Photos with new eyes, tigers among us, and proving there is life after death

I have had to have my photographer Doc take some new photos of me without glasses. He has had quite a time to take some that flatter me. The above header is about the best he has been able to do with the subject. I took a profile photo of it to put on blogspot and Facebook. I spent an hour or so last evening scanning some old photos to Facebook. I love looking at the albums my family and friends put up there.
I called a friend last night whose dear husband passed away not long ago, and we were talking about the hereafter. She said she had some doubts about psychic pickups in dreams, etc, and mentioned that she listens to George Noory on talk radio, as I do if I listen to anyone. Lately to tell the truth I have not dared listen to radio in my bedroom at night since I am going a little deaf and need to turn it up to hear, and my neighbor has such keen ears he calls the police over imaginary sounds. I doubt if he can stand it here too many more months since he is now being shunned for good reason. It must be very lonely to come out as a tiger among people now wary of being clawed. Oh, by the way it is against the rules to post questionable pictures on your entrance, so since the owners are here visiting the complex from back east I believe he may have been told to remove that picture of a tiger. I was quite relieved to see it gone. I don't like to be reminded that I might live in a jungle.
Oh by the way, someone who saw the video I made in which I talked about the chronically mentally ill residents sometimes becoming dangerous made a comment on Youtube saying that was ridiculous, they were no more violent than anyone else. She also said that watching Doc and me in videos made her blood boil, and I ought to have her for a neighbor! Grrrr. Snarl, snarl. Oh there is more than one tiger or tigress watching us. She told me to move if I did not like it.
I must protest that unfortunately many murders have been committed in Phoenix by chronically mentally ill people. That is a fact as anyone who keeps track of violent crime can testify. Sadly, a police officer who stopped such a man just for an obscure license plate was shot in the head and killed Friday. A beloved police officer whose death by such violence caused such a meltdown of shock and grief as we have not had since the last good police officer was murdered by a citizen turned tiger.
HUD housing by law must not deny residency to ex convicts either, who may have been jailed for a combination of mental illness, criminal behavior, and substance abuse which is often the case.
I have chosen to continue to reside here, taking the chance that dangerous tendencies in a resident can be contained as I have become attached to this area and this historic landmark hotel as a residence. Besides the swimming pool will be wonderful this summer!
As for the hereafter I will continue to study and think on how it can be proved to exist. Remember, there has to be an extremely good escape hatch for people to escape pain when all else fails. The death of the body ensures the end of agony as is experienced by say a bullet wound in a vital spot. The good and the innocent die, so from where will justice come when that happens? There always seems to be unfinished business in such deaths. We need something like a hereafter desperately, it seems.
I heard on George Noory last night a man saying that science has never detected anything leaving the body when it dies. That is it. The end. Suggesting that the concept that a soul exists and departs to a heaven may be, sadly, pure fantasy.
I have pondered many hours and believe there could be a number of explanations why proof of a spirit is so hard to come by. I am going to be asking my sister LaRae some questions in the months to come. She has agreed to be the spirit on the other side who will try to explain to me as best as she can what happens when we 'pass over.' She has passed over. Tell me some of what you have told me, LaRae, in our conversations which of course could be suspect to science, too. I am making all this up. You are not talking to me. And so on. I don't say you are talking to me as we talk here, but I say you know my questions and you are responding. Here is the gist of what I think I am picking up from you.

LARAE: When I passed I did not believe in a hereafter either. I hoped but I was very doubtful, so when I found myself still existing I thought that I must have lost my mind and was in a mental hospital now. I went through days and days of doubt. Drifting in and out of consciousness. I was conscious of someone trying to help me and finally it occurred to me that I may have died. Was this oblivion? I asked this question over and over. And finally, you will find this quite amusing, I just got tired of trying to be obliterated and said I am going to get up and believe in whatever religious heaven I can find, just like everybody else. I was tired of this gray hell.
I had put up a good fight in life against religion which I thought was wrong, misguided, full of falsity. So when I got feeling better I asked the attendants to take me to talk to some people I knew. Somebody else who died. That was the beginning of my starting to come out of it. I really had cracked up. I realized that I had such great issues with religion that I was going to have to start from there. I felt I had been lied to. I could feel this great stubbornness in me about accepting anything. But I was finally able to isolate this lump of stubbornness that was stopping my progress. Yes, what is known as 'religion' can be flawed, but it is the language that is used to describe the hereafter. So the hereafter had become suspect. I fought against it as I fought against 'religion.' It was all a lie. Science said there was no such thing as a hereafter. So why did I find myself in this sick prison of the mind where sometimes I did not know if I was alive or dead. This went on for months. I was very very sick. I did not know when I could get well, I guess when science did discover there was a hereafter. Until then I would be forced to inhabit this cold grey hell where there seemed to be neither life or death, no end but no progress. If you didn't know what mental illness was before, now you have met it personified in me, as I was then. I did not know if I could ever 'get well.' Existence seemed like an illusion. Had I really ever lived? Well, I had to go on like this for months. I will tell you more next time. There were no miracles. I got better very very slowly. You might say as I rejected the dark conclusions of 'science' just as I had once rejected the falsities of religion. The story of how I lost my faith and regained it is the story of my life, both before and after 'death.'

Why expecting 'meds' to keep people from doing bad things fails

I live in a HUD complex where quite a number of mental patients on disability reside so we are always hearing discussion of how this one and that one went off their meds and on a rampage. A great deal of blame is sent the way of the prescribers who have often been sued in our city as ultimately responsible for some terrible murders because they did not monitor their patients close enough and somehow keep them from going off their meds and committing some ghastly crimes.
Another such crime is in the paper today which galvanizes me finally to speak out. A teacher at a Catholic school around 62 did not come to work and when police were sent to check on her uncharacteristic silence, she was found dead and her undoubtedly mentally ill son was digging a grave size hole in the backyard quite openly. All too often this kind of crime is splashed across the front pages.
Another mentally ill man committed the crime of bludgeoning to death two little boys playing in the park who were the same age of his own two boys who were living in another state at the time. This was such a henious crime that it hit national headlines.
A settlement was given by the jury of 36 million dollars recently to a family that sued after a mentally ill man came and shot a young father and another man who were gathering carts to take into a shopping center. The prescribers were the ones who were going to have to cough up this settlement. I don't know how Value Options and other such providers keep functioning with such ruinous judgments by jurors frustrated with crime after crime like this. Value Options lost the contract they had with the county to care for their mentally ill, and another company had taken over when the mentally ill man went on the rampage and killed the two little boys.
But such settlements will not bring back life, and I am thinking that we as a society are expecting the impossible of pills. The mentally ill patient always has the option of not taking them. Aren't we avoiding another conclusion we might come to about a society that would expect pills which the patient may or may not take to stop the savage beast from emerging to kill.
Nobody ever talks about a society that does not hold its self in check from killing policies and then expects pills to do the job in others. That is just not rational thinking.
Too many times families become unable to control a member who has begun to exhibit violent tendencies. I think we are seeing the break down in these cases of a society that does not constantly present a good example of restraint to its most unstable members. We are raising people to kill. And we don't know why?
I believe our society is suffering from a serious case of mental illness that pills will not cure. Only recognizing the malady and taking the steps to rid ourselves from such thinking is the only thing that is going to stop our progress into more and more violence. These unstable people are not getting the example they need from birth.
I am reading that one in five young people now days gets diagnosed with a mental illness. That should be enough to tell us right there that is a big fallout from compromising on acts of violence. We delude ourselves at our own peril.
Once a person is on the rampage, nobody can stop the carnage. Somebody is going to get hurt. The power of the mind and good example of restraint is what I think keeps people from committing violence. Stability in the parent and in the society around them is what builds sanity. We are expecting way too much from pills.