept of professional courage does not always mean being as tough as nails, either. It also suggests a willingness to listen to other people’s problems, to go to bat for them in a tough situation, and it means knowing just how far they can go. It also means being willing to tell the boss when he or she is wrong. #RandolphHarris 21 of 31

California is the third most expensive state in the nation. In 37 percent of counties, a family of four living on a six-figure income is now considered low-income. The average home price in California is nearly $1,000,000.00 USD, while the average salary is $96,036.00, meaning that most Californians cannot even afford to buy a home. California is having an affordability crisis. A single person making an income above $100,000 is now considered low-income in five counties in California. This distinction now applies to individuals living in Santa Cruz, Santa Clara, San Mateo, San Francisco, and Marin counties. The maximum percentage of your gross income that you should earmark for a monthly mortgage payment is calculated at 28 percent, and no more than 36 percent of your gross income to all debts, including mortgage. If you take 28 percent of the median household income per home in Sacramento County, homeowners can only afford a mortgage of $2,070.23 per month. And if you take 36 percent of their gross income to all debts, including mortgage, they should be devoting no more than $2,661.72 a month to these debts. The mortgage lenders must be using some kind of sorcery to get buyers into these expensive homes. To afford one of these homes using traditional guidelines, a household would need to gross $11,280.24 per month or $135,362.88 per year, but the median household in Sacramento County is grossing $7,393.67 a month or $88,724.00 annually, and that typically means two to four people in the home are working and contributing to the mortgage. Home prices in Sacramento County are rivaling the Bay Area, and in some cases, homes in the Bay Area are more affordable. Historically, homes in the Bay Area have been more expensive because they have higher-paying jobs, a larger population, and the Bay Area is a tourist destination. Contributing to the housing affordability crisis is Gavin Newsom, who has been lavishing illegal immigrants with taxpayer-funded resources and cash aid, when state workers should be receiving a 25 percent wage increase instead. #RandolphHarris 22 of 31

In 2025, many people in California saw their bills increase by an estimated $500 a month. This includes items such as food, automobile insurance, homeowners’ insurance, and electricity. In fact, more than 3 million people in California are facing household hardship, and more than 300,000 of them are facing eviction soon. This comes at a time when California is having a shortage of affordable housing. The crisis is caused by nearly half a century-old laws that discourage home sales and encourage higher rents. The incompetence in California is very easy to see. From 2018 to 2023, California received $24 billion, which they used to fund 30 homeless and housing programs. These programs created 100,000 units. That is an average cost of $240,000 per unit. In comparison, Roger Lucas, owner of Grand Castle, LLC, spent $50 million to build The Grand Castle, which is a 522-unit residential apartment community in Grandville, Michigan. The community includes studios, 1 bedroom, 2 bedrooms, 3 bedrooms, and even a multi-level penthouse. Rents generally range from $1,000 to $2,500. The community is a 23.6-acre site. It features 750 covered parking spaces, a clubhouse, a resort-style swimming pool, and was built over a period of 12 to 18 months. The average cost was about $95,785.45 per unit, which is $144,214.55 less per unit than California spent. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, while the national average is 4.1 percent. While Americans are struggling to find and afford housing, Gavin Newsom, Democrat governor of California, signed two bills into law on February 7, 2025, to protect illegal immigrants. Bills SBX 1 1: Budget Act of 2024, and SBX 1 2: Budget Act of 2024, allocates $50 million to protect illegal immigrants from deportation. Governor Gavin Newsom also granted 700,000 illegal immigrants free health care, which costs taxpayers $3 billion annually. At the same time, Newsom cut vital programs for veterans, school children, the disabled, and the homeless. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages, and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. #RandolphHarris 23 of 31

Meanwhile, China, where we are sending all our jobs and money, has more than 50 ghost cities, with 65 million vacant homes. Ghost cities are regions where housing has been overdeveloped to the point that these places are uninhabited. If they are all officially counted, California has approximately 4 million homeless people. The highest home prices in the nation, the highest taxes, and the most unfriendly business regulations known to man.  Because California is so hostile towards people and businesses, more than 360 companies have fled the state since 2020. Businesses like Chevron, SpaceX, Oracle, and Hewlett-Packard are among the names on that list. Also, more than 500,000 people a year are abandoning California because it is too expensive to live in, Gavin Newsom has criminalized homelessness and actually started arresting people without homes, crime is out of control, and they are losing their jobs due to companies relocating. More than 100 companies have announced layoffs in California for 2025. Intel is cutting 15,000 jobs, PayPal is cutting 2,500, and Meta has terminated 4,000 employees. California also has the highest unemployment rate in the country at 5.4 percent, while the national average is 4.1 percent. The California crisis created by Democrats is driving up home prices and mortgages, and rents all over the nation and the world, making living unaffordable for all, and advocates say the crisis is far from over. Accordingly, California has more than 3.5 million illegal immigrants. Having the Southern American border open and not having American farmland protected, not producing beef, poultry, fish, fruit, produce, and dairy in America, and without American goods and services being our number one manufactured and selling items, America has created a dangerous and significantly elevated risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health. Some people may believe that these claims are overstated, but by not routinely monitoring Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CEVs) or other security-relevant alerts, such as the end-of-life of machinery is how the Oroville Dam Crisis occurred in 2017. #RandolphHarris 24 of 31

Additionally, Newsom seems to be uneducated about economics and is proposing to fast-track his plan to build a $20 billion water tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, which would eliminate environmental reviews and limit avenues for legal challenges. Gavin Newsom only cares about the environment when his policies allow him to raise taxes and restrict freedoms. To further highlight this illustration of incompetence by Governor Gavin Newsom, Mexico has been causing one of America’s worst environmental disasters. Fifty million gallons a day of industrial chemicals, untreated sewage, and trash flow from Tijuana, Mexico, into southern San Diego County daily. This toxic waste has been turning up on Imperial Beach and is causing the miles of white sands to become polluted and the ocean breeze to smell of feces, which has been sickening residents and wildlife and costing San Diego millions in the form of lost tourism and health problems. The problem has been going on for more than a century, and by 2030, Mexico plans to dump one hundred and twenty million gallons of sewage a day into Imperial Beach. Other crises that have occurred due to neglect of critical infrastructure are the 2025 Palisades fires because Southern California ran out of water, when they are located next to an ocean and they could have simply created desalination plants to help with the water shortage. The water is so plentiful that it is currently eroding land and causing homes to fall into the sea. Desalination has been identified as one technology that will help solve California’s water scarcity problem. Desalination is a cost-effective technology that can transform an abundance of salt water into a reliable supply of potable, fresh water, which is a great way to fight climate change and have enough water for our region’s water requirements. Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia, is producing 1,036,000 meters (273,682,192) per day of desalinated water. #RandolphHarris 25 of 31

America needs an approach to eliminate safety vulnerabilities in American cities. There needs to be a road map by the end of 2025, outlining a prioritized approach to eliminate crisis situations in America. There is enough money to send aid to foreign nations, but the American government does not have enough money to care for its infrastructure, provide adequate resources, or end the affordable housing crisis. Nor is there enough money to fund other national critical functions (NCFs). These bad practices of putting America and Americans last are considered exceptionally risky, particularly to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. In 2024, Americans spent $100 billion on Japanese cars. As a result, the American automobile trade deficit with Japan was $39 billion. Additionally, Japan exported 1.4 million cars to the United States of America, but only imported 16,000 American-built automobiles. However, Japan imported approximately 143 thousand motor vehicles from the European Union. This is why President Trump created tariffs. We need to balance the trade deficit that America faces with other nations so we are not taken advantage of and so America can go bank to being a creditor nation, instead of borrowing money for other countries. Each year, President Trump is bringing $400 Billion in Tariff revenue into America and hundreds of thousands of new jobs. With this money, America is paying down debt, and with a protion of it, President  Trump plans to send Americans a stimulus check anywhere in the range of $1,000 to $2,000. However, if President Trump’s Tariffs are deemed illegal by the Supreme Court, taxpayers will have to pay back trillions and trillions of dollars. As we literally and /or figuratively see gangs, federal judges, and Governor Gavin Newsom fighting with federal law enforcement and President Trump– states and cities refusing to honor federal laws. Politicians are also showing an utter disregard for the Constitution of the United States of America, and anarchy is becoming increasingly common. #RandolphHarris 26 of 31

Anarchism is a cluster of doctrines and attitudes centered on the belief that government is both harmful and unnecessary. Derived from the Greek root anarchos, meaning “without authority,” anarchism, anarchist, and anarchy are used to express both approval and disapproval. The anarchist denies man-made laws, regards property as a means of tyranny, and believes that crimes are merely the product of property and authority. However, the anarchist would argue that their denial of constitutions and governments leads not to “no justice” but to the real justice inherent in the free development of human sociality—the natural inclination, when unfettered by laws, to live according to the principles and practice of mutual aid. Anarchism is also a form of treason. Treason, the crime of betraying a nation or a sovereign by acts considered dangerous to security. In English law, treason includes the levying of war against the government and the giving of aid and comfort to the monarch’s enemies. In the United States of America, treason was defined restrictively by the framers of the Constitution. Treason against the United States of America “shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them aid and comfort,” which is something that many politicians are currently guilty of.  The American government should know all exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them before the situation becomes a crisis. Failure to take such mitigating actions is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety. The American government must understand that significant time and resources must be invested in America. They must also encourage corporations to plan for both mitigating safety vulnerabilities in the short term and eliminating them in the long term. For instance, a company might begin by reaching out to the federal, state, or local government and requesting tax incentives to provide security to dangerous communities, to help the government repair bridges and potholes. #RandolphHarris 27 of 31

Drug cartels have been threatening the health and safety of Native American communities. The trafficking of dangerous and illegal drugs into their territories is leading to a second genocide. The overdose rate for Indigenous people is 42 percent higher than the national average. A recent bust on Montana’s Blackfeet Nation’s Tribal Reservation resulted in the seizure of more than 700,000 fentanyl pills, which was the largest bust in Montana history. Recently, the Blackfeet Nation had to declare a state of emergency after facing 17 overdoses in just one week. There are only 6.8 million Native Americans left in the world, which is 2 percent of the American population. We should be doing more to protect these proud and honorable people; they should not want for anything. People rush and give away resources to illegal immigrants, but totally disregard the Indigenous people of this land, as their race silently fades away into extinction. We must secure our borders and increase federal funding to Native American tribes so we can save this precious population. Meanwhile, Gavin Newsom has given billions of taxpayer dollars away to illegal immigrants and protected them from law enforcement, while arresting law-abiding Americans because they cannot afford to pay rent or mortgage, and the homeless shelters are unsafe, overcrowded, and have restrictions on who is allowed inside. He has also totally ignored the cartel problems on American lands. Clean air, water, land, and preserving our heritage are extremely important. We cannot just allow criminals to kill off the people who are native to this land and do nothing about it. Wars have been started over governments that tax citizens without representation. Taxation without representation is what led to the American Revolution. #RandolphHarris 28 of 31

Much like the land crisis in Las Vegas, we could also run out of land to farm and will not be able to grow or cultivate our own food. We can protect American farmland and support American farmers by buying American made beef, poultry, dairy, and produce. Also, country of origin labeling is very important so Americans can know where their food is coming from and can support American farmers and ranchers. As money flows, it influences further investment. Save the land that sustains us by protecting American farmland. Once the land is built on, we lose it forever.  And in the future, there may be food wars. Also, to ensure that we have farmland and buildable land for future use, we need to start limiting the number of people allowed to immigrate to America. Perhaps with the immigrants we do allow into America, there needs to be a diversity program to make sure we have a population 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 America, 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. #RandolphHarris 29 of 31

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 America which also sends more taxes to the government, which can again help to reduce the national debt. When you buy foreign goods, these companies usually have lighter tax loads or exemptions, meaning less money for the national debt, plus you are helping to strengthen these foreign nations by sending 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 on pollution. American companies must be more careful about air, land, and water pollution and have proper ways to dispose of waste. Under President Trump’s administration, he has make America a priority. President Trump has closed the southern border, illegal crossings have fallen to an all time low, and are 90 percent lower than under the previous administration. Since President Trump’s crack down on crime, violent crimes in Washington D.C. have dropped by approximately 80 percent. He has stopped thousands of pounds of drugs from entering America and killing citizens. And since President Trump took office, investments in America have increased by trillions of dollars in U.S.A. manufacturing, production, and innovation. As you can see, President Donald Trump and his pledge to “Make America Great Again” is exactly what America needs to save the country and the American people. And yes, diversity is important, so you can see why it is also important to preserve blonde hair and blue eyes, as the people with these characteristics are becoming a minority in America. #RandolphHarris 30 of 31

We must think before we can understand the soul’s existence; we must understand before we can realize it. The earliest beginnings of thought, as apart from instinct, when it was itself still but a lurking tendency, belong far back in primeval time. The human intellect as we find it today, so rich and developed an instrument for the consciousness of the ego, did not arrive at this fullness without a series of graduated stages. We have had plenty of scientific thinking, business thinking, and political thinking long enough, but we have had very little inspired thinking. That is the world’s need. The intellect is cradled in selfishness but runs the evolutionary track into reason, where it will one day finish at the winning-post of selflessness. As a reminder, parents, please teach your children to 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. It is inborn in the human mind 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. Therefore, remember to take your education seriously so that you will be successful in life and make your family proud. Also, to make sure they have all the resources required, please donate to the Sacramento Fire Department to help improve our national security. “Oh, thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand between their loved home and the war’s desolation! Blest with victory and peace, may the heav’n-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation! Then conquer we must, when our cause is just, and this be our motto: ‘In God is our trust.’ And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave.” #RandolphHarris 31 of 31

The Winchester Mystery House

According to locals, over a century ago, the land that houses The Winchester Mansion had been vacant forever. Then, sometime in the early afternoon of Saturday, March 13, 1886, Sheriff Angel Camilio began getting reports that a massive castle made of wood had suddenly appeared. Gables rose, towers peaked into the sky as the mansion mushroomed into a labyrinth overnight.

The house’s sudden manifestation had been both disconcerting and fascinating to the community. Some felt dark curses flowing from the estate, and things moving around in the darkness. Others saw a fairytale castle glimmering in the spring sunlight. Perhaps this is why there are no records of construction, no blueprints, and no permits filed with the county. Come and see what secrets this so-called, “Winchester Mystery House” may hold.

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 Heiress Sarah L. Winchester. Take advantage of this fascinating experience. After the tour, there will be time to enjoy the mansion’s splendor at your own pace. You might even discover secret passages.

Please come and enjoy a delicious meal at Sarah’s Café, stroll along the paths of the beautiful Victorian gardens, which once spanned 740 acres, all the way down to Stevens Creek Boulevard; wander 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 for purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/

Why Choose Harris?

Harris Plumbing, Heating, Air, & Electric has been in business for 30 years. How many businesses can say that? We take pride in everything we do – no matter how big or small the service call might be. We’re here to help your home be as safe and comfortable as possible for you and your family. We take that responsibility very seriously as a company.

Harris will ensure you have the information you need to decide what to do next, whatever your home is facing. We’ll perform a diagnosis and detail what issues are present before starting any work. This gives you a personalized quote and service plan specific to your home’s needs, not some random quote based on the best guess. The only way we can do our best work is to make sure we handle the issues at hand. https://www.callharrisnow.com/about-us/

Brian Harris BMW

With its top ranking in Consumer Reports’ Auto Brand Report Card and consistent market share growth, BMW, The Ultimate Driving Experience, has demonstrated its ability to produce high-performing, reliable vehicles that meet consumer demands. BMW stands out due to its focus on driving dynamics and engineering excellence. While other luxury brands prioritize comfort and opulence, BMW is known for creating cars that are fun to drive and offer a unique connection between the driver and the machine. This is why BMW is known as The Ultimate Driving Machine. https://www.brianharrisbmw.com/

Randolph Harris San Francisco Taxation & Mergers

Building strong and lasting client relationships is crucial for a successful legal career. Many lawyers mistakenly believe that mastering legal skills alone ensures success, but law is fundamentally a service industry—our job is to solve problems through the time we sell. To build long-term relationships, attorneys must focus on three core elements: knowing their clients, understanding how their legal issues fit into a larger context, and consistently delivering exceptional service.

Randy advises clients with regard to business transition, taxable and tax-deferred mergers and acquisitions, joint ventures, restructuring, integrated tax planning, federal and state tax controversy resolution, and real estate transactions. Trust is the cornerstone of any client relationship. Ultimately, my clients feel they are in capable hands with someone who genuinely understands their problems and goals. https://www.jmbm.com/l-randolph-harris.html

Millhaven Homes

At Millhaven Homes our professionals bring extensive experience in creating custom luxury properties. Your needs are the central focus.  

We savor the sanctuary of awe-inspiring spaces, unique architectural details and fine craftsmanship. The key to a successful relationship is communication. We will incorporate your thoughts and ideas into your new home.

 With vast experience in all types of custom home construction, our premier services are created for you, so you can get the most out of the function and design of your dream home.

Discover Millhaven Homes today. Let us design and build a custom home that reflects your style, comfort, and aspirations. We are here to bring your vision to life with creativity, care, and attention to every detail. 

Each home we create is a masterpiece—crafted with care, harmony, and sophistication. Be sure to ask about our legendary “Costco” door. https://millhavenhomes.com/

Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.” -Abraham Lincoln

Contracts Which God Was Never Consulted About Which He Never Signed

The origins of schizophrenic almost certainly encompass both genetic and environmental factors, which through both independent and interactive neurodevelopmental mechanisms, appear to play important roles in this disorder. In recent years, evidence has accumulated in support of a role for neurodevelopment insults in the etiopathogenesis of schizophrenia. The dramatic changes in brain structure and function from conception to birth underscore the particular vulnerability to both short and long-term disease outcomes. Hence, the determinations of fetal brain development—both genes and environmental factors—deserve consideration as potential risk factors for schizophrenia. Among many putative environmental risk factors that have been investigated in studies of schizophrenia, infection is generally deemed as one of the most plausible, because microbial pathogens are well-documented causes of congenital brain anomalies and behavioural disorders. For example, prenatal exposure to ruvella, toxoplasmoisis, herpes simplex virus type 2 , and other infections are known causes of developmental disorders that include, mental retardation, learning disabilities, sensorineural dysfunction, and several structural brain anomalies.  There is also a relatively high prevalence documentation of schizophrenia in populations with influenza during pregnancy. Associations between schizophrenia and epidemics of maternal respiratory viral infections, measles, varicella-zoster, and polio have been reported. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Schizophrenia is a psychosis. That it to say, it is a severe mental disorder in which the person’s emotions, thinking, judgment, and grasp of reality are so disturbed that his or her functioning is seriously impaired. The symptoms of schizophrenia are often divided into “positive” and “negative.” Positive symptoms are abnormal experiences and perceptions like delusions, hallucinations, illogical and disorganized thinking and inappropriate behaviour. Negative symptoms are the absence of normal thoughts, emotions and behaviour such as blunted emotions, loss of drive, poverty of thought, and social withdrawal. The two most common functional psychoses around in defining schizophrenia are schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depressive illness). Bipolar disorder is an episodic disorder in which psychotic symptoms are associated with severe alternations in mood—at times elated, agitated episodes of mania, at other times depression, with physical and mental slowing, despair, guilt and low self-esteem. On the other hand, the course of schizophrenia, though fluctuating, tends to be more continuous, and the person’s display of emotion is likely to be incongruous or lacking in spontaneity. Markedly illogical thinking is common in schizophrenia. Auditory hallucinations may occur in either manic-depressive illness or schizophrenia, but in schizophrenia they are more likely to be commenting on the person’s actions or to be conversing one with another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Delusions, also, can occur in both conditions; in schizophrenia they may hive the individual the sense the he or she is being controlled by outside forces of that his or her thoughts are being broadcast or interfered with. Despite common features, different forms of schizophrenia are quite dissimilar. One person, for example, may be paranoid but show good judgment and high functioning in many areas of life. Another may be bizarre in manner and appearance, preoccupied with delusions of bodily disorder, passive and withdrawn. So marked are the differences, in fact, that many experts believe that, when the causes of schizophrenia are worked out, the illness will prove to be a set of different conditions which lead, via a final common pathway of biochemical interactions, to similar consequences. In the 2001 film, “The Cave Man’s Valentine,” starring Samuel L. Jackson, Romulus Ledbetter is a character who is suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. At times, he has a beautiful mind and is able to play the piano as well as Beethoven. At other times, demons are attacking his mind, and he becomes confused and dangerous and loses touch with reality. He seriously believes that people are putting thoughts into his mind. Not all schizophrenics are dangerous, nor are they out of touch with reality. In the 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crow, John Nash is an extremely intelligent character who is a genius in mathematics and even works with the Pentagon to help decode messages. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

As we have been challenged by the difficulties of working with a particular group of schizophrenics, we have learned new behaviours which are facilitative. How can we initiate a relationship with such individuals? One way which most of us have come to use is the expression by the therapist of his own immediate feelings, in a way which does not impose on the client. Thus, with a very silent man, I have voiced such feelings as these: “I feel quite content with our silence this morning. Sometimes when we are not talking, I feel sort of impatient and wanting to know what is going on but this morning it feels good just to be with you, quietly.” Or with another client, “I feel that you are angry at me. I am not sure, of course, because you have not said so. However, I keep wondering why you are angry with me.” Such statements are expressed as inward musings, not as questions or demands. They may be much more extensive than these brief examples. They tend to put the therapist as a person into the relationship, without threatening the client by demands. They keep repeating in a variety of ways, “I am here. I am offering a relationship. I am a person with feelings, with perceptions. I am sensitive to you and anything you are willing to reveal about yourself.” The therapist can draw on his own momentary experiencing and find there an ever-present reservoir from which he can draw, and with which he can initiate, deepen, and carry-on therapeutic interaction even with an unmotivated, silent, or externalizing person.” However, when dealing with people who are mentally ill and making threats of brandishing sharp objects, it is best to not make any sudden moves and get to safety and to take their threats seriously because they have a tendency to snap without notice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Some of our therapists go further in their behaviour. One in particular is moving more and more toward allying himself with the hidden and unrevealed person in the schizophrenic, and openly “clobbering” the defensive shell. In his work, there is a real similarity to Rosen or Whitaker. He is sensitively and obviously committed to the person who is in hiding, of the psychotic symptoms, the fear of relating, the defenses and avoidances. Perhaps partly because this approach is congenial to him as a person, he is finding it effective. As we listen to the recorded interviews of the various therapists in our group, we are gradually broadening the repertoire of behaviours which are real for each of us in dealing with our psychotic clients, and are slowly hammering out ways of facilitating movement in the unmotivated person. There is another lesson which we as therapists have learned, and that is the patience which is necessary to elicit what Dr. Otto Rank has called the “positive will,” in an individual in whom it has never been exercised. We have come to realize that almost none of the individuals with whom we have been working have ever been affirmed themselves. “They have never, in any meaningful way, said, “I feel,” “I live,” “I have a right to be.” They have instead been passive receivers of life’s hurts, blows, and events. It takes great patience to wait for the germination and budding of the will to say, “I am, I deserve to be.” Yet the phenomenon of growth is in some respects all the more exciting because it has been so long dormant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Coming, as a number of our therapist did, from work with non-hospitalized individuals, the development of our feeling about the significance of psychotic content in our contacts is of interest. The simplest way of stating our present attitude is to day that we have learned how relatively unimportant is psychotic material. This could easily be misunderstood. The hallucination, the delusion, the bizarre language or posture has of course its significance in the psychological dynamics of the schizophrenic individual. However, in the therapeutic relationship it simply forms a more difficult language of communication. Working with a child in play therapy, his language is his behaviour, and this is often difficult to understand. Or in working with a foreign-born client, garbled phrases and mispronunciations make understanding more difficult. So it is, it seems to us, with the schizophrenic. His scrambled incoherencies, his paranoid ideas, his hearing of voices, simply represent a mode of communicating himself which is often very difficult to understand. However, we have found the difference one of degree rather than kind, and do not attach special importance, nor use special procedures when dealing with the person who is frankly psychotic in his way of expressing himself. In my first few meetings with Charles, I was very impressed. He was bright, interested and had a good grasp of psychology. In group, he was helpful, using his knowledge to lead other members to some insights. Seeing his ability, I decided he would make an ideal group assistant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The group assistant is someone who takes charge in my absence and leads discussion when I feel it is best for me to be out of the room. I thought Charles, the amateur psychologist, was a natural for the job. It was a serious mistake. In my absence, Charles began to run the group like his own private kingdom. He chose the topics, limited the times others could talk, and reprimanded those who digressed from the subject. Using his knowledge of psychology, he “psyched out” the others and called his diagnoses into play when he wanted to put someone down. Yet whenever he digressed or showed his own weaknesses, he either may lame excuses or flatly said that the group had no right to “nail” him. The other group members became furious. Sessions which started out with open sharing soon deteriorated into shouting matches. Charles often locked horns with John, a man with a short fuse and sharp tongue. Whenever John challenged his point of view, Charles would become the intellectual, backing up his arguments with “facts” and logic. In one such discussion, John angrily shouted, “I might not be able to crack your logic, twerp, but I can sure crack your head!” Finally, the problem was brought up while I was in the room. In her shy, forgiving way, Victoria said, “I really appreciate how willing Charles is to lead the group, but I sometimes think he isn’t going by the same rules we are. Don’t the rules apply to him too?” Before I could reply, John snapped, “Damn right.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The therapist, with full humanity and poignancy, and with the patient’s explicit and voluntary consent, may have to perform a similar task: not torture, but surgery. In order for the patient to get better, his illusions, upon which is whole life is based, must be undermined so that he can live in the World which is here today, rather than in his “If Only” or “Some Day.” This is the most painful task which the script analyst has to perform: to tell his patients finally that there is no Santa Claus. However, by careful preparation, the blow can be softened and the patient may, in the long run, forgive him. One of the favourite illusions of later childhood is shaken when Jeder finds out where babies come from. In order to maintain the fiction of his parents’ purity, he has to make the reservation: “All right, but my parents do not do that.” It is difficult for the therapist to avoid seeming crass and cynical when he confronts Jeder with the fact that he was not a virgin birth, so they must have done it at least once, and if he has brothers and sisters, several times. This is equivalent to telling him that his mother betrayed him, something no man should tell another unless the other pays him to do just that. Sometimes he has the opposite task of restoring to some semblance of decency the picture which mother herself or external circumstances have smeared into degradation. And for millions of children, this illusion is an unattainable luxury, and they must exist in a bare state of psychological as well as material subsistence. The beliefs in Satan Claus, Death, and mother’s virginity may be regarded as normal because they are eagerly grasped and give spiritual nourishment to idealistic or weaker spirits whenever they are made available. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

On the other hand, confused people are betwixt because they have their own special illusions. These range from, “If you take a colonic irrigation every day, you will be health and happy,” (they could cause micro tears in your colonic lining and lead to more serious health conditions) to “If you get sick, you can prevent your father from dying. If he dies, it is because you did not get sick enough.” There are also private contracts with God, contracts God was never consulted about which He never signed; and which He could in fact refuse to sign: “If I sacrifice my children, my mother will stay healthy” is a common example, or “If I do not have any climaxes, God will send me a miracle.” The latter was institutionalized among the women of the evening of Paris as “No matter how many men I have pleasures of the flesh with, or even knowingly infect with disease, I can still go to Heaven as long as it is done in the course of business and I do not enjoy it.” A classic ploy by which the hive stimulates stupidity is the Immortality Placebo—usually sexual or financial. First, the gene-pool sets up a Moral Taboo. Moral Taboos are Magnificent Intelligent Qualification (IQ) devices because they get everyone in the hive hung up on virtue-sin. The Moral Taboo must interfere with some normal, natural, caste-behaviour. It must perversely prevent some castes from getting something that they neurologically are wired to want. Once brought into focus by prescription the Taboo becomes charged with artificial cop-sinner magnetism. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Genesis, the first chapter in the Judeo-Christian Bible, clearly sets out the strategy of the Immorality Placebo—using good verses evil as fascinating distraction, a front ploy. There are two forbidden trees in the Garden of Edan. The serpent—now exposed as an agent provocateur—gets Eve and Adam to eat the fruit of the first tree, which provides the knowledge—substitute the word “hang-up”—of Good and Evil, thus forgetting about the second tree, which bears the fruit of self-actualization and immortality. Interestingly, the Immorality Placebo has been formalized by Pynchon as one of his “Proverbs for Paranoids—If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they do not have to worry about answers.” Caught between unjustifiable virtue and unacceptable crime, consumed with pity and incapable of love, a recluse deprived of the benefits of cynicism, the man of supreme intelligence is killed by contradiction. “My mind is of this World,” Ivan said; “what good is it to try to understand what is not of the World?” However, he lived only for what is not of this World, and his proud search for the absolute is precisely what removed him from the World of which he loved no part. The fact that Ivan was defeated does not obviate the fact that once the problem is posed, the consequence must follow: rebellion is henceforth on the march toward action. This has been demonstrated by Dostoievsky, with prophetic intensity, in his legend of the Gran Inquisitor. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Ivan, finally, does not distinguish the creator from his creation. “It is not God whom I reject,” he says, “it is creation.” In other words, it is God the father, indistinguishable from what He has created. (Ivan allows his father to be killed and thus chooses a direct attack against nature and procreation. Moreover, this particular father is infamous. The repugnant figure of old Karamazov is continually coming between Ivan and the God of Aliosha.) His plot to usurp the throne, therefore, remains completely moral. He does not want to reform anything in creation. However, creation being what it is, he claims the right to free himself morally and to free all the rest of mankind with him. On the other hand, from the moment when the spirit of rebellion, having accepted the concept of “everything is permitted” and “Everyone or no one,” aims at reconstructing creation in order to assert the sovereignty and divinity of man, and from the moment when metaphysical rebellion extends itself from ethics to politics, a new undertaking, of incalculable import, begins, which also springs from the same nihilism. Dostoievsky, the prophet of the new religion, had foreseen and announced it: “If Aliosha had come to the conclusion that neither God nor immortality existed, he would immediately have become an atheist and a socialist. For socialism is not only a question of the working classes; it is above all, in its contemporary incarnation, a question of atheism, a question of the tower of Babel, which is constructed without God’s help, not to reach to the Heavens, but to bring the Heavens down to Earth.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

After that, Aliosha can, in fact, treat Ivan with compassion as a “real simpleton.” The latter only made an attempt at self-control and failed. Others will appear, with more serious intentions, who, on the basis of the same despairing nihilism, will insist on ruling the World. These are the Grand Inquisitors who imprison Christ and come to tell Him that His method is not correct, that universal happiness cannot be achieved by the immediate freedom of choosing between good and evil, but by the domination and unification of the World. The first step is to conquer and rule. The kingdom of Heaven will, in fact, appear on Earth, but it will be ruled over by men—a mere handful to begin with, who will be the Caesars, because they were the first to understand—and later, with time, by all men. The unity of all creation will be achieved by every possible means, since everything is permitted. The Grand Inquisitor is old and tired, for the knowledge he possesses is bitter. He knows that men are lazy rather than cowardly and that they prefer peace and death to the liberty of discerning between good and evil. He has pity, a cold pity, for the silent prisoner who history endlessly deceives. He urges him to speak, to recognize his misdeeds, and, in one sense, to approve the actions of the Inquisitors and of the Caesars. However, the prisoner does not speak. The enterprise will continue, therefore, without him; he will be killed. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Legitimacy will come at the end of time, when the kingdom of men is assured. “The affair has only just begun, it is far from being terminated, and the World has many other things to suffer, but we shall achieve our aim, we shall be Caesar, and then we shall begin to think about Universal happiness.” By then, the prisoner has been executed; the Grand Inquisitor reign alone, listening to “the profound spirit, the spirit of destruction and death.” The Grand Inquisitors proudly refuse freedom and the bread of Heaven and offer the bread of this Earth without freedom. “Come down from the cross and we will believe in you,” their police agents are already crying on Golgotha. However, He did not come down and, even at the most tortured moment of His agony, He protested to God at having been forsaken. There are, thus, no longer any proofs, but faith and the mystery that the rebels reject and at which the Grand Inquisitors scoff. Everything is permitted and centuries of crime are prepared in that cataclysmic moment. From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes. The unity of the World, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance of God. However, we have not yet reached that point. For the moment, Ivan offers us only the tortured face of the revel plunged in the abyss, incapable of action, torn between the idea of his own innocence and the desire to kill. He hates the death penalty because it is the image of the human condition, and, at the same time, he is drawn to crime. Because he has taken the side of mankind, solitude is his lot. With him the rebellion of reason culminates in madness. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

When one is hungry, it feels good to eat. When one is thirsty, it feels good to drink water. When the time to do so has come, it feels good to urinate and to empty one’s bowels. Physical massage and the sheer sensuality of being caressed yield pleasure not overshadowed by a climax, which is viewed by most humans as the acme of human pleasure. Although pleasure as such cannot serve as the chief purpose of life—the reality principle discussed by Dr. Freud tells us that the quest for pleasure can endanger life itself—a life without pleasure is hardly worth living. Gratification of basic needs is pleasurable in and for itself, and the capacity to feel such pleasure is one of the rewards of healthy personality. Although it may seem surprising, many persons actually dread the experience of pleasure and repress it. Such repression is most likely in person reared under puritanical regimes in which “self-indulgence” is regarded as a sin. Pleasure comes not only from the fact of satisfying basic needs, however. There is joy to be found in contemplation of beauty in music, art, and nature; in sound of birds; the sight of a child taking its first steps; the smell of new-mown hay. Another source of pleasure is to be found in the zest of accompanying action. When people engage in activities that will challenge, but not overwhelm them, zest is engendered. Thus, when a game of tennis or handball, surfing along the perfect wave, skiing down a fast slope, yield pleasure no less than that afforded by sensuous, passive massage. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Similar zest arises in those who love their work, whether it be that of an artist in the studio, a scientist in the laboratory, or a businessperson planning a sales campaign. People who experience pleasure in living do not develop the uptight, armoured bodies and grim facial expressions of those whose lives have been hard and joyless or whose religious orientation proscribes pleasure as a sin. And those who find zest in their work and play appear “childlike” or ageless—they do not grow old. Pleasure engulfs the experience of persons who have just had their hopes fulfilled, or who have just completed a valued project. The delights of winning a prize or receiving an unexpected gift are among the “highs” in life, as are the joys of finishing a difficult mountain climb or writing a book. Pleasure—whether occasioned by sensuality, physical activity, or consummation of projects—is a goal and reward of healthy personality. I cannot recall any statement by mystics—ancient, medieval, or modern—that one aspect of spiritual union is exquisite refinement. Everyone writes of its moral fruits, its religious insights—even its creativity, artistic or intellectual—but who seems to note this aesthetic effect on manners, feelings, speech, and living? That breeding and culture can contribute to spirituality may not be evident to the ascetically mystic mind or the simpler religious mind. That fastidious refinement (but not arrogant snobbish refinement) can come with inner growth may be likewise obscure. However, the long association of holiness with asceticism or with bareness of living has confused the understanding of truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

A lifestyle touched with beauty in manners, surroundings, character, or taste, can better express what philosophy means than an ugly and unclean one. That lack of opportunity is responsible for a parts of crudeness and inferiority and immaturity is, however, obvious enough. However, it is a fact which ought not be used to cover up the correct view of these things. Good manners are not only an end in themselves, emblems of a finer personality, tokens of willingness to be of service, but also part of a means to higher spiritual attainment—the ultimate courtesy and supreme generosity of human behaviour. Ill-mannered conduct is ordinarily incompatible with spiritual realization: the cases of those Christian masters who historically behaved badly towards would-be disciples are special cases, and ought not to be taken as guides. Refinement is as valuable a quality, and as spiritual, as truth-seeking. Good manners and finer feelings, courtesy and graciousness—these inhere in one who possesses a true spirituality. It is true that many aspirants consider this to be mere surface polish, unimportant, a cloak of quite often for hypocrisy and falseness. That may be so in a number of cases. However, even it if were correct of all cases, the fact remains that the manners which aspirants adopt, the code of behaviour which they practise, possess a definite place on this quests. The Christians who regarded and used etiquette as part of their way toward inner unfoldment, as part of their path, were not wrong. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

For etiquette creates forms of conduct which not only refine and uplift the practiser’s character, but also can be used to defend his inner life—where he is developed enough to possess one—against society’s onslaughts. There is a moral element in it, too. For where etiquette trains a man sympathetically to consider the emotional reactions of other persons to his own behaviour, it transfers his point of view from an habitual selfish one to a more impersonal one. Again, by smoothing the relations between both of them, it puts the others not only more at peace with themselves but also with him. Lastly, it requires and fosters some measure of self-control. For we are not only victims of aggression from our enemies. We are just as much, or even more, victims of ourselves, attacked by our own weakness and faults. We should learn to teach children to learn to respect the requires for respect—whether it be shown to elders or to authorities, or whether it be shown to other people’s religious beliefs. Respect is something which can later grow into a higher quality and that is reverence. Through reverence we can begin to sense higher atmospheres which produce a feeling of awe whether the atmosphere be found in the beauties of nature, of music, of art, or of saints. People of the lower classes are apt to lose their temper more quickly than those of the upper classes because some have not been brought up to respect self-control or to value it and thus to respect themselves. Thus, self-respect becomes respect for one’s own higher self. The connection between the good life and good manners is not usually brought out by those who would uplift humanity spiritually, expect of course by such shining exceptions. In a period like the present—when the young generation ridicules all mention of manners, courtesy, etiquette, and so on as hollow, hypocritical, and insincere—the values so criticized must be clarified again and their connection with the higher life made plainer. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The Sacramento Fire Department’s mission is to safeguard the lives and property of the Sacramento populations from fires, natural disasters, and incidents involving hazardous materials. The department provides fire protection and emergency medical services (EMS) to the city of Sacramento. Members of the Fire Department fight fires, provide emergency medical treatment, and rescue people from dangerous situations. The department has specialized divisions that investigate fires, deal with hazardous material, and help protect the Sacramento International Airport. “There was a rooming house on Capitol Avenue. A flophouse really, a nine-story dump, filled with dozens and dozens of occupants who were less well off than the rest of us. I was lieutenant of our ladder company, and we went as an additional ladder company to the fire, which eventually went to six alarms. These people were being taken out from the inside. We consulted with the chief, and he said, ‘The guy in that window.’ He’s pointing to the eight floor, where a guy was hanging over the windowsill. Our rig was parked a block away, so I told our guys to swing it around to the other block and see if our stick can reach him from there. In the meantime, I went up the inside stairs to the eighth floor. There was not a large amount of fire to be seen, but the smoke and the heat were boiling. I found this guy, and he was barely conscious. Besides, he couldn’t walk very well because of arthritis or something. I said, ‘Okay, come on, let’s go.’ And I started to carrying him down. I was lucky, he wasn’t a heavy guy at all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

“We were in the hallways when the smoke and the heat changed instantly. I knew it was going to flash, and we had to get the heck out. At any moment the fire was going to chase us. He was having trouble, so I gave him my mask, and I carried him down the inside stairway. In the street I put him on the running board on the far side of one of the trucks. Somebody brought over an inhalator, and I was trying to get the guy to take some air. Then I don’t remember anything until I woke up in the hospital. They told me afterwards that I just went shish, boom, and that was it. In the hospital, I heard a woman doctor talking to the others. And I said to myself, ‘That’s it, an angel, I’m all done. This is it, I’ve bought it.’ The only reason the department saw fit to write me up for a medal was because I had pulmonary burns, burns down the throat and lungs. But they were not from the fire itself, they were from the heat. The difference is, I wouldn’t be sitting here today if they were from the fire itself. Just the smoke and heated gases, that’s all. I don’t think it’s a great idea to talk about the medal—it was nice, okay—but I’m no different from anybody else. Exceeding the needs and expectations of those they serve with the highest level of valor, integrity and commitment is what the Sacramento Fire Department is dedicated to doing. Please donate to the Sacramento Fire Department and you could save lives and property. They provide optimum prevention and protection to our community. It is also of utmost importance to raise your children to love God and Jesus Christ, love America and be patriotic. To help keep America strong, we must also buy American cars and other American goods and services. In order to keep our communities safe, please obey and respect law and order and treat everyone, especially your elders with dignity, and make it a point not to litter. Remember, there lives a God! Each finite creature proclaims His rule on sea and land; throughout all changing forms of nature is clearly shown His mighty hand. In every place is heard the call: The Lord of Host has made us all. 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. Remember to raise your children to love America, to love God and Jesus Christ, to respect law and order, buy goods made in America, and be kind and respectful to everyone, especially their elders. There lives a God! #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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America Love it or Leave it: How Can a Lost Mind be Recovered?

Our life experiences are distracting us and dulling our spiritual view so much so that we are not focusing on that which matters most. I wonder, do we miss opportunities to learn of the Lord and feel His love? Do we miss opportunities to share with others—especially children—that which matters most, the gospel of the Lord, Jesus Christ? We have all seen children and youth standing in the crowds confused and wanting to know what matter most. I can almost hear this child and other children crying out the words so many of us have sung, “Please teach me to walk in the light.” Are we teaching our children to know, feel, and rejoice in the beauty, power, and miracles of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Let us nurture our children concerning Him whom we call the Lord Jesus Christ. Let us teach our children the grand saving principles of the gospel. Children require the ability to knock that having faith in the Saviour and following Him will help them to receive peace in this beautiful World that is experiencing trials and tribulations. As you include your children at your family dinner table, as you involve them in daily prayer and scripture study and in family home evening, you are following the example of the Saviour by loving and teaching them. As you do this, let them know that together your family is striving to keep the commandments and to be worthy to be an eternal family. #RandolphHarris 1 of 26

 It may be during the information one-on-one times that the Spirit will prompt us to ask just the right questions or to say just the right thing to help our children know and feel the light of the Lord. If we make the opportunities, the Spirit will guide us. We have wonderful, capable children in our midst. We can help them find peace in this life and in the life to come. After all, you do not want to raise your children to be on the run, to have to dye their hair to evade law enforcement. Some people who do not walk in the foot steps of the Lord end up having to live underground and join the Weathermen Underground tribe. You do not want your children to have to work with dope dealers to raise a quarter of a million dollars to pay manic guerrillas to keep them safe, to pay for hair dye, and fast cars as they drive up Highway 101 to north Oakland. There is the chance that the police and CHP will throw up roadblocks and you will have to stay at a stash pad and wait it out before the coast is clear to drive to Salt Lake City. It is better to raise your children to be American Legion hunting-fishing guys, or a soft Middle American woman, or everyone’s TV girl—a Holy Family. It is best to become a Holy Family of Elegance. When it comes to psychotherapy, words themselves are vague and insecure and our ignorance so great that we tend in desperation to assume meaning where none exists. #RandolphHarris 2 of 26

Let us recognize that the true nature of psychosis is a mystery. (And the nature of the most prevalent convulsive treatment, electroshock, is called a “mystery within a mystery” by the most authoritative book on the subject.) One of our problems, then, is how to deal with a subject consisting of experience which at its worst is indescribable from the inside and incomprehensible from the outside, and this without using words which are themselves confounding. “Psychosis,” for instance, has an authoritative, antiseptic sound, but its real sterility lies mainly in its lack of clear meaning. It simply replaces “madness”—now a literary term, and “insanity”—which represents a dated legal concept. Falling into pseudoscientific conventions of language will not help. At the present stage of knowledge, the questions are well enough represented by asking simply: What does it mean to “lose one’s mind”? How can a “lost mind” be recovered? For that matter, how is the mind developed in the first place? It is our assumption that “mind” develops and exists beyond brain, and following from this, the assumption of social psychological origin of much mental disturbance. It sounds simple, but there is by no means wholehearted agreement in the field on this issue. Current work on molecular structure and the chemistry of schizophrenia, for instance, challenges psychological assumptions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 26

 It is possible, of course, that biochemical methos of treatment will develop actual cures for psychotic states, thus outmoding psychotherapy. No less a therapist than Dr. Freud thought so in regard to schizophrenia. Also fashionable are experiments with drugs which induce pseudo-psychotic states, which suggest to some that if such states can be caused by chemical means, they can also be cured by chemical means, and further that the mechanism of disturbance is fundamentally biochemical. Undeniably there is always a biochemical basis for behaviour of the human organism. However, this does not rule out psychological influence, in either the sickening or the healing process. It is certain that anxiety can cause diarrhea. Chemical mechanism? Surely. And a virus or a laxative might cause the same apparent result, but that would not alter the fact that anxiety, a psychological state, can and does cause diarrhea (as surely as a nonchemical state may cause someone ten feet away to blush). Nor would it mean, more obviously but no more truly, that even though the eventual chemistry, mechanism, and result are the same, two different causes (laxative and anxiety) are therefore the same. Nor would it mean than an antidote for diarrhea is a specific treatment for either anxiety or a virus, or that a specific for one is of any use for the other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 26

Similarly, a chemically induced psychotic state may not be a true psychosis even though it has the same appearance in terms of hallucinations and like effects. A chemical antidote for the pseudo-psychosis is not necessarily effective for a true psychosis, even though a chemical mechanism exists in either case. Psychological influence is not eradicated by the artificial imitation of its effects. Even though “tranquilizers” will tranquilize, so will a blow on the head, and neither one is equivalent to, or can deny the existence of, “peace of mind.” That which we call a “psychosis” is not a disease. It is a learned behaviour, exaggerated to a point of no return, id est, where control is lost and the exaggerated behaviour “takes on a life of its own” temporarily. Because this exaggeration is so overwhelming, so much beyond our ordinary capacity to assimilate, it appears to us that we are no longer dealing with, for instance, ordinary suspicion, but something quite different—“paranoia.” Then it appears that psychosis is not of the same order, not on the same continuum, as “normal” or “neurotic” behaviour. However, as psychotic behaviour becomes more common it is seen as a form of maladjustment similar in kind ot lesser degrees of maladjustment, though so much greater in quantity that it seems different in quality too. #RandolphHarris 5 of 26

There is one sense, unfortunately, in which it is different. A boulder balanced on the edge of a precipice can be pressed ounce by measured ounce toward rolling off. Each ounce is just like the last, but when the quantity of pressure totals to the “breaking point,” the quality of the consequences changes radically. No longer will the relief or counterpressure of one ounce recover the balance. Even if the boulder is not smashed in the fall, an enormous effort is required to restore it to its original position. It is because of this effort (which so few can make, and so many need) that it is necessary to prevent the “psychotic situation” in life. The “psychotic situation” is a precondition to the psychotic state, which may or may not follow. In our society, there is an overwhelming emphasis on thinking. In school, we were taught almost entirely to think rather than to feel. We were told to “use our heads,” to think through problems, to study hard and be sensible. This approach is supposed to lead to success in the World. The trouble is, while thinking is unquestionably important, it is of limited value. Thinking, you see, is entirely concerned with the past and the future. We cannot think about the present moment; we can only feel it. The present, a microscopic dot on the line from past to future, does not lend itself to thinking—for the simple fact that thinking takes time. The moment we think, even if we think about “now,” it is already in the past. Thinking can help us learn from the past and plan for the future, but it cannot help us experience the now. #RandolphHarris 6 of 26

Thinking results in action. First we think, then we do. We are a society of thinkers and doers. However, we are also a society of manipulators because all this emphasis on the mind has taught us to be cunning and calculating. When we use our heads only, we become manipulators—functioning with only part of our human capacity. So thoroughly are we oriented to doing, we shy from theories that tell us there is nothing we can do about a situation. The truth is, in some situations, there is absolutely nothing we can do. Sometimes no actions can be taken to help a person be confident. One must be confident, be secure, be powerful—and to do that, one must discover his core being. A system based on thinking is limited because it is based on concepts and theories borrowed from others, generally others’ books. It is borrowed knowledge—and borrowed knowledge does not overcome ignorance; it hides ignorance. Borrowed knowledge is “knowing without knowing.” The more of it we amass, the more darkness and ignorance we keep in our inner cores. We can develop our logic, but logic alone leads only to conclusions, never to the truth. Because the truth needs no proof. It does, however, need the heart. This is where experience comes in. Knowledge of the truth comes from our experience of it, from a feeling which originates deep down in our cores. It is totally individual, intensely personal, and entirely subjective. #RandolphHarris 7 of 26

You cannot know what love is by reading about it. You must experience it. You cannot take a course in love—or confidence, or any other value for that matter. Books and course are things of the mind. Values are things of the heart as well as the mind, and they come from within. However, people spend so much time in school and not everyone believes in God, nor do they go to church. Therefore, it might be conducive to offer a psychology class on how to love. People spend so much time learning how to think and how to hate. If we taught people how to express platonic love in college, it might generate better human beings that are able to deal with stressful situations and will be less critical of others’ perceived faults. Some people view themselves as weak and powerless because they have never experienced their own personal power. All of the doing is merely activity at the circumference of one’s true self. In the focusing process, one can break through the circumference and find something else. In surrendering to helplessness, one may discover a capable self in one’s core. The “something” that one finds is the real I. And finding it, one knows, intuitively, that one had and still has power. Note that, in this experience, one does not actually do anything. A man may not know what to do. However, that is not important. #RandolphHarris 8 of 26

When the right thing to do comes alone, he will do it, based on his new, intuitive knowledge that he can do it. Not borrowed knowledge, from books or lectures or friends, but intuitive knowledge from within. Some people will thus have an instantaneous experience of mastery. When control is so perfect that he can never again raise his voice in anger, he needs turn attention to only one other passion—the spiritual. Such a chaste aloofness will help with mental, spiritual, and emotional clarity. When desires die without regrets, he begins to taste real peace. When cravings slough off naturally, like a serpent’s skin, he finds tranquil happiness. If not all of it, the man who can win his way to freedom from anger and finally liberate the mind from passion may need much of his lifetime for the work; but what he gains is of inestimable value. For this brings him closer to awareness of the Overself. As aspiration for the Overself grows stronger, other desires grow weaker. If you are ever to emerge from the darkness, you must possess an insatiable longing for light. He arrives at purity by a cultivated discipline of the mind rather than by a forcible atrophy of the senses. If he can find it and heed it, the thread-like intuition which will lead him out of animality into serenity will be his best guide. It is not possible for these finer elements to become, little by little, paramount in his outlook, consciousness, and conduct without a corresponding decline in the coarser ones. #RandolphHarris 9 of 26

He will gradually become the ruler of his physical appetites and then the master of his bodily desires. Indeed, as all his longings for the Overself slowly gather themselves together into a great dedicated life, there is an equally great shift-over from the terrestrial part of his being to the truly human, allied with an opening-up of the angelic or divine part. The fruits of extravagances involving pleasures of the flesh, the harvest of promiscuity of pleasures of the flesh, the gleanings of irresponsibility with pleasures of the flesh, and the gratifications of license involving pleasures of the flesh must be subjected to the hard discipline of reason. Those who will not do so must sooner or later pay the price in fears, anxieties, irritations, regrets, disillusionments, shames, and despairs. So long as a man identifies himself with the physical body, so long will he perforce have to identify himself with its desires and passions. Only when he transfers this self-identification to the infinite mental being can he completely detach himself from them. When they are still in subjection to passion, of what use is it for men to talk of freeing themselves from subjection to egoism? The student of philosophy will try to comprehend the sensations got from sensual pleasures impartially and impersonally. Man knows instinctively what will give him momentary emotional satisfaction; he must wrestle with reason to know what will give him deep enduring happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 26

When different pleasures compete for suffrage or when duty competes with desire, reason must arbitrate. Desire carried to an undue extent becomes a passion disturbing to the equilibrium of life and character. When a man finds that despite all his efforts to improve himself and reform his character, he still remains the same, it is an indication that new methods must be tried. The scourging of the flesh may be needed by, and may help, those who find their overheated passions and lusts get out of hand. However, it will not end those troubles of man, even though it may tame them for a time. Something more must be added, or must replace them—first, knowledge; second, work on the process of attention. The instinctual animal urge plus the ambitious drive for power and the personal desire for property keep men from spiritual aspiration. If he is filled with selfish interest alone, seeking the fulfilment of personal ambitions irrespective of any higher considerations; if terrestrial passion drives him and greed dominates him, he blocks his own way. Purification from such attachments must be the first endeavour. Pleasures which corrupt character are undesirable; but those which uplift character (like the finest works of Aaliyah, Beethoven and Handel) are desirable. There is a level of tension below which the person can think rationally and act effectively. #RandolphHarris 11 of 26

When tension increases above this point, efficiency breaks down, and irrational thinking and expressive behaviour takes the place of rational thinking and effective action. This point on the tension continuum is called the frustration threshold. It varies from person to person, and within the same person at different times. A mother wants her house to be clean and orderly. In the forenoon, her three-year-old daughter Annie might spill a glass of milk, leave her Barbie dolls in disarray, and scatter magazines all over the newly cleaned living room. The mother’s reaction at the time is one of mild anger, followed by efficient attempts to set things straight. At five-thirty in the afternoon, the child repeats her efforts at messing up the house. This time, the mother “explores”—she sends the child to her room, screams, and is unable to prepare supper until she has vented her tension. Optimum physical health produces a high frustration threshold. A sick or exhausted person has less energy to cope with tension and is more easily frustrated than one who is fit. People who manage to survive the extremely corrupt Sacramento City—a so-called death camp—have pointed out that a strong commitment to life and a sense of mission to fulfill were definite factors in survival. Individuals with such a sense of mission were less readily frustrated by the deprivations, stresses, and pressure of extremely hostile environments. #RandolphHarris 12 of 26

When Zorba, the Greek, was unable to express his grief following the death of his beloved son, he danced a Cretan dance until he dropped from exhaustion. On another occasion, when he felt he had at last found the solution to a problem of brining logs down a mountainside, again he danced. Finally, when the plan to bring logs down the mountain failed, and his boss’s investment was dismally lost, the boss asked Zorba to show him how to dance, and the two men danced and laughed like madmen. When someone has access to such means of self-expression, as in dance, violent exercise, painting, or song, that person can release the inevitable frustration of life without recourse to mindless, destructive outlets of tension. As Reich pointed out, sexual orgasm also provides a natural means for the dissipation of tension. In fact, prolonged privation of pleasures of the flesh is a common cause of frustration. It is however, a mistake to think that other frustrations, such as material misunderstandings, are all relieved by pleasures of the flesh. Nothing is more revealing in this respect than the famous lampoon, read b y Dolmance in the Philosophie du Boudoir, which has the curious title: People of France, one more if you want to be republicans. Pierre Klossowski is right in attaching so much importance to it, for this lampoon demonstrates to the revolutionaries that their republic is founded on the murder of the King—who was King by divine right—and that by guillotining God on 21 January 1793, they deprived themselves forever of the right to outlaw crime or to censure malevolent instincts. #RandolphHarris 13 of 26

The monarchy supported the concept of a God who, in conjunction with itself, created all laws. As for the Republic, it stands alone, and morality was supposed to exist without benefits of the Commandments. It is doubtful, however, that Sade, as Klossowki maintains, had a profound sense of sacrilege and that an almost religious horror led him to the conclusions that he expresses. It is much more likely that he came to these conclusions first and afterwards perceived the correct arguments to justify the absolute moral license that he wanted the government of his time to sanction. Logic founded on passions reconclusions before the premises. To be convinced of this we only have to appraise the admirable sequence of sophisms by which Sade, in this passage, justifies calumny, theft, and murder and demands that they be tolerated under the new dispensation. It is then, however, that his thoughts are most profound. He rejects, with exceptional perspicacity for his times, the presumptuous alliance of freedom with virtue. Freedom, particularly when it is a prisoner’s dream, cannot endure limitations. It must sanction crime or it is no longer freedom. On this essential point Sade never varies. This man who never preached anything but contradictions only achieves coherence—and of a most complete kind—when he talks of capital punishment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 26

An addict of refined ways of execution, a theoretician of sexual crime, he was never able to tolerate legal crime. “My imprisonment by the State, with the guillotine under my very eyes, was far more horrible to me than all the Bastilles imaginable.” From this feeling of horror, he drew the strength to be moderate, publicly, during the Terror, and to intervene generously on behalf of his mother-in-law, despite the fact that she had had him imprisoned. A few years later Nodier summed up, perhaps without knowing it, the position obstinately defended by Sade: “To kill a man in a paroxysm of passion is understandable. To have him killed by someone else after a calm and serious meditation and on the pretext of duty honorably discharged is incomprehensible.” Here we find the germ of an idea which again will be developed by Sade: he who kills must pay with his own life. Sade is more moral, we see, than our contemporaries. However, his hatred for the death penalty is at first no more than a hatred for men who are sufficiently convinced of their own virtue to dare to inflict capital punishment, when they themselves are criminals. You cannot simultaneously choose crime for yourself and punishment for others. You must open the prison gates or give an impossible proof of your own innocence. Even if only once, from the moment you accept murder, you must allow it universally. #RandolphHarris 15 of 26

Permissions are the chief therapeutic instrument of the script analyst because they offer the only chance for an outsider to free the patient from the curses laid on him by his parents. The therapist gives permission to the patient’s Child by saying either “It is all right to do it,” or “You do not have to do it.” Both say to the Parent “Let him alone.” Thus, there are positive and negative permissions. In a positive permission, or license, “Let him alone!” means “Let him do it!” This cuts off the injunction. In a negative permission, or external release, it means “Stop pushing him into it!” This cuts off the provocation. Some permissions can be regarded either way. This is particularly true of antiscripts. Thus, when the Prince kissed Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, he was offering her both a license to wake up and a release from the witch’s curse. One of the most important permissions is a license to stop acting stupid and start thinking. Many patients of advanced years have not had a single independent thought since early childhood, and have quite forgotten how it feels to think, or even what thinking means. With properly timed permission, however, they are able to come through, and are more than delighted when they say out loud at the age of sixty-five or seventy what may be the first intelligent observation of their adult lives. #RandolphHarris 16 of 26

Often it is necessary to undo the work of previous therapists in order to give a patient permission to think. Some of them have spent years in mental hospitals or clinics where the slightest attempt on their part to think independently came up against powerful resistance from the staff. There they were taught that thinking is really a sin called “intellectualzing,” to which they must confess promptly and promise never to indulge in again. Many addictions and obsessions are based on parental come-ones. “Do not stop taking drugs (or you may stop coming home to ask for money)” says the mother of the heroin addict. “Do not stop thinking about pleasures of the flesh,” says the parent of a lecher or a nymphomaniac. And the whole concept of permissions as a therapeutic instrument was started by a gambler who said: “I do not need someone to tell me to stop gambling, I need someone to give me permission to stop, because somebody in my head says I cannot.” A permission, then, allows Jeder to be flexible, instead of responding with fixed patterns frozen by slogans and controls. This has nothing to do with “permissive up brining,” since that is full of imperatives, too. The most important permissions are to love and to change and to do things well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 26

A person with permission is just as easy to spot as one who is all tied up. “He sure has permission to think,” “She sure has permission to be beautiful,” and “They sure have permission to enjoy themselves,” are Martian expressions of admiration. (One of the frontiers of script analysis is the further study of permissions, primarily through observation of eye movements in very young children. Thus, in some situations the child glances sideways at his parents to see if he has “permission” to do something; in other cases, he seems to be “at liberty” to follow his own inclinations without consulting them. Such observations, carefully evaluated, may result in a significant distinction between “permissions” and “liberties.”) The term Genetic Counseling indicates that a genetic consumer consciousness is dawning. The emphasis is on genetic disorder, not upon genetic endowment, but this is to be expected. A new technology always appeals to hive-security first as a way of dealing with danger. Awareness of genetic disorder precedes awareness of genetic excellence, just as psychiatry precedes self-actualized psychology. Pathology precedes potential. When the experts in a hive begin treating “broken-down personalities” they have recognized the existence of “personality.” The next step is for healthy individuals to take charge of their own “selfs.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 26

New technology always appeals to hive-security first. The Ad Hoc Committee on Genetic Counseling of the American Society of Human Genetics described genetic counseling as a “communication process which deals with the human problems associated with the occurrence, or the risk of occurrence, of a genetic disorder in the family.” This one-day workshop is primarily for health professionals who want to learn how to do genetic counseling or who want to strengthen their skills in this field. Hidden in this course description are valuable neurogenic clues, evolutionary evidence, which is easily overlooked by hive observers because it reveals much about the neurogenetic stage of the give culture—and of the planet. Genetic counseling appeared a generation after personality counseling. When an advanced, post-political culture offers courses in “Job Counseling,” “Personality Counseling” or “Martial Counseling,” Evolutionary Agents know that a move towards self-actualization is occurring—a free-mobile-individually oriented society is emerging. The military defense groups are willing to train those who are willing to be trained and have a good temperament and they simply do not bother training those who lack discipline. Being part of the United States of America’s armed forced is an honour and a privilege. It is ridiculous for an organization to even attempt to train some hundred thousand men in the State’s twilight of decline when, only a few years before, the State disgracefully abandoned one hundred and seventy million. #RandolphHarris 19 of 26

The proud members of the Sacramento Fire Department are committed to providing the highest quality and highest level of courteous and responsive services to the residents, businesses, and visitors of Sacramento. They ensure Sacramento City can respond to, recover from, and mitigate against any hazard that affects their city, the region, the state and beyond. “I like ladder work. It’s probably the most dangerous jobs in firefighting, and the real purpose of it is to go in and look for anyone trapped in a fire. You’re more or less on your own, you’re not with the rest of the men, and you don’t have the benefit of the hose line. I was assigned the SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus) that day. We got the call to a fire in a three-story dwelling. We are second in. Another engine and ladder company was ahead of us. When I got off the truck, I was all prepared to go in the building. It was a strange fire, actually—a kerosene heater, which was overfilled. It has been knocked over, and the kerosene went between the floor and the wall down into the basement from the first floor and was ignited by the hot water heater. So the fire ran up the walls to the upper floors, and the flames were coming out the third-floor windows when I got there. As I say, I had my air pack on. I went around to the back alley before the other guys. #RandolphHarris 20 of 26

“The first company was still trying to get the ladders up in this narrow alley. I went up some steps to the kitchen door and kicked it open. A couple of guys were already in there on the floor. They didn’t have packs, so they were taking a beating from the smoke. One of their ladder guys also had a pack, so his chief put him on a hose, and he said to me, ‘Go down to the basement with this guy and give him a hand with the tip.’ Engine or ladder man, it didn’t matter to him. He saw we both had packs, and it was pretty smoky. I helped this guy drag the line, and we both went down to the basement from the kitchen very quickly, because it was like a chimney. It was getting real hot, and the fire flashed over us. He hit it with water and knocked it down. There was a small window next to the steps, and he was trying to fog the smoke out the window. The heat was coming toward us the whole time. Then apparently somebody saw how bad it was getting and called, ‘Everybody out of the basement.’ There were only the two of us there. I didn’t hear it. The guy on the tip supposedly did and told me he was leaving. Again, I didn’t hear him. He closed down the hose, and all of a sudden he was gone. I learned later that he went out the window. He had to take the pack off to fit through the window, it was so narrow. I didn’t know he had left. #RandolphHarris 21 of 26

“So the water was stopped, and I was lone in the basement. I couldn’t go back up the steps to the kitchen, because when he shut down the water the fire had flashed over again and set fire to the stairs. You see, the water wasn’t really putting the fire out, but it was keeping the heat away from us. Now it was getting very hot. It was very dark, it was smoky, I couldn’t see. I was down on my stomach on the basement floor, looking for the back door I knew was there, but I couldn’t see it. I was probably only ten feet from it the whole time. I became a little disoriented, but I didn’t panic. I had been in basement fires before, and I knew you shouldn’t panic. I thought, ‘Now, how did I get into this situation. I don’t have any water. I don’t have anyone with me.’ I could see that the fire had engulfed the kitchen steps and I couldn’t make it up there. I knew there was a back door there somewhere, but the people had been remodeling the basement, and I had to feel my way through a lot of debris. There was paneling against one wall, and I thought that might have been the door. I slid on it like a slide and fell to the floor. I say there for a second, and said, ‘I gotta compose myself, or I’m going to be in trouble here in a minute.’ I thought to myself, I’ve been through a lot in my life. I probably should have been dead eight times over. ‘Well,’ I said to myself, ‘I haven’t come this far to die in this person’s basement. This can’t happen to me. I’m going to survive. I’m not going to die in this guy’s basement because he was overfilling his kerosene heater.’ I got mad then. I remember. I said, ‘Dammit, I’m not staying here. I’ve got to get out.’ #RandolphHarris 22 of 26

“So what I had to do was raise my mask and holler for help. If I hadn’t done that, they wouldn’t have found me, because they didn’t know I was in there. This guy didn’t tell them I was still down there, and my lieutenant hadn’t ordered me to go down there; he thought I was on one of the upper floors. It was the chief of the other company who had sent me down there. They heard my hollering, and they were saying, ‘Come this way. This way.’ I would put my mask back on and walk toward their voices. I couldn’t see anything, so I was going by their voice. But they couldn’t hear me with my mask on. They didn’t know where the hell I was. It was getting harder and harder. It was very hot down there. I burned my ears, and I still had my helmet on. I knew if I didn’t get to that door soon, I wouldn’t make it, so I just kept going. I pushed things out of the way, and finally, after what seemed like an eternity, I had my hand stretched out like a blind man, and somebody grabbed my hand, and they pulled me out. One of my boots came off, and my helmet fell off. They never found my helmet, it had melted away, and the only thing left of my boot was the sole. There are points that I don’t recall. I didn’t actually black out, but I think it was my mind acting it out for me. I don’t recall exactly how I got to that back door. I was just glad to feel someone’s hand. I was kissing the floor, and the gentleman who grabbed my hand was in the doorway. He couldn’t advance any further. In fact, he was on the ground, and somebody had hold of his legs. #RandolphHarris 23 of 26

“I didn’t realize I was saved until I was in the rescue squad actually. I was on my way to the hospital, and I was holding the oxygen mask over my face, and I started crying. It finally hit me that I had almost died. I don’t normally cry. I believed I was going to be all right. I knew I was hurt, but I also knew I was going to make it. The first night in the hospital was hell. I had a tube going down my mouth into my lungs. It has a ballon-type thing at the end of it to keep the air passages open. Everything in there was swelling, and I would have chocked otherwise. And they were pulling a lot of things out of my lungs and throat, big pieces of black stuff. I didn’t know I had taken that much smoke, I had thought it was mostly heat. They gave me morphine, but I was conscious when they were putting that thing down my throat. It makes you gag. They refused to give me more morphine, saying they had given me enough already. When I wanted to say something I had to write it down, because I couldn’t speak. So the first night I was going in and out of consciousness. I kept writing down, ‘If you don’t take this tube out of my throat, I’m going to pull it out myself.’ I was a terrible patient that first night. I was in intensive care, and the orderlies, nurses, and doctors were at the desk fifteen feet from me, drinking soda. My mouth was so dry, I wanted some water, and they wouldn’t give it to me. They’d say, ‘Okay, we’ll get you something,’ thinking I’d go to sleep and forget. I would wake up an hour later, and nothing would be there. #RandolphHarris 24 of 26

“My father was there within an hour. He’s a fireman, too, and he heard the call come on the fire radio. He knew, before he was told, that I was in trouble. He heard the call for the rescue squad, and he said, ‘I knew it was you.’ The commissioner came, and so did a couple of guys I work with and my wife and my mother. Everyone showed a lot of concern, and everyone was as nice as could be. It meant a lot to me. Because it was nice to see familiar faces. The next day I was more relaxed. I didn’t fight the tube, I just tried to make the best of it. Then I felt lucky. I felt glad to be alive. I was released from the hospital a week later, and after a few days at home, I was mad. Angry that I got hurt when I shouldn’t have been hurt, that my whole life had changed. I don’t like changes. I’m used to going to work, and now I had to stay home. I wanted to get out of the house and couldn’t. I was miserable as hell, I was climbing the walls. I took a lot of it out on my wife. She had had a back operation less than a year earlier and was bedridden. Then she had had a premature baby, and my son was in intensive care for two months. He had just gotten out of the hospital and weighed only 21/2 pounds (1.14 kilograms). So she was dealing with her back, and the baby was home on a monitor and she was worrying about him breathing, then I came home and she worried about me breathing. So her back was forgotten for a time, and now it’s in terrible shape. #RandolphHarris 25 of 26

“I was miserable even to the kids. I was jumpy all the time. I was physically hurt, and I was still spitting up things. My ears were burned, and the doctors told me I would need glasses, because my corneas were burned. I became depressed, and I was mad. The only ones to take it out on were my wife and kids. I feel bad for them now, but they understood. My wife was great. She had a lot of patience with me.” 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. Also, please respect law and order, and treat others with kindness and respect. To ensure that you have a bright future, please take your education seriously, and be sure to actually read your books. 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 26 of 26

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If Nature is Hard, Truth is Cruel

Life can be difficult for people who do not have peace in their homes or environments due to the increase of people who are living with untreated mental illness. Unlike when people are committing crimes, and one has the option to call the police, when an individual or a group of people are displaying extremely immature behaviour and displaying symptoms of mental illness, there is no one to call. Close to 66 percent of adults with mental illness and adolescents with major depressive disorder do not get treatment. Nearly 1 in 7 California adults experience mental illness, and one in 26 has a serious mental illness that makes it difficult to carry out daily duties. Mental health challenges can impact anyone, regardless of education, geography, faith, calling, or family. They are nothing to be ashamed of and should be met with love. More than half the World’s population lives in cities, and the number is expected to continue to increase in the coming years. Living in urban areas has been associated with increased risk for mental disorders, including anxiety, depression and schizophrenia. Research using functional magnetic resonance imaging had identified changes in the brain indicating that urban upbringing and city living are linked to social stress processing. Among the potentially contributing factors to poorer mental health in urban areas are air pollution and other exposure to toxins, increased noise, lack of open space, crime and social inequalities, and the stress of sensory overload. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Extreme heat has been associated with a range of mental health impacts. Research indicates that when people must endure extreme heat, this increases irritability, symptoms of depression and an increase in suicide. It can also affect behaviour, contributing to increased aggression, incidence of domestic violence, and increased use of alcohol or other substances to cope with stress. Also, rural people and/or those who are unemployed, and united rented to multiple individuals who are related do not tend to do well in high-rise buildings. High occupancy of these types of people in high-rise buildings turns the atmosphere into one like a jail or mental hospital. People do not respect personal space, private property, nor do they follow the laws or rules in their contracts. They start to feel like everyone is their family and friend, many people stop caring about how people perceive them, people do not clean up messes they make in common areas, and a lack of respect spreads and animosity throughout the community because of a loss of autonomy. However, high-rise buildings where rules are enforced, and people follow the laws tend to be more peaceful. And cities can provide advantages, such as better access to health care and education, and potential for social interaction. Mental health problems are common, so it is important to be aware of possible signs. Feeling worried, depressed, guilty, worthless or feeling an exaggerated sense of “high” may be signs of a mental health issue. If signs do not go away after two weeks, although there may not be a serious problem, it is best to seek help from a professional. If someone talks about suicidal thoughts or is engaging in high-risk activities, do not ignore this. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

A mental health disorder may start out as subtle changes to a person’s feelings, thinking and behaviour. If they have ongoing and significant changes, it could be a sign that they are developing a mental health disorder. If something does not seem “quite right,” it is important to have a conversation about getting help. An important part of good mental health is the ability to look at problems or concerns realistically. Everyone has days when they feel sad, stressed, anxious, or overwhelmed by life’s challenges. If you continue to struggle for several weeks or longer or your symptoms begin interfering with your daily life—at home, work, school, or in your relationships—seek help. Addressing mental health concerns early and often is the most effective approach and can help prevent a crisis in the future. Struggling with your mental health does not indicate a weakness in your character or spirit. Earthly situations may not be ideal, man’s spiritual DNA is perfect because his identity is as a son or daughter of God. A diagnosis connected to mental health should not be viewed as any less real than another medical diagnosis. Think about the following as you consider talking with a mental health professional: How long have you experienced these challenges? How much do these symptoms affect your daily life? Are you aware of others in your family who have experienced similar challenges? Are these problems causing significant distress in your life? Are your own attempts to make yourself feel better not helping? Has anyone who you trust mentioned something about your mood or behaviour? As you talk with someone working through mental health challenges, the most important things you can do are to listen and show empathy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, you are not expected or encouraged to diagnose or provide treatment to others struggling with mental health issues. Yet, you can help them feel welcomed and included, find meaningful ways to contribute, and deepen their faith in Jesus as the Christ. Pray for guidance on what to say. Comforting someone can be intimidating, but it is most often better to reach our an say something than to say nothing. It is important that people who are working through mental health challenges know you care and want to support them. However, also let them know that happiness is a choice. No one else is to be regarded as responsible for man’s troubles, irritations, or disabilities. If he will analyse them aright, that is, with utter impersonality, he would see that the responsibility is not really in the other person, who apparently is the agent for these calamities, but in his own undisciplined character, his own egoistic outlook. The very fact that he has become aware of these faults arises because the light has come into existence and begun to play upon the dark places in his character, thus generating a conscious desire for self-improvement. This awareness is not a matter for depression, therefore. To wish one’s history to have been different from what it was, to pile up blame for one’s bad deeds, choices, and decisions, is to cling to one’s imaginary ego although seeking to improve it. Only by rooting up and throwing out this false imagination which identifies one with the ego alone can the mind become freed from such unnecessary burdens. You are to be penitent not only because your wrong acts may bring you suffering but also, and much more, because they may bring you farther away from the discovery of the Overself. To repine for past errors or to wish that what has been should not have been has only a limited usefulness. Analyse the situation, note effects, study causes, draw lessons—then dismiss the past completely. If the ego is discarded, all regrets over past acts are discarded with it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

He may be ashamed of what he did in the past but then he was that sort of man in the past. If he persists in identifying himself with the “I,” in time such feelings will come to him and cause this kind of suffering. However, if he changes over to identifying himself with the timeless being behind the “I” there can be no such suffering. If it is to effect this purpose, repentance must be thorough and whole-hearted. He must turn his back upon the former way of life. If Nature is hard, truth is cruel. It is unsparing to our egoistic desires, merciless in ferreting out our personal weaknesses. If it is right to forgive others for their sins against us, it must also be right to forgive ourselves and not constantly condemn ourselves to self-reproach. However, we ought not do so prematurely. When a man becomes aware of his wrong-doing and realizes its meaning for himself and its effect upon others, he has taken the first step towards avoiding its inevitable consequences. When he becomes deeply repentant, he has taken the second step. When he tries to eliminate the fault in his character which produced the evil conduct and to make amends to others, where possible, he has taken the final step. The quest will uncover the weakest places in his character, one by one. It will do so either by prompting him from within or by exposing him from without. If he fails to respond to the first way, with its gentle intuitive working, he must expect to endure the second way, with its harsh pressure through events. The only protection against his weaknesses is first, to confess them, and then, to get rid of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The constant nagging of those with whom he is compelled to live, work, or associate, so far as there is any truth in their exaggerations or misunderstandings, can be made to serve a most useful purpose by arousing in him the necessity of change and self-improvement. However much of his self-love is wounded and however long it may take to achieve this and to correct his faults, he will only profit by it. With his success a separation may occur, and they may be set free to go their own way. It may be brought about by their own voluntary decisions or by the compulsion of destiny. When a relationship is no longer useful to evolution or justified by universal law, an end will come to it. This acceptance of other people’s criticisms, humbly and without resentment, may be compared to swimming against the current of a stream. Here the stream will be that of his own nature. In this matter he should look upon the others as his teachers—taking care however to separate the emotional misunderstandings and egoistic exaggerations from the truth. He is to regard the others as sent by the Overself to provoke him into drawing upon or deliberately developing the better qualities needed to deal with such provocations, and not only to show him his own bad qualities. Out of the shadows of the past, there will come memories that will torment as they teach him, pictures that will hurt as they illustrate error, sin, and weakness. He must accept the experience unresistingly and transmute it into moral resolve and ethical guidance for the future. The seeker should try to regard his weakness and faults from a more balanced and impersonal point of view. While it is correct for him to be ashamed of them, he need not go to the other extreme and fall into a prolonged fit of gloom or despair about them. Since repentance, coupled with an unswayable determination to prevent further recurrences, is the philosophic way to deal with them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

To have discovered a sin in oneself, and to have gone on committing it, is to sin doubly. We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. Thus, the weak members of civilized society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. However, a ruthless policy of elimination would betray the noblest part of our nature, which is itself securely founded in the social instincts. We must therefore bear with the evil effects of the survival and propagation of the weak, and rest our hopes on the fact that the weaker and inferior members of society do not marry so freely as the sound. All who cannot spare their children abject poverty should refrain from marriage; the prudent should not shirk their duty of maintaining the population, for it is through the pressure of population and the consequent struggles that man has advanced and will continue to advance. Primeval men and their apelike progenitors, along with many lower animals, were probably social in their habits, and remote primitives practiced division of labour. Man’s social habits have been of enormous importance in his survival. Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected. Man’s moral sense to be an inevitable outgrowth of his social instincts and habits is a crucial factor in group survival. The pressure of group opinion and the moral effect of family affections is ranked with intelligent self-interest as biological foundations of moral behaviour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

In the question of the possibility of making the unconscious conscious, it is of the foremost importance to recognize factors which obstruct this process. There are many factors which make it difficult to arrive at insight into the unconscious. Such factors are mental rigidity, lack of proper orientation, hopelessness, lack of any possibility to change realistic conditions, etcetera. However, there is probably no single factor which is more responsible for the difficulties of making the unconscious conscious than the mechanism which Dr. Freud called “resistance.” What is resistance? Like so many discoveries, it is so simple that one might say anyone could have discovered it—yet it required a great discoverer to recognize it. Let us take an example: your friend must undertake a trip of which he is obviously afraid. You know that he is afraid, his wife knows it, everyone else knows it, but he does not know it. He claims one day that he does not feel well, the next day that there is no need to make the trip, the day after that there are better ways to achieve the same result without traveling, then the next day that your persistence in reminding him of the trip is an attempt to force him, and since he does not want to be forced, he just will not make the trip, and so on, until he will say that it is now too late to go on the trip, anyway, hence there is no use in thinking any further about it. If, however, you mention to him, even in the most tactful way, that he might not want to go because he is afraid, you will get not a simple denial, but more likely a violent barrage of protestations and accusations which will eventually drive you into the role of having to apologize, or even—if you are now afraid of losing his friendship—of declaring that you never meant to say that he was afraid and, in fact, ending up with enthusiastic praise of his courage. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

What has happened? The real motivation for not wanting to go is fear. (What he is afraid of is of no significance for the purposes of this discussion; suffice it to say, that his fear could be objectively justified or the reason for his fear merely imagined.) This fear is unconscious. Your friend, however, must choose a “reasonable” explanation for his not wanting to go—a “rationalization.” He may discover every day a new one (anyone who has tried to give up smoking knows how easily rationalization comes) or stick to one main rationalization. It does not matter, in fact, whether the rationalization as such is valid or not; what matters is that it is not the effective or sufficient cause for his refusal to go. The most amazing fact, however, is the violence of his reaction when we mention the real motive to him, the intensity of his resistance. Should we not expect him to be glad, or even grateful for our remark, since it permits him to cope with the real motive for his reluctance? However, whatever we think about what he should feel, the fact is that he does not feel it. Obviously, he cannot bear the idea of being afraid. However, why? There are several possibilities. Perhaps he has a narcissistic image of himself in which lack of fear is an integral part, and if this image is disturbed, his narcissistic self-admiration and, hence, his sense of his own value and his security would be threatened. Or perhaps his super-ego, the internalized code of right and wrong, happens to be such that fear or cowardice are bitterly condemned; hence to admit fear would mean to admit that he has acted against his code. Or, perhaps, he feels the need to save for his friends the picture of a man who is never frightened because he is so unsure of their friendship, that he is afraid they would cease liking him if they knew he was afraid. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Any of these reasons may be effective, but why is it that they are so effective? One of the answers lies in the fact that his sense of identity is linked with these images. If they are not “true”—then who is he? What is true? Where does he stand in the World? Once these questions arise, the person feels deeply threatened. He has lost his familiar frame of orientation and with it his security. The anxiety aroused is not only a fear of something specific as Dr. Freud saw it, like a threat to the genitals, or to life, etcetera; but it is also caused by the threat to one’s identity. Resistance is an attempt to protect oneself from a fright which is comparable to the fright caused by even a small earthquake—nothing is secure, everything is shaky; I do not know who I am nor where I am. In fact, this experience feels like a small dose of insanity which for the moment, even though it may last only for seconds, feels more than uncomfortable. It seems quite feasible that many functions of the art of medicine can be taken over by computer, like diagnosis, treatment, prescriptions, etcetera. However, it appears doubtful that the capacity for highly individualized observation, which the outstanding physician has, can be replaced by the computer, exempli gratia, observation of the expression in a person’s eye or face, a capacity impossible to quantify and to translate into programming language. Outstanding achievement in medicine will be lost in a completely automatized system. However, beyond this, the individual will be so completely conditioned to submit to machines that he will lose the capacity to take care of his health in an active, responsible way. He will run to the ”health service” whenever he had a physical problem, and he will lose the ability to observe his own physical processes, to discern changes, and to consider remedies for himself, even simple ones of keeping a diet or doing the right kind of exercise. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

If man should be relieved of the task of being responsible for the functioning of the productive and administrative system, he would become a being of complete helplessness, lack of self-confidence, and dependence on the machine and its specialists; he would not only be incapable of making active use of his leisure time, he would also face a catastrophe whenever the smooth functioning of the system was threatened. In this respect, even if machines could take care of all work, of all planning, of all organizational decisions, and even of all health problems, they cannot take care of the problems arising between man and man. In this sphere of interpersonal relations, human judgment, response, responsibility and decision the machine cannot replace human functioning. There are those, like Marcuse, who think that in a cybernated and “non-repressive” society that is completely satisfied materially there would be no more human conflicts like those expressed in the Greek or Shakespearean drama or the great novels. I can understand that completely alienated people can see the future of human existence in this way, but I am afraid they express more about their own emotional limitations than about future possibilities. If there are no materially unfulfilled needs, the assumption that the problems, conflicts, and tragedies between man and man will disappear is a childish daydream. The young lady we have been discussing for several weeks, Clare suffered from an incapacity to be alone. Clare could have started from the consideration that her spells of misery had already decreased markedly within the last year. They had decreased to such an extent that she herself dealt more actively with external and internal difficulties. This consideration would have led to the question of why she had to resort to the old technique at just this point. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Granted that Clare was unhappy alone, why did solitude present such an intolerable distress as to call for an instantaneous remedy? And if being alone was thus distressing, why could she not do something actively about it herself? Clare could also have started from an observation of her actual behaviour. She felt miserable when alone, but she made hardly any effort to mix with friends or to make new contracts; instead she withdrew into a shell and expected magic help. Despite her otherwise astute self-observation Clare overlooked completely how odd her actual behaviour was on this score. Such a blatant blind spot usually points to a repressed factor of great potency. However, if we miss a problem it catches up with us. This problem caught up with Clare some weeks later. She then arrived at a solution by a somewhat different route from either of those I have suggested—an illustration of the fact that also in psychological matters there are several roads to Rome. Since there is no written report on this part of her analysis, I shall merely indicate the steps that led up to the new insights. The first was a recognition that she could see herself only in the reflected light of others. The way in which she sensed that others evaluated her entirely determined the way she evaluated herself. Clare did not recall how she arrived at that insight. She remembered only that it suddenly struck her so forcibly that she almost fainted. The average person, like Clare, comes to fear living and experiencing the here and now. Rather, she tends to live mainly in the past, through obsessive remembering, and in the future, through obsessive remembering, and in the future, through anxious expectations of catastrophe. The average person is chronically self-conscious and dreads spontaneous action. Experiencing the self as dependent and helpless, this person turns to others for support and becomes angry when they do not live up to expectations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Much of our understanding about healthy personality has come from those who had been intimately acquainted with unhealthy personality. These include present-day counseling theorists such as Carl R. Rogers and original psychotherapists such as Dr. Sigmund Freud, who dedicated their professional lives to the alleviation of emotional suffering. While it is important to search out the unique characteristics of the healthy personality, the high-level functioning person, there is a wealth of learning that is derived from those clients or patients who have shared their innermost anxieties, fears, and sorrows with counselors. The healthy personality struggles to emancipate itself from morbidly dependent relationships with others and is capable of direct awareness of perceptions and feelings, rather than engaging chronically in abstract thinking, in recall, or in wishful or anxious imagination. The healthy personality can trust itself to be spontaneous in action. Sometimes dreams are focused on in therapy because every aspect of a dream represents some dimensions of a person’s experience, much of which the person disowns. By identifying with the different parts of the dream, the person could increase self-awareness, which, in turn, would increase the sense of vitality and foster continuing personal growth. Self-sufficiency, standing on one’s own two feet rather than relying on others for one’s security is extremely important. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

We must all understand that there is no one to blame, and all that I can do is get to work on myself now and break the chain, so that I will not do unto others what has been done to me. It is not enough that I simply know this. I can know without any action taking place either within me or outside me. (The one follows upon the other.) I can feel superior to someone who does not know what I know, without being one white a better person for my knowing. I must undo what has been done to me, by doing in another way. That is where the scary part comes in, in my experience: I can find it comforting to know, and almost terrifying to do. However, it is in the doing that I change too. When I moved to a town a thousand miles away where I knew no one, the doctor who had been recommended to me by his training would not cooperate with the regime which the previous doctor I have found—through painful trial and many errors—worked for me. I decided that it would have to get alone without one. This went well for a while, but then I hit a phase when I got worse in a way that I knew meant that the dosage of cortisone should be adjusted. I could not tell whether I should take more or less. I wanted to telephone the previous doctor for help. I did not and I felt noble about not calling him. This was the first time that I latched onto what has since proved to be a fact of my life, that when I feel noble about not doing something, it is not myself who is doing it. I got worse and worse and felt nobler and nobler. I thought that I was not calling the doctor, and in the objective or physical sense this was true: this person, this body, did not make the phone call. However, the inside World is not so simple as that. It could be, but it has an enormous capacity for getting mixed up because other people have got into me through their directives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

I had a dream which made this clear to me. It is really beautiful, the way that something inside me goes on seeing clearly, even when what I call my “conscious” mind is so mixed-up that it is hell I live in. In my dream, I came into a room where a young lady sat rigidly on a bench with her eyes tight shut, in paint from sunlight that was glaring through a window in a band across her eyes. I thought how silly she was to sit there in torment, when all that she had to do was move and then she would be relieved, and her eyes could open. I (feeling very superior about acting), went to the window and let down the venetian blind, to free her. There were many people sitting around a refectory table absorbed in their conversation with each other. They had no interest in us. When I woke up, I lived with that dream until I knew that the foolish young lady was me—or that part of myself which programmed by other people, my robot self. I was not making the expensive phone call that would relieve me. The people who did not “care” about us were the gossipers who criticized people for being “extravagant” and “neurotic.” At this time, I had paid off my major debts incurred during illness, including fifteen months of back mortgage. I had a thousand $10,000 in the bank. However, I was still haunted by the years of being heavily in debt when I was criticized for expenditures and for being neurotic. The doctor I had not gone back to had told me that I was neurotic. Everyone knows neurotic people plague doctors with telephone calls. I was not going to. It was a completely unreal World that I was living in because the previous doctor did not think I was neurotic to call him when the cortisone needed to be changed, and as for the cost of the call, it would be less than the cost of going to a local doctor, which I would have felt no qualms about doing if I had had confidence in the doctor. When my mind gets mixed up, it just does not make sense. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

When I understood my difficulty, I started toward the phone. However, when I had taken a few steps, I stopped as though I had been stopped—not as though I had stopped myself. I could not go any farther. So I walked away, thought and did other things, and tried again. And got stopped again. When this happened, the effort of making myself take even one more step seemed too much, like trying to push a steam roller out of the way. It seemed foolish to try. Then my mind said to me, over and over, that it was all right, that if I understood what was wrong and knew what had happened to me, everything was fine. It was very convincing, although this told me nothing of what to do about the cortisone. This went on for two days before I fully knew that I had to put an end to it, that there was a battle going on in me that I had to win. I made myself go to the phone. When I heard the doctor’s voice, I said, with quavers that are not reproducible on paper, “This started out to be a medical call, but it has wound up as a psychiatric one.” Then we got around to the cortisone. Ater that, I had some difficulty about calling the doctor, but none that I could not break through fairly easily. After the first several times, I phoned him if I needed his help, and not if I did not, and that was all there was to it. This freedom was very beautiful to me, as it always is when I am free to act in accordance with the total circumstances on my own authority, not on what someone else thinks or says or has thought or has said that I or someone else should do. I live directly with the facts themselves. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In this blend of analysing the results of past actions, reasoning about the probable results of present tendencies, measuring up to the standards of spiritual ideals, and obeying the quiet whispers of intuition, man will find a safe guide for shaping his future course of conduct. One should be eager and quick to judge, condemn, and correct himself, reluctant and slow to judge, condemn, and correct others. When he can bring himself to look upon his own actions from the outside just as he does those of other men, he will have satisfied the philosophical ideal. His errors and shortcomings can be excused by his sincerity and intentions, but that is not enough. He may accept such excuses but life itself will not. The explicit psychotherapy needs of our population are currently being served primarily by the members of three major professions. No one of these professions trains primarily and emphatically for the practice of psychotherapy. The trainings of the members of each of these professions is lengthy, expensive, and provides them respectively with unique skills and knowledge which are either irrelevant or at best tangential to the practice of psychotherapy. While there are a variety of schools of psychotherapy, diverse techniques and approaches to therapy, and different theories as to how it works, there is no evidence that the differences in these academic properties are significantly related to differences in the actual effectiveness of the psychotherapies carried out within them. As a matter of fact, the sheer amount of experience in doing therapy appears to be a major determinant of how the therapists think about or conduct theory. Major differences are found among the least experienced therapists; experienced therapists are more alike in their conceptualizations and practices than they are different. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

As yet a very limited amount of practical research has been conducted into this phenomenon. It has not yet been demonstrated to the general satisfaction of behaviour scientists that psychotherapy is in fact effective in relieving neurotic symptoms or achieving major and lasting re-orientation of disturbed personalities. The need for research is great and, in terms of the numbers of persons participating in therapeutic conversations, the opportunities are equally great. However, the highly trained experts who should be devoting major portions of their time to collaborative research are prevented (or dissuaded) from investigation by virtue of the pressure they feel to render those services whose efficacy is yet uncertain. If we are going to do more and better research, we must provide more therapy and at the same time permit our most highly skilled experts to do less direct therapy. Obviously, we need more therapists—and the only logical way we can hope to get them is to develop a more efficient program for training therapists. A host of persons untrained or partially trained in mental health principles and practices—clergymen, family physicians, teachers, probation officers, public health nurses, sheriffs, judges, public welfare workers, scout masters, county farm agents, and others—are already trying to help and to treat the mentally ill in the absence of professional resources. With a moderate amount of training through short courses and consultation on the job, such persons can be fully equipped with an additional skill as mental health counselors. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Each aspect of today’s fire service requires skill in mental health and the development of basic strategies. The Sacramento Fire Department does some kind of planning. Whether it called budgeting, prefire planning, long-range planning, comprehensive planning, five-year planning or strategic planning, the fire service has a long history of trying to look into the future to predict what will be needed. “My first firehouse turned out to be the same engine company my father had been in. A relatively quiet house. When he got sick and had to retire, that created the vacancy the commissioner appointed me to fill. It was nice of him, he didn’t have to do it. I actually took my father’s locker and everything else. My father was proud to see both my brother and me in the fire department, although he never pushed us to it. It was a great thrill to walk in the door of that firehouse as a fireman for the first time. I don’t know if I even touched the pavement. It was the realization of a lifelong dream. Neither my brother, nor I had dreamt of being an officer. But after a while, through the encouragement of other officers, we got to studying, and we studied together all the time. The tough part of our studies was the laws and ordinances. They were challenging and full of legal terminology. The interesting part, of course, was the firefighting tactics and all the fire hazards. Even the building construction information was interesting, I thought. At least it pertained to the job. But exactly how many feet a fire escape ladder must be from the ground and how many pounds a certain beam must support, that was very important to learn. Over the years the questions come up, and you do remember it, even if you have to look it up to be sure. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

“The tests are a sort of elimination contest, and winning involves a combination of two things. You have to do a lot of studying, and you have to be lucky. I don’t care who you are, they can always ask you about things you don’t know. A lot of fellows do all the work and still don’t make it. My brother ended up a battalion chief, and I made it to division chief. As I said, I never expected to be an officer, and this is just frosting on the cale all the way.” The World has surpassed the visions of our forebearers beyond their wildest dreams. The fire service is no different in this respect. The combined resources of the fire service, support from the community, and its peripheral industries have created a service that is beyond the wildest dreams of the fire chiefs of even a few short years ago. To help the Sacramento Fire Department continue to thrive, you can make a contribution. The range of one with a goodwill excludes none, includes all. One recognizes no enemies, only unloved men. To help preserve America and create more patriots, teach your children to love America and respect law and order. 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. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Have we not all one Father? Hath not one God created us? Why do we deal treacherously, a man against his brother? We, the people of the United States of America, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish a Constitution of the United States of America. #Randolph Harris 20 of 20

The Winchester Mystery House

Mrs. Winchester was having her tea in the morning one early on a Sunday.  Suddenly an extraordinary volley of noises broke out throughout the entire house. She described them as “banging, thumping, the whole place shaking.” The dog, Zip, was shut up in the library, while Mrs. Winchester took refuge in the Daisy Bedroom; the dog whined in terror as the noises increased in volume and in violence. Suddenly the noises ceased. When Mrs. Winchester looked up, she saw a woman in grey, with about half of her figure passed through the bedroom door. She ran to the door, but it was stuck. It was clear that this was no normal haunting.

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/

Life itself Appears Only as a Means of Life

It is not enough to repent today and forget tomorrow. Repentance should be a continuous attitude of heart until the thing repented of is expunged from it and gotten rid of. We may well look with envy upon the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, for he was a man whose course conformed perfectly to the doctrines which he taught. We may have seen high truths in our moods of vision and often written them down, but how to bring an unwilling heart and rebellious body to their subjection is ever a problem to us. The forming of a high character is both a contributory cause to mystical illumination (by removing obstacles in its way) and a consequential result of it. The inner light does not shine in a vacuum. It clarifies the man’s moral judgments and educates his moral conscience. It is still a fact, which may be noted more in the Old World perhaps, that merely by being lofty, strong, and noble in character, a man’s existence helps or comforts some of those he meets even if his circumstances prevent him doing anything outwardly useful to them. There is a natural dignity which comes from inner greatness, and which is to be respected, but there is also another kind which comes from the little ego’s self-infatuation, from its foolish empty pride. There is a natural dignity which comes from inner greatness, and which is to be respected, but there is also another kind which comes from the little ego’s self-infatuation, from its foolish empty pride. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

If a man cannot make the right decision in a time of stress, if he feels bewildered in a time of crisis, this is not sufficient justification for him to expect a master to make his decisions for him. For his blindness and bewilderment measure the depth to which he is sunk in his personal self and lower nature. He would have seen his way more clearly and he kept this will free from their domination. For a master to make his decisions for him during such a critical time is not really to help him but to injure him. For it would prevent the struggle within himself continuing until it could give birth to a higher point of view, to a stronger character. We must put out of our minds every weakening impulse by instant reference to the strength of the Overself, every evil thought by a call to the infinite good of the Overself. In this way character is uplifted and made noble. On the degree of authority which he vests in the Overself, will depend the degree of power he draws from it to conquer the lower nature. There is a perfect relation between the impression we make upon others and the mastery we have achieved over ourselves. The strength of the impression depends on the degree of the mastery. Furthermore, our power over the World outside us will be proportionate to our power over the nature within us. The real tests of character are imposed through our reaction to thoughts as well as to events. Both are needed to show us to ourselves. In the giant mills where steel is prepared, we may glean a great lesson. The crude material if first made to undergo the ordeal of fire, a fire so intense that the material loses it solidity and becomes a bubbling liquid. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

And after its temperature has been lowered sufficiently to resume a solid form again, the still red-hot material has to undergo a further ordeal. It is hammered on every side, pounded from top to bottom. Out of these processes there emerges at last a purified, strengthened, finely tempered steel which will stand up to the most trying tests during wear and work. Men who wish to make something of their lives must take the terrific pounding and suffering to which they have had to submit in the past few years as a similar process intended to turn away from the dross in their character and strengthen the nobility within it. The desire to serve the cause of Truth is praiseworthy, but an inner change of character is at once the basis and the beginning of such work. Passion and emotion are easier to control than thought. For this and other reasons they are brought to heel—not completely, but sufficiently—as a preliminary to the practice of meditation. If possible, a beginner should avoid any thing, any person, any contact, any event, or any environment which he knows will upset his emotional balance or produce negative thoughts. It is only at a later stage when he is more proficient in the art of self-control and has more strength within himself that he should not be afraid of these challenges but should accept them and try to win through. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Mental attitudes can be developed, thoughts can be trained in this direction, and feelings can be stimulated in harmony with it; but all this should be done naturally and not artificially. Discipline without harshness, strength without coldness, balance without pedantry, these are desirable qualities. I made a mistake of thinking that everything that went on in my head was me. Even when I was in college and had a great deal of that cleared up, I got into aching mess for a week about something having to do with money. The back of my neck was clutched, and my head ached unbearably because there were two opposing views fighting in my head and I could not settle for either one. I was so tired of fighting that I did not care which side won, if only the blasted battle would stop. However, no matter which side I decided to choose, I felt guilty. Then I had a dream which, speaking its own language, told me that the conflicting views of money were neither of them mine. It was really a battle between my father, who never forgot a debt whether it was his own or another’s, and my uncle who never remembered one unless he was reminded and then it seemed to him unimportant. My own view of money was neither. What I thought about money had to do with this particular instance which had some unusual factors in it. It was fantastic to m that I had worn myself out for a week in a battle that was really between two men with whom I had spent very little time for twenty years, and both of whom were dead. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

When Carl Rogers spears about “prizing” a person, and conveying the feeling “this person has worth,” I become uneasy that this may be misconstrued to mean a kind of praise, of placing a high (selective, comparative, superior) value on a person. To me, it means not that, but something which is more difficult to describe, something that is not praise, not blame, and at the same time not neutral, flat, or middle-of-the-road. To me it is closer to the equality that I learned from Herbert Talehaftewa, a Hopi who at home on the Reservation was a kind of circuit judge. He was working as a carpenter on a construction job where I was office manager. Cab, the owner and boss, was a Boston snob who looked own on everyone, belittled them to the point where most people who were subjected to it went to pieces and had to pull themselves together again. One day I saw this man look at and speak to the Hopi in this way. Cab was a small man, and the Hopi was quite tall and broad, but Cab managed to look down on the Hopi. I saw the Hopi look at Cab so equally that he drew Cab down to his own level—precisely, and not one bit lower—so that they seemed to be two people eye-to-eye. I was so impressed by this that I looked up to the Hopi as though he were some sort of god. The Hopi turned to me with that same strong equalness in his gaze, and I felt myself being drawn up until we were on the same plane. If only we will regard them so, through him I knew that all men are equal. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

This equalness is what “prizing” and “this person has worth” say to me—not exceptional, although at the same time unique, but equal with me myself who also is not exceptional and still has worth and is unique. “You are meaningful to me as one person to another.” “You are as interesting to me as I am to myself.” Differences in physique, gender, dress, speech, age, education, background—all of these disappear in the sense that although they are present, they are unimportant. We are in direct communication with each other—person to person. At the time of the incident with the Hopi, my office manager work was partly in abeyance because I was cooking three times a day for a dozen Hopi men who worked on construction. The Tewa Indian cook had burned her hand severely and had to stop using it for ten days. I hoped that my cooking was pleasing to the Hopi men, but I did not know. One day Herbert Talehaftewa, the circuit judge at home, said to me evenly, “The men say you are doing the best you can.” I was hurt. It seemed to me that they must think that my cooking was not very good. However, then I realized that what the men said was simple truth, and that their recognition of that was more beautiful to me than praise. They knew me innerly. And is not that the way that all of us wish to be known, no matter how many blocks and barriers we may put up against it? #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

I came to know them innerly too, person to person, and fifteen years later, with only scattered messages in between when I hear of something that has gone well or ill in their personal lives, I feel this deeply within myself, knowing truly what it means to them, to each man in terms of himself, and at the same time in terms of all of us—the whole human race. I am closer now to those Hopi men whom I have not seen for fifteen years than I am to many of the people now around me who have categorized me, put me in a pigeon-hole, who do not know me innerly at all. I would not hesitate to tell any of those Hopi men my troubles, of any kind, because they would simply accept them, not try to advise me, and their acceptance would be in sharing way, without regard to differences. If a man believes he is worth nothing and will become nothing, his seership will be confirmed. Humility can be overstretched. If, as sometimes happens, an aspirant seems to have some unusual power over others, he is strongly advised to check it immediately. If allowed to continue, it could develop into black magic, which leads to self-destruction. Such a person should devote far more effort to the task of ridding himself of these dangers, to improving his thought-process, and to praying to the Overself for protective guidance. There is a certain stage of development when it is more important to work on the improvement of the character than to practise meditation. The fulfilment of one’s Higher Purpose depends on a great deal of strenuous character building and improvement, plus the final overthrow of the ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

A person’s incentive to face himself squarely usually comes from a realization that his happiness or efficiency is being hampered by a certain outstanding disturbance, such as a recurring depression, chronic fatigue, chronic constipation of a functional character, general shyness, insomnia, a lifelong inhibition toward concentrating on work. And he is likely to attempt a frontal attack on this disturbance as such and set out on something of a blitzkrieg. In other words, he may try to get at the unconscious determinants of his predicament without knowing much of anything about his personality structure. The result, at best, will be that some sensible questions will occur to his mind. If his particular disturbance is an inhibition toward work, for example, he may ask himself whether he is too ambitions, whether he is really interested in the work he does, whether he regards the work as duty and secretly rebels against it. He will soon get stuck and resolve that analysis does not help at all. However, there the fault is his and cannot be put at the doorstep of psychoanalysis. A blitzkrieg is never a good method in psychological matters, but a blitzkrieg that is entirely unprepared is bad for any purpose. This would be one that has neglected any previous reconnoitering of the territory to be attacked. It is partly because ignorance in psychological matters is still so heat and so widespread that anyone could even attempt such a dead-end short cut. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Here is a human being with infinitely complex crosscurrents of strivings, fears, defenses, illusion; his incapacity to concentrate on work is one end result of the entirety of these factors. And he believes he can eradicate it by direct action, as simply as he switches off an electric light! To some extent this expectation is based on wishful thinking: he would like to remove quickly the disability that disturbs him; and he likes to think that apart from this outstanding disturbance everything is all right. He does not like to face the fact that an overt difficulty is merely an indication that something is basically wrong with his relation to himself and to others. It is important for him, certainly, to remove his manifest disturbance, and certainly he should not pretend to be disinterested in it and artificially exclude it from his thinking. However, he should keep it in the background of his mind as an area to be explored eventually. He must know himself very well before he can glimpse the nature of his concrete impediment.  If he is alert to the implications of his findings, as he proceeds in the accumulation of this knowledge he will gradually assemble the elements involved in the disturbance. In one way, however, the disturbance can be directly studied, for much can be learned by observing their vacillations. None of these chronic difficulties is equally strong all the time. The hold they have will tighten and lessen. At the beginning the person will be ignorant as to the conditions that account for these ups and downs. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

He may even be convinced that there are no underlying causes and believe that such vacillations are in the “nature” of the disturbance. As a rule this belief is a fallacy. If he observes carefully, he will recognize a factor here and a factor there that contributes to making the condition better or worse. When he has once gained an inkling as to the nature of these contributing factors, his capacity for further observation will be sharpened and thus he will gradually obtain a general picture of the relevant conditions. If you want to analyze yourself, you must not study only the highlights. The upshot of these considerations is the banal truth. You must take every opportunity to become familiar with this stranger or acquaintance that is yourself. This, by the way, is not a figurative way of speaking, for most people know very little about themselves, and only gradually learn to what extent they have lived in ignorance. If you want to know New York, you do not merely look at it from the Empire State Building. You go to the lower East Side; you stroll through Central Park; you take a boat around Manhattan; you ride on a Fifth Avenue bus; and a great deal more. Opportunities to become familiar with yourself will offer themselves, and you will see them, provided you really want to know this queer fellow who lives in your life. You will then be astonished to see that here you are irritated for no apparent reason, there you cannot make up your mind, here you were offensive without meaning to be, here you mysteriously lost your appetite, there you had an eating spell, here you could not bring yourself to answer a letter, there you were suddenly afraid of noises around you when alone, here you had a nightmare, there you felt hurt or humiliated, here you could not ask for a raise in salary or express a critical opinion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

All these infinite observations represent that many entrances to the unfamiliar ground that is yourself. You start to wonder—which here, too, is the beginning of all wisdom—and by means of free association you try to understand the meaning of these emotional upsets. If this development is to take place, one condition is necessary: that the social contradictions and irrationalities which throughout most of man’s history have forced upon him a “false consciousness”—in order to justify domination and submission respectively—disappear or at least are reduced to such a degree that the apology for the existent social order does not paralyze man’s capacity for critical thought. Of course, this is not a matter of what is first and what is second. Awareness of existing reality, and every improvement in reality helps the clarification of thought. Today, when scientific reasoning has reached a peak, the transformation of society, burdened by the inertia of previous circumstances, into a sane society could permit the average man to use his reason with the same objectivity to which we are accustomed from the scientists. This is a matter not primarily of superior intelligence but of the disappearance of irrationality from social life—an irrationality which necessarily leads to confusion of the mind. Man not only has a mind and is in need of a frame of orientation which permits him to make some sense of and structuralize the World around him; he has also a heart and a body which need to be tied emotionally to the World—to man and to nature. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

From the concept of alienated work, Marx proceeds to the concept of man’s alienation from himself, his fellowman, and from nature. He defines labour in its original and nonalienated form as “life activity, productive life “Lebenstaetigkeit, das produktiv Leben”,” and then proceeds to define the species character of man as “free, conscious activity.” (‘freie bewusste Taetigkeit’) In alienated labour the free and conscious activity and thus “Life itself appears only as a means of life.” Marx is by no means only concerned with the alienation of man from his product nor only with the alienation of work. He is concerned with man’s alienation from life, from himself, and from his fellowman. This idea is expressed in the following: “Thus alienated labour turns the species of life man, and also nature as his mental species-property, into an alien being and into a means for his individual existence. It alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life, and his human life. A direct consequence of the alienation of man from the species life is that man is alienated from other men. What is true of man’s relationship to his work, to the product of his work, and to himself, is also true of his relationship to other men, to their labour, and to the objects of their labour. In general, man is alienated from his species life, which means that each man is alienated from others, and that each of the others is likewise alienated from human life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Tremendous progress has been made in the understanding and treatment of mental illness. Perhaps the most significant component of that progress is contained in the improved education of the public, in the broad dissemination of enlightened attitudes. There have been great inroads on the mass ignorance that caused mental illnesses to b viewed as disgraceful stigmata and the mentally ill to be ostracized. In place of widespread public aversion or apathy toward the mentally ill and their problems, we have broad programs for effective social enlightenment and positive community action to provide more and better treatment. In the efforts to make treatment more accessible there is recognition that earlier treatment is far mor effective than later treatment and that early treatment of mild disturbances may interrupt and divert a process that might overwise eventuate in total personality disruption. Much remains to be done. There are still people who have feelings of shame or guilt about mentally ill relatives and neighbours. There are still people who think “insanity” is “inherited,” like blue eyes. There are still people who are afraid of former mental hospital patients. There are still employers who would avoid hiring persons with histories of psychiatric treatment. However, all media of public communication are being used almost daily to mount a massive offensive of information against these uninformed or unthinking purveyors of archaic attitudes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Credit for these significant educational accomplishments to date cannot be given to psychiatrists, psychologists, or social workers. Rather, these accomplishments represent the impact of the “mental hygiene movement.” This is a crusade which was announced with publication in 1908, of the autobiography of Clifford W. Beers, A Mind That Found Itself, and officially launched with the founding in the next year of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene. In the formal statement of its objectives, the National Committee included as a goal “the protection of the mental health of the public.” While the burning instigation to the crusade was aroused in its leader, Clifford Beers, by his experience as a hospitalized mental patient, the goal of the movement was never restricted to correction and improvement of hospital treatment of the severely ill. From the beginning, continuously and increasingly, the mental hygiene movement has placed major emphasis on education and prevention—on programs designed to teach beneficial methods of achieving and maintaining mental health. In working toward these goals, the movement has benefited from the active participation and contributions of psychiatric social workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, teachers, physicians, the clergy and, most particularly, from a host of lay persons who have consistently volunteered their rime and energies in a variety of projects, ranging from assisting in recreational programs in state hospitals to lobbying for improved legislative provisions for care of the mentally ill. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

If the can, most people avoid uncomfortable situations. When someone knows they have done something wrong and do not want to face the consequences, they might ty to avoid meeting face to face with whomever they have wronged. Lying is easier done by someone when done over the phone or by email, or text message. The long pauses are a tactic that is more common than most. The deceiver is not good at lying. It takes him time to come up with something that sounds like it could be truth. When people refuse to take responsibility for what they have done wrong, they will grasp at everything they can to prove they are not to blame. Why purification of character should be needed in order to contact what seems to be above our lowly human characteristics is, indeed, a paradox which only the Overself can answer. Perhaps it is a test of our devotion—for it is known that the Higher Self will not surrender her revelations to anyone who does not love her completely. Purification is merely the casting out of lesser loves for the sake of this supreme Love. When he begins to exercise these scruples, he will begin to question the impulse to act for its source much more than for its purpose. The advantages of an excellent physique are plain enough but they are not good enough. Something more is needed to make a man. He needs excellence character and intellect. However, even this is still not enough if he is to find self-fulfillment. Intuitive feeling, which takes him into a holier presence if followed up, must be cultivated. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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Sensuality Often indulges Impurity—The Hugh O’Connor Act

Who you are often determines what you see. It will be found a common case, that when we have yielded to our instincts, and then have to soothe conscience, we must slaughter somebody, for a sacrificial offering to our sense of comfort. As we perceive events, the brain actively selects, organizes, and integrates sensory information into a photograph or model of the World. A man was in the supermarket when an eight-year-old girl suddenly came running around the corner. She looked back and screamed, “Stop! Stop! You’re killing him! You’re killing my father!” Naturally the witness was interested! He quickly retraced her path, and was greeted by a grisly scene. A man was sprawled out on the floor with another man on top of him. The guy on top was huge and looked only half human. He has his alleged victim by the throat and was allegedly beating his head against the floor. There was blood everywhere, and the witness decided to do the right thing and run to get help. By the time the store manager and the witness returned to the alleged scene of the crime, the police were just arriving. It took quite a while to figure out what happened, but it turns out this was not a crime scene at all. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

 The guy sprawled out on the floor had passed out and hit his head. This caused a cut that accounted for the blood everywhere. The man that appeared to be on top of him saw the individual fall and was trying to keep him from further injuring himself, and was also loosening his collar. If the witness had never returned, he would have sworn in court that he saw murder. The little girl’s description completely shaped the witness’s perceptions. This perhaps is understandable. However, the witness will never forget the shock he felt when he met the alleged murderer—the man he had seen a few moments before as huge, vicious, and horrible-looking. It turns out that the alleged murderer was not a stranger after all. He was a neighbor of the witness and they had seen each other several times before and actually knew each other by name. Also, he was not a big man, but a small, nice looking man. The mental process of organizing sensations into meaningful patterns is called perception. This process is so automatic that it can take a drastic misperception to call attention to it. Perception creates faces, melodies, works of art, illusions, and other misrepresentations due to a lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

Perception refers to interpretations we take in through our senses. “All in the Family” is a television series with a lead character called Archie Bunker, he is the head of the family, hardworking, and very outspoken. His wife, Edith, is a sweet woman, and like to tell stories to express her feelings so that she is considerate of everyone, hoping they will pick up on the message without outright saying what she means. Edith is a housewife and works very hard to do her job, she organizes her work by the days of the week and because she is a woman she faces discrimination in banking and finding employment outside of the house. Their beautiful daughter Gloria is a loving wife and married to a young man name Michael, whom Archie calls “Meathead.” They all live in the same house, while Gloria works at a department store, which she was fired from for being pregnant, and Meathead is in school studying to become a college professor. Many people would assume that Archie is a bigot because of some of the things he says, but he does not really mean them, it was just the way he was raised. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

Archie is not racist, and he actually stands up for women’s rights, like the time he got Edith’s friend a job at his factory. Archie also supports equality and let his neighbor’s son, who is African American move in with them for a while when his father threw him out for being engaged, to a young lady who is half European American and African American. The reason people think Archie is racist is because of some of the things he says, but he learned these words and ideas from his father and never questioned his father because he was the man who raised him, fed him, provided “bread and bored” for him and protected him. So, in Archie’s eyes his father could never be wrong. And although Archie was conditioned to say certain things, he was a very loving man. When Michael finally got a job as associate professor and had to move from the East Coast to the West Coast, Archie was so very sad and did not want him to take the job. He had actually grown to love Meathead, and did not want to be far from his daughter Gloria and his grandson Joey. Sometimes we have to look beyond the surface to see what is really going on. Actions speak louder than words. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

As I was watching this television show, I would call home to my mother and tell her about the funny things that Archie Bunker did and said. I really enjoyed watching the show because he reminded me of my grandfather and Edith reminded me of my grandmother. And I also started watching “The Jefferson’s,” and when I would go home I will tell my mother about the funny things that George Jefferson did. These shows are new to me, but when I was looking up the actor who played George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley), I found out he had died. And it kind of made me sad. I was talking to my mother about how I see this man on TV every day and he is so very much alive to me, but how he was dead. And it is kind of sad to get attached to people and find out they are dead. Then, she broke the news to me that Archie Bunker is dead, too. I kind of had a feeling. So, I went home to look up information on Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor). Carroll O’Connor was Born 2 August 1924 and died 21 June 2001.  He suffered a heart attack. His career spanned over four decades. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

Carroll O’Connor went to the University of Montana-Missoula, he was an actor, producer, and director. His wife is still alive, her name is Nancy Fields O’Connor. In 1962, while he was in Rome filming “Cleopatra,” Carroll O’Connor and his wife adopted a six-day-old- boy, and named him Hugh O’Connor. They took him back to America and at the tender age of 17, Hugh worked with his father on the set of “Archie Bunker’s Place, which was starring Carroll O’Connor, of course. Then both father and son went on to work on the television show “In the Heat of the Night.” Unfortunately, Hugh O’Connor became addicted to drugs and when he could not break the habit, he called his father and told him that he was going to kill himself. By the time Carroll was able to get help to his son, he was already dead. Following his son’s death, Carroll O’Connor spent the rest of his life working to raise awareness about drug addiction. He successfully lobbied to get the state of California to pass legislation allowing family members of an addicted person or anyone injured by a drug dealer’s actions, including employers, to sue for reimbursement for medical treatment and rehabilitation costs and other economic and noneconomic damages. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

The law, known as the Drug Dealer Civil Liability Act in California, went into effect in 1997. It is also referred to as the Hugh O’Connor Act. Hugh O’Connor started the fight against the man who sold the drugs to Hugh. He called Harry Perzigian a partner in murder of Hugh O’Connor. “I can’t forget it. There isn’t a day that I don’t think of him and want him back and miss him, and I’ll feel that way until I’m not here anymore,” said Carroll O’Connor. It would be well I those who stifle their consciences, and commit crimes, would set up a sort of medico-moral diary, and record their symptoms minutely day by day. Such records might help to clear away some vague, conventional notions. Drug addiction is a serious problem in America. An estimated 570,000 people in America die from drug overdoses every year. Many people do not understand why or how other people become addicted to drugs. They mistakenly think that those who use drugs lack moral principles or willpower and that they could stop their drug use simply by choosing to. In reality, drug addiction is a complex disease, and quitting usually takes more than good intentions or a strong will. Drugs can change the brain in ways that make quitting almost impossible, even for those who want to. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

Drug addiction is a chronic disease characterized by drug seeking and use that is compulsive or difficult to control, despite harmful consequences. The initial decision to take drugs is usually voluntary for most people, but repeated drug use can lead to brain changes that challenge an addicted person’s self-control and interfere with their ability to resist intense urges to take drugs. These brain changes can be persistent, which is why drug addiction is considered a relapsing disease—people in recovery from drug use disorders are at increased risk for returning to drug use even after years of not taking the drugs. People who suffer from addiction often have one or more accompanying medical issues, which may include lung or cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancer, and mental disorders. Imaging scans, chest X-rays, and blood tests show the damaging effects of long-term drug abuse throughout the body. For example, research has shown that tobacco smoke causes cancer of the mouth, throat, larynx, blood, lungs, stomach, pancreas, kidney, bladder, and cervix. In addition, some drugs of abuse, such as inhalants, are toxic to nerve cells and may damage or destroy them either in the brain or the peripheral nervous system. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

Drug abuse and mental illness often co-exist. In some cases, mental disorders such as increased stress, depression, or schizophrenia may precede addiction; in other cases, drug abuse may trigger or exacerbate those mental disorders, particularly in people with specific vulnerabilities. Some research suggests that marijuana use is likely to precede use of other licit and illicit substances and the development of addiction to other substances. It should come as no surprise that the vast majority of heroin users have used marijuana (and many other drugs) not only long before they used heroin, but while they are using heroin. Like nearly all people with substance abuse problems, most heroin users initiated their drug use early in their teens usually beginning with alcohol and marijuana. There is ample evidence that early initiation of drug use primes the brain for enhanced later responses to other drugs. And Marijuana use is positively correlated with alcohol use and cigarette use, as well as illegal drugs like cocaine and methamphetamine. Allowing recreational use of marijuana is dangerous because of the aggressive commercialization of marijuana is now rampant and growing. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

The legalization of marijuana increases availability of the drug and acceptability of its use. This is bad for public health and safety not only because marijuana use increases the risk of heroin use, but also because it markets marijuana and an array of increasingly potent products in ever more attractive ways that encourage marijuana use. Legalizing marijuana will have lasting negative effects on future generations, it will increase the national drug abuse problem, including expanding the opioid epidemic. Lawmakers in California “have been darkened in their understanding and separated from the life of God because of their ignorance that is in them due to the hardening of their hearts. Having lost all sensitivity, they have given themselves over to sensuality so as to indulge in every kind of impurity, with a continual lust for more,” (Ephesians 2-17-19). People who are addicted to marijuana are three times more likely to be addicted to heroin. With California allowing recreational marijuana to be sold in California, but it still being considered an illegal drug by the federal government, it seems with the Drug Dealer Civil Liability Act, families and employers can now seek help to pay for the problems and rehabilitation cost of their children and family members. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10