To the hands I cannot see, for the love of America, judge me tenderly. Through austerity and self-control, one can attain a realization of one’s eternal self. Inner mystical knowledge brings a union with the Divine. God and the Devils do not dwell in mythical Heaven or Hell, but in our daily actions. Mysticism was practiced in the second millennium B.C. or earlier, and it is considered a ritual religion, which is surrounded by the idea that knowledge gives one a quasi-magical power over aspects of reality and allows on to identify with things in a whole new way. Mysticism centers on the pacifying of the mind and of attaining interior insight, it is an awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery. It is a timeless experience, that involved an apprehension of the transcendent (of something, state, or person lying beyond the realm of things), that gives an individual serenity, and normally accrues upon a course of self-mastery and contemplation. One gains a kind of rapport with the World or panenhenic feeling. Various abnormal mental states, such as those induced by mescalin, lysergic acid, and alcohol are sometimes considered mystical, but they are far enough removed from mainstream mysticism for it to be reasonable to neglect them here. 

 Mystical consciousness is also said to be like a state beyond dreamless sleep, it goes beyond ordinary perceptions, mental images, and thoughts. It is thus not describable by the ordinary expressions for mental states.  Also, such paranormal phenomena as levitation are sometimes ascribed to mystics, although they are usually regarded as a secondary significance.  An infinity of eternal life or souls brings about an isolation of the soul from the material environment, and it is a final deliverance from suffering. Mysticism is supposed to allows one to develop a Heavenly eye, which enables him to view the entire World and attain supreme insight and supreme peace. The achievement of inner harmony and insight where your body is fresh; you are vigorous and fit, and things are so bright, so pure, it is the highest, the eternal place. The eternal place is, of course, Nirvana. It is totally opposite of the use of complex psychological categories in explaining human nature. The experience involves both the attainment of a marvelous serenity as knowledge and ignorance is dispelled. These terms served bring out the ineffability and undifferentiated nature of ultimate reality, which in turn correspond to the undifferentiated and void nature of the contemplative experience itself. 

Of course, the adoration and love of God, leads to a different valuation of mysticism. One need not be blind to the World if they are performed in a spirit of self-surrender to God; they way of works should be seen in the light of the way of devotion. Mystical experience is the duality of the soul and God implicit with the worshiper having a strong sense of the majesty and glory of God. Their virtues are wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. Different strengths contribute to each virtue. The virtue of humanity and mysticism include the strengths bravery, persistence, integrity, and vitality. Doing the right the at greater risk or cost to oneself strikes us as more heroic than doing good in a way that benefits oneself. People will accomplish greater things because of their feelings toward others and will succeed each time through hope, faith, loyalty, and compassion. Empathy plays an important role in altruistic behavior. Some believe mysticism is part of the essence of life and through one’s intellect, one has an affinity with God; and though the contemplative life, one can in principle attain a state where one can see God’s essence, and will give people ever fresh chances of living the pure life and would provide the punishment for those who transgressed.  

Adam was a Universal being who before the Fall embraced the Universe, then in an ideal state. With his fall, the material World was created, and the light of his divine nature was fragmented into the sparks that illuminate the myriads of livings soul. In the final consummation, all will be reunited. Asceticism is concerned with the devotion in all one’s acts—were the means of purifying the soul. Social conditions may have helped the growth of such doctrines, for the emphasis on meekness, love, and a quiet interior life were well adapted to the unhappy outer circumstances of the people, and mysticism hope gave the contemplative a cosmic role. Through righteous acts the favor of God is channeled. That I always did love, I bring thee proof: that till I loved I did not love enough. That I shall love always, I offer thee that love is life, and life hath immortality. This, dost thou doubt, sweet? Then have I nothing to show but calvary. He fumbles at your spirit as players at the keys before they drop full music on; he stuns you by degrees, prepares your brittle substance for the ethereal blow, by fainter hammers, further heard, then nearer, then so slow.

Your breath has time to straighten, your brain to bubble cool—deals one imperial thunderbolt that scalps your naked soul. Mysticism became the pattern after which eternal life was conceived. Humans are considered the connecting link between the visible and invisible Worlds. One was created perfect but through the Fall lost his immortal, incorruptible, and passionless nature. A certain cope for free will remained, however. This image of God, although defaces, was not entirely lost. The restoration of man to the true end for which he was made—the contemplation of God—was effected through Christ’s incretion. Mysticism takes place through the illumination of the soul; its divinization, through the Divine Light. O Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. In a mysterious manner, the very repetition of the sacred name of Jesus was supposed to contain Divine power. The soul and God remain distinct in substance, although they are joined by the glue of love. Through man’s love flowing up to God and through the downward movement of God’s grace, the two become united. This mysticism is combined with intense powers and one can gain continuing union with God through love. This love is nourished by concentrating upon God, to the exclusion of mutable things.

The Winchester Mystery House

The Winchester Mystery House appears to be a bright Queen Anne Victorian Mansion from the Old World filled with sunshine and love, but there are many frightening tales that have taken place in this beautiful home of Mrs. Winchester. Hidden inside is an evil which lies hidden from the World. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

 

Very few beings really seek knowledge in this World. Mortal or immortal, few really ask. None of us really changes over time, we only become more fully what we are. The prince is never going to come, everyone knows that, and maybe sleeping beauty is dead. We know that the brain is not immortal, and that the organized energy of a living body, becomes incorporeal when it is disembodied. The difficulty is to attach enough sense to the expression so that some discovery about disembodied people could provide us with grounds for believing we survive death. In their present senses persons words have logical liaisons of the very great human importance. Personal identity in the present sense is the necessary condition of both accountability and expectation. This is only to report that it is unjust to reward or punish someone for something unless, as a minimum condition, one is the same person who did the deed and that it is absurd to expect things to happen to me in 1984, as a minimum condition, there is going to be a person in existence in 1984 who will be the same person as I am.  The difficulty is to change the use of persons words so radically that it becomes significant to talk of people’s surviving dissolution without changing it in such a way that these crucial logical liaisons must be broke. If this difficulty cannot be overcome—and there seems to be little reason to think that it can—then the apocalyptic words that our life is endless as the visual field is without limit. Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through. However, the soul carries with it experiences and knowledge. His memory stretches to a time before he knew humans, perhaps, two thousand years ago. He was born on an island of perpetual warmth, a kind of Garden of Eden where life went on in innocence and crimes were rare. There was a great cataclysm, and they came to Britain and broke up into their individual families. They adapted their initial cultural practices to the changed circumstances of four seasons. Their disdain for, and indifference (not cruel) treatment of, human is also noticeable. It is mostly due to the social and cultural differences. One of the questions that Christian theologians have repeatedly discusses is whether there is both general and special revelation.  

Are nature and history as a whole—including the whole religious history of mankind—revelatory of God, as well as the special occasions of the Bible Heilsgeschichte? Many theologians of all communions today hold that God is indeed Universally active and that his activity always discloses something of his nature, even though his fullest personal self-revelation has occurred only in the person of Christ. It touches on the meaning of human power and its corrupting influence and their contact with humans. “They stole our women and raped them until they died of the bleeding. They stole our men and sought to enslave them, and laughed at them and ridiculed them, and in some instances drove them mad. Often we fought them off. We were not by nature as brutal, by any means, but we could defend ourselves, and great circles were concened to discuss their metal weapons and how we might make our own. Indeed, we imprisoned a number of human beings, invaders all, to try to pry the knowledge from them. And the men have deep, inveterate hatred of our softness. They called us ‘the fools of the circle’ or ‘the simple people of the stones.’” The locus of revelation is not propositions but events, and its content is not a body of truths about God but “the living God” revealing himself and history with humans. The nonpropositional view thus centers upon what has come in recent theology to be known as Heilsgeschichte (“salvation history”) identified as the medium of revelation. It Is not supposed that God has marked his presence by performing a series of miracles, if “miracle” is taken to mean an event that compels a religious response by eluding all natural explanations. It is not characteristic of those theologians who think of revelation in nonpropositional terms to regard the Bible miracles as constituting theistic proofs. Rather, the Heilsgeschichte is the way in which a certain segment of human history—beginning with the origins of the national life of Israel and ending with the birth of the Christian community as a response to Christ—was experienced by men of faith and became understood and remembered as the story of God’s gracious dealings with his people.

What Christianity (and, confining itself to the Old Testament, Judaism) refer to as the story of salvation is a particular stream of history that was interpreted by prophets and apostles in the light of a profound and consistent ethical monotheism. They saw God at work around them in events that accordingly possessed revelatory significance.  God continues his story and describes the slaughter of his people while they were celebrating a great religious festival. On their flight to escape the human, they find it necessary to resort to laughter to rescue their fellow angles or to protect themselves. However, he draws the parallel with other tribes throughout history who underestimate the blood lust of their conquerors and so list out to them in many other ways they were their superiors. The role of Christianity as a corrupting influence becomes publicly observable in the series of events forming its basis belonging to the secular World of history and is capable of a variety of political, economic, psychological, and other analyses besides that of a theistic faith. Humans have a blood lust. Humans sacrifice and blood lust are the root of human religion. Even as many of you are attracted to the teaching of the gentle Christ, these teachings stressing Christ’s gentleness lose their meaning, as they become the basis for even greater slaughter and lust for money. The virtual annihilation of the angels results from their division into Christian and pagan groups. Adam is forced to watch as his own wife Eve is forced to abandon the antiquated ways.  Revelation refers to the completed communication that occurs when God’s approach has met with a human response. Good negotiators appreciate the role of ambivalence and can resist drawing conclusions from contradictory information. People saw more patterns in obscure pictures, even where to patterns existed, and expressed their beliefs more fervently. Christ is the divine Son incarnate in a human life, seeking to draw humans into a new life in relation to God. “Gentle beings, out of time, out of place, and maybe out of luck. And of such tragic import to his fledgling and her human kindred.

I, having spent two centuries in the Blood, should possess a wisdom and restraint that makes such a request unnecessary, but alas, within my heart I feed a human flame that it may never completely go out, and it is the heat of this flame which distracts me now and renders me so powerless in your presence.” Recall in the Bible that angels were mating with humans and also eating them and that God flooded the World to destroy him because he saw his Earthly creation, human, which he had cherished and loved so much had a blood lust and provoked the angels to attack and feed on them, which is probably why Lucifer was so jealous and upset that God loved these worthless, lustful, evil beings so much. There is certainly an event and appreciation; and in the coincidence of these revelations consists of. However, the discernment are interpretations in which men are convinced that they are conscious of God at work in and through certain events of both their personal experiences and World history. Is there an image of God (imago dei) in man that constitutes an innate capacity to respond to divine revelations or whether, on the contrary, human nature is so totally corrupted by the Fall that in revealing himself to men God has created them in a special capacity for response? Certainly, it is clear that humans have exploited angles. A mere listing of their atrocities is sufficient to make the point. At one time or other ritual slaughter, rape, infanticide, various tortures, and other physical violations. In addition, there are the usual psychological abuses; perpetuation of stereotypes, denigration of their physical and cultural traits, attribution of brutal traits, and various means for devaluing their lives. At once, it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.  

The Winchester Mystery House

Come explore the weird phenomena, ghostly legends, and ghoulish folklore of the Winchester Mystery House. Hear tales of vengeful ghosts, malevolent, red-eyed orbs, and statues that come to life. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

 

 

 

Fines and imprisonments and corporal punishments operate more forcibly on the human mind than all the fears of damnation. Punishment is deliberately inflicted pain or deprivation on an offender because of an offense he has committed; it is deliberately imposed, not just the natural consequence of a person’s action (like a hang-over), and the unpleasantness is essential to it, not an accidental accompaniment to some other treatment (like the pain of a dentist’s drill). It is imposed by an agent authorized by the system of rules against which an offense has been committed; a lynching is not a standard case of punishment. My interest in punishment is mainly connected with questions of justification. It is, prima facie (based on the first impression), wrong to deliberately inflict suffering or deprivation on another person, yet punishment consists in doing precisely this. What conditions would justify it? Or, more generally, what kind of considerations would count toward a justification? 

We must reconcile the apparently conflicting principles that wrongdoers should be punished and that it is wrong to make another man suffer. For instance, if a person had already committed a crime, that would clearly be relevant to the questions of whether he ought to be punished (although it might not be conclusive). What if he were only expected to commit a crime in the future? Or, again, is it relevant to the question of whether this man should be punished to say that punishing him would deter others? And assuming that criminals ought to be punished, how should we set about deciding appropriate penalties? Punishment can be justified only if it has beneficent consequences that outweigh the intrinsic evil of inflicting suffering on human beings. However, it is better that the wicked should be punished than that they should prosper more than the virtuous and, perhaps, at the hands of their expense. Sin is always punished in this World, whatever may come in the next. There is always some penalty in health, in comfort, or in peace of mind to be paid for every wrong. 

One can take for granted the principle that wrongdoers should be punished and ask whether a particular cause of punishment was justified. For instance, “The War on Drugs,” is an American term commonly applied to a campaign of prohibition of drugs, with the purpose to reducing the illegal drug trade. It was started by President Richard Nixon 18 June 1971. Since then, “The War on Drugs,” has cost Americans $51,000,000.00 a year. And in the year 2014, 1.6 million people were arrested for drug offenses in the United States of America, 700,993 of those were for marijuana law violations, 1,297,384 (83 percent) of those arrest were for possession only, and 46.4 percent of people are in prison for drug related charges. Punishment has the advantage of impressing both on the criminal and on everyone else that a breach of law and morals is so serious that society must do something to prevent it.  Happy is it for those few who are detected in their sins, and brought to exemplary punishment for them in this World.  

However, this raises the philosophical question of how one justifies a set of rules or an institution like a penal system to incarceration of people who deal drugs, but allows corporations to deal drugs and even local governments want in on the action. Mind you, it is still against federal law to sale and distribute drugs like marijuana. Nevertheless, according to David Downs of the East Bay Express in “Oakland, California USA, the city of Oakland wants to require any new Oakland marijuana company to make the city a partner—and direct revenue from the cannabis industry to elected officials’ special projects. Oakland would require new marijuana-shop owners to give the city 25 percent ownership stake in a business, plus one seat on a company’s board.” So, in what sense can punishment be said to restore the balance or annul the wrong, when it taken for granted that criminals deserve to be punished? How can we have 1.6 million people arrested for drug crimes annually, making up nearly 50 percent of prison populations, but allow corporations and cities to be involved in the cultivation and distribution of drugs that are deemed illegal by the federal government?  

Nor is it clear that virtue must be rewarded or that universal justice requires the kind of human rectification that this sort of retubutivism envisages. Of course, in a universe in which the wicked prospered, there might be no incentive to virtue. Again, evil motives and a bad character are necessary conditions for wickedness, but not of legal guilt and criminal liability. The state’s function is to punish breaches of those rules which in the public interest ought to be upheld; it is a matter of indifference in law (but not in morals) that some men who observe the rules do so from the unworthy motive of fear and others break them from the laudable motives of principle. Conversely, it is at least doubtful whether the criminal law should provide penalties for offenses against morality except where the public interest is at doubtful whether the criminal law should provide penalties for offenses against morality except where the public interest is at stake—exempli gratis (for the sake of example), whether it should extend to cases of lying other than, say, false pretenses and perjury. 

Punishment is necessary to annul the wrong done by the criminal. By this something more than restitution or compensation, neither of which is strictly punishment. It is, rather, that the criminal has upset the balance of the moral order, which can be restored only be their being made to suffer. In what sense can punishment be said to restore the balance or annul the wrong, unless it is taken for granted that criminals deserve to be punished? All punishment is a mischief…If it ought at all to be admitted, it ought only to be admitted in as far as it promises to exclude some greater evil. By reforming the criminal, by deterring them or others from similar offenses in the future, or by directly preventing further offenses by imprisonment, deportation, or execution, the good that comes out of punishment may outweigh the intrinsic evil of suffering deliberately inflicted. Without such effects, or if the suffering inflicted exceeded the suffering avoided, the institution would be unjustified. 

If people generally could be persuaded that an innocent man was guilty, some would justify punishing him since as a warning to other he would be just as useful as a genuine offender. Again, offenders might be deterred by threatening to punish their wives and children, particularly, if as is so often the case with political terrorists and resistance fighters, it were difficult to catch the offenders themselves. Or again, if punishment could be justified as a way of reforming criminals, it would seem better to punish them before, rather than after, they have committed their crimes. Nonetheless, do not lose sight of the two conditions which are necessary to the very idea of punishment—namely, that an offense should have been committed and that punishment shall be of the offender himself, who alone can be said to deserve it. Even justice makes victims. Punishment is punishment only when it is deserved; punishment for any other reason is a crying injustice. Proof must be built up stone by stone. The end crowns the work. It is not enough that Justice should be morally certain; she must be immorally certain—legally that is.  

I hate the man in whom kindness produces no responsive affection, and injustice no swell, no glow of resentment. Some think that it is a good idea to punish innocent people provided that such punishment causes less suffering than might otherwise be caused by the would-be criminals it deters because in the end, the deception would break down, that it could not be used systematically, or that the long-term consequences would be bad for society. However, these answers are unsatisfactory because they depend on assumptions of purely contingent consequences. Our revulsion against punishing innocent men seems to go deeper than that. In any cause, these answers will not meet the case for punishing hostages, which can certainly be done systematically and requires no deception or secrecy. The truth is always incredible, because the blind eyes of humanity can see only half-truths except by great effort. Child predators like, Kevin Maurice Johnson, the Mayor of Sacrament, California USA will eventually be punished for his crimes. Kings are accountable for injustice permitted as well as done.