Law Enforcement- Certified Crime Prevention Specialist- PhD Religious Studies- Served in US Army- Artist- Art Institute of Atlanta-Lives in rural Virginia-
High cortisol is the real reason you wake up at 3-4 AM.
It also shaves 5 years off your life — tanks testosterone, locks belly fat, literally shrinks your brain.
If I wanted to fix it without medication, here are 8 things I'd do every day:
1. No food 3 hours before bed.
A Stanford neuroscientist warns high cortisol wrecks memory, enlarges your fear center, and make your brain feel broken.
If I wanted to fix it naturally, I'd do these 8 things every day:
1. Walk barefoot on grass for 5–7 minutes.
Cortisol is the most powerful hormone in your body.
It controls your sleep, your weight, your energy, and even how fast you age.
Here's how to lower it naturally in 7 simple steps:
1. Stop trying to relax.
A Stanford neuroscientist warns high cortisol wrecks memory, enlarges your fear center, and make your brain feel broken.
If I wanted to fix it naturally, I'd do these 8 things every day:
1. Walk barefoot on grass for 5–7 minutes.
A review of the latest attempt of a Protestant to critique the EED.
Strange that you say that the doctrine of the Energies is hardly discussed since for the last thirty years it occurs nearly everywhere Orthodoxy is discussed in the English speaking world.
The distinction between essence and energy predates Christianity, as any reader of Plato and Aristotle would know. It figures proximately in the Late Platonism of Plotinus for example and undergirds thinking in Late Antique medical theory and other venues. It played a role in the Arian the later controversies and is evidenced in figures like John of Damascus. It is not the brainchild of Palamas.
To speak of them as aspects is a mistake, since that which is aspectual is that which is merely perspectival and dependent on the observer.
As to the claim that there is no distinction within God’s being on the western view, this runs afoul of the standard Augustinian view that there are real distinctions in God’s being, namely the persons as self subsisting relations. So here your claim is far too strong and would exclude most western views within the Christian tradition.
As to the claim that the Orthodox take the energies to be distinct “things” this is explicitly denied by Palamas. Any reader of Aristotle would know that energia are not things properly speaking, they are not primary substances. This is true for Christian and non-Christian usage of the distinction. A disease in the body causes symptoms which give knowledge of the cause, but it would be foolish to think of the symptoms are separate objects or “things.”
Any reading of Aristotle through Plotinus would make clear that the usage of the term energia expresses an activity or a doing. My teaching or waking is an act and it would be foolish to think of my walking as a separate object. So here your reading of the EED is completely philosophically uninformed.
The unknowability of the divine essence has widespread purchase in the Christian tradition and not just in the East. What you are calling the “western view” on this point doesn’t even get started until Albert the Great translates Dionysius’ God as beyond being, as superessential being.
The Orthodox view of deification doesn’t violate the creator-creature distinction because there is not a change of essence. Hence your reasoning that creatures have passed out of the category of creature is a metaphysical non-sequitur. The same goes for your postulation of creatures becoming a tertium quid. All that follows is that creatures become deified or in the words of the bible, partakers of the divine nature.
If you wish to maintain that it does, then you will have to deny that Christ’s flesh is rendered immortal by the exclusive divine property of immortality and posses the divine glory. Hence the “western view” runs contrary to the plain reading of the Biblical text.
If you wish to take the “western” view of simplicity and so endorse the Identity Thesis, can you show where the Biblical text expresses and/or teaches this concept on the basis of Sola Scriptura?
While the deification of matter is a feature of Orthodox soteriology, the upshot is rather the defeating of death and the separating of sin from death, such that death now leads to universal resurrection.
It should also be said that Protestant traditions can use the creator-creation distinction as a shield to cloak Nestorianism as you find in figures like Vermigli, who denies that God the Word suffers for the sins of humans. For figures like Vermigli, following the heretic Theodoret of Cyrrus, the creator-creation distinction acts as a wall precluding God from suffering or even really becoming incarnate at all. So it should be kept in mind that merely waving the creator-creature flag often hides more serious theological problems. If the distinction were as absolute as you assert, Christ’s flesh could not have the divine property of immortality nor the glory which existed prior to the creation of anything.
I don't know when Protestants are going to figure this out, but you have to spend time not only in the sources, but you have to think through the system from the inside out and not try to take shots at it from the outside.
Three devils' traps we fall into every day:
Fear of the past: mistakes, sins, insults.
Fear of the future: what will happen tomorrow: what will they think of me; what if I get sick; what if it all collapses?
Ingratitude to God for what is happening here and now. This is where despair begins: anxiety, panic, fear, asking 'what will I do?'
How do we get out of this?
The first trap - the past: The devil returns a person to their old sins and whispers, "Look what you've done. God will not forgive you.
Why do you feel like praying? What do you have in common with God?" And one believes, not in the mercy of God, but in the devil's whisper. As if your sin is stronger than God's mercy.
Second trap - the future: In the future, the devil wants to make you play out scary scenarios in your head, getting tired of those thoughts. He wants you to be exhausted before anything has happened, so you don't pray, don't do good, and don't go to God.
But the Gospel says: "Do not worry about tomorrow. The future has not yet arrived, but fear has already stolen both your future and your present day..."~Matthew 6:25-34
The third trap - the present: This is the most dangerous one. We simply don't thank God for what we have. Again; the past is gone, the future is not yet here, and the present is all we have, here and now. The morning, the sky above us, the roof, the room, the food you eat today, the life you live. And we complain that it is not enough.
Look, you have already woken up this morning; cross yourself and say: "Glory to God!" Thank God for waking up alive and well.
And all these three traps of the devil are summed up in one word; DISTRACTION (or disquiet). This state distances people from prayer, from reading, from work, and from loved ones.
It talks about the past; "You will not fix anything." It speaks of the future; "You will not succeed." And it paralyzes you in the present.
But we have a weapon; the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God have mercy on me, a sinner." It returns a person to God, not to the past, not to horror of the future, but to God, here and now.
Repent of the past, trust God for the future, and for today, give thanks and get up again, move on, and fear nothing. "….The Lord Almighty is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress."~Psalm 46:10-11
LORD PETER MANDELSON: THE REAL RED MEAT OF THE EPSTEIN FILES @PrometheanActn
The Epstein files aren't about island trips.
They're about who was running the 2008 financial bailout from the inside.
Lord Mandelson was leaking bank secrets to Epstein while he was in jail.
Now Trump is dismantling their whole system ...
#EpsteinFiles
„If one of the doctors were to promise you, through some clever tricks and inventions, to make you young again from old age, wouldn’t you long for the day when you would see yourself returning to the bloom of youth?
But when repentance promises you that it will make your soul blossom anew - the soul that you yourself have aged, stained, and withered - will you then despise the Benefactor and not run to that promise?
Will you not desire to behold what a great wonder this promise is? How a man is born again without a mother? How the one who has grown old and corrupted by the deceit of passions blossoms once more, reaches youth again, and returns to the true flower of youth?”
St. Basil the Great
Trump isn't going to Davos to negotiate—he's delivering terms of surrender.
His team has already withdrawn from 66 globalist bodies and is tracking the money behind domestic chaos.
The real offensive is underway.
🎥 Watch:
One of the world’s top cancer researchers just dropped a bombshell most oncologists don’t want you to hear:
Dr. Thomas Seyfried (MIT-trained professor who’s published 200+ peer-reviewed papers) says the century-old habit of immediately biopsying tumors could actually be spreading the disease in some cases.
In this explosive 2:36 clip, he explains:
• Why “Stage 1–4” grading is based on how scary the tumor looks under a microscope AFTER you’ve already poked it
• How dozens of published studies show needle biopsies (breast, colon, liver, lung) can seed cancer cells along the needle track
• His radical but logical alternative: “Don’t poke the bear. Starve it first with metabolic therapy until it’s weak and docile, then remove the entire shrunken tumor in one clean surgery.”
• After that, use non-invasive PET/CT/MRI to confirm it’s gone — no risky needle required.
His exact quote: “We already beat it down… if you stab it early you’ll call it aggressive. If you shrink it first, the pathologist says ‘this isn’t even dangerous.’ Same tumor, totally different story.”
This isn’t fringe — it’s published biology being ignored by standard protocols.
Watch the full 2:36 clip and decide for yourself if the current “diagnose → biopsy → treat” sequence is backwards.
Do you think patients should at least be told this approach exists before deciding on a biopsy? Let me know in the comments.
Against the Destructive Passion of Self-Pity in the Christian Life
TUESDAY - After 26th Sunday after Pentecost
“If anyone seeks to save his life, he will lose it; but whoever loses it will preserve it” (Lk. 17:33).
This should be understood in the following manner: to save one’s life means to pity (to spare oneself) oneself; to lose one’s life means not to pity (to spare oneself) oneself. And this must be understood specifically in reference to walking the path of the Lord’s commandments or working in the Lord.
Therefore, the one who serves the Lord by fulfilling His commandments without pitying himself is the one who is saved. But the one who pities himself perishes. As soon as you begin to spare yourself, you will inevitably become a transgressor of the commandments and therefore a bad servant. And what is the judgment of the bad servant? “Cast him into the outer darkness; there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”
Try to keep watch over yourself even for a single day, and you will see how self-pity interferes with all our works, driving away any readiness to accomplish them. Yet without effort and labor, you will accomplish nothing. When we pity ourselves because of the labor involved, we withdraw from the work. There are tasks which, whether we want to or not, must be done. Such tasks are carried out without fail, even with difficulty. Here self-pity is overcome by necessity itself. If you do not work, you will not eat.
But the works of the commandments are not of this kind; therefore, out of self-pity they will always be neglected. Likewise, indulgence in sinful deeds is also done out of self-pity. You feel sorry to deny yourself something you desire—and so the desire is fulfilled. Yet that desire is either directly sinful or leads to sin.
Thus the one who pities himself always abandons what is necessary, while at the same time granting himself what is inappropriate. In this way he becomes useless for anything. And what salvation can we speak of in such a case?
+ St. Theophan the Recluse - Thoughts for Every Day of the Year
https://t.co/IwOx8xUMzn
https://t.co/5oPG5uOqy4
🚨The Kid Who Explained the 4th Dimension… Then Vanished
Imagine dropping a video that breaks down dimensional physics so cleanly it makes half the internet reconsider what reality actually is… and then you disappear... That's exactly what happened here.
A kid called Danny walks people through 1D, 2D, 3D, and then hits the leap, how a 4D intelligence would see straight through our world the same way we see through paper. He explains how perspective lies to us, how we never see the world as it actually is, and how a higher dimensional observer would watch every layer of our lives at once. Freaky right?
He doesn't stop there, he goes diving deeper into tesseracts and curved dimensions, nested universes stacked inside bigger ones. Exactly the kind of thinking physicists study and the kind NHI already operate in.
Right after uploading the video this kid just disappeared, gone, no follow ups, no socials, literally no trace.
Maybe he just moved on, or maybe he stumbled upon something human beings aren't supposed to articulate too clearly.
Higher dimensional awareness isn't just math. Its the entry point to understanding how NHI move, hide, see, and interact with us. To them, slipping in and out of our world is as simple as stepping across a sheet of paper.
Something to think about right?
#NHI #FourthDimension #Hyperdimensional #UAP #NonHumanIntelligence #HiddenKnowledge #ForbiddenScience
📜 𝗪𝗛𝗬 𝗣𝗥𝗢𝗧𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗦 𝗥𝗘𝗠𝗢𝗩𝗘𝗗 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗕𝗢𝗢𝗞 𝗢𝗙 𝗠𝗔𝗖𝗖𝗔𝗕𝗘𝗘𝗦?
Among the most revealing moments in the early years of the Protestant revolt is the Leipzig Debate of 1519 between Martin Luther and the Catholic theologian Johann Eck. This decisive debate exposed a deep weakness in Luther’s new theology: it did not agree with the historic biblical canon used by the Apostles and preserved by the Church.
🔹 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐋𝐞𝐢𝐩𝐳𝐢𝐠 𝐃𝐞𝐛𝐚𝐭𝐞: 𝐖𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐋𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐖𝐚𝐬 𝐃𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐛𝐲 𝐒𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞
During the debate, Johann Eck defended the Catholic doctrines of purgatory and prayers for the dead. To support his argument, he appealed directly to Scripture, specifically 2 Maccabees 12:43–46, which explicitly describes prayers and sacrifices offered for the souls of the dead so they may be purified from sin.
Luther was instantly trapped.
⚠️If Maccabees is Scripture, then prayer for the dead and purgatory are biblical.
⚠️If he wanted to deny purgatory, he had to deny Maccabees.
Instead of accepting Scripture, Luther declared that Maccabees was not part of the Bible, right there in the debate, simply because it contradicted his new teachings. Eck immediately pointed out that Luther was rejecting 1,500 years of Christian tradition, the canon affirmed by the early Church, and the Bible as used since apostolic times.
The debate made it clear:
Eck stood on the universal Christian canon. Luther stood only on himself.
📘 𝙒𝙝𝙮 𝙈𝙖𝙘𝙘𝙖𝙗𝙚𝙚𝙨 𝙃𝙖𝙨 𝘼𝙡𝙬𝙖𝙮𝙨 𝘽𝙚𝙡𝙤𝙣𝙜𝙚𝙙 𝙩𝙤 𝙎𝙘𝙧𝙞𝙥𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚
1️⃣ Ancient Jews accepted Maccabees as historical and sacred tradition
While later rabbinic Judaism narrowed its canon in the late 1st century, earlier Jewish communities:
✅used Maccabees,
✅transmitted Maccabean texts,
✅and celebrated the feasts recorded in it, especially Hanukkah.
2️⃣ Maccabees is found in the Septuagint (LXX)—the Bible of Jesus and the Apostles
The Septuagint was the Scripture used by:
✅Jesus,
✅the Apostles,
✅early Christians,
✅and Greek-speaking Jews.
And the Septuagint contains 1 and 2 Maccabees.
Over 300 New Testament quotations match the Septuagint, not the Hebrew Masoretic text adopted later by Protestants.
Rejecting the Septuagint canon means rejecting the canon used by the first Christians.
3️⃣ Maccabees appears in the oldest Christian manuscripts, Sinaiticus and Vaticanus
Two of the most ancient complete biblical manuscripts contain Maccabees:
✅Codex Sinaiticus (4th century) – includes 1 Maccabees and even 4 Maccabees.
✅Codex Vaticanus (4th century) – includes both 1 and 2 Maccabees.
These manuscripts are more than a millennium older than the Protestant Reformation and prove that the early universal Church accepted Maccabees.
4️⃣ Maccabean texts are found in Hebrew among the Dead Sea Scrolls (Qumran)
Fragments related to the Maccabean period were preserved at Qumran, proving that ancient Judaism transmitted these traditions in Hebrew before Christianity.
5️⃣ St. Jerome included Maccabees in the Latin Vulgate
Despite his own academic reservations, Jerome obeyed the Church and included Maccabees in the first official Christian Bible. The Vulgate became the standard Bible for more than 1,000 years.
If Maccabees is in:
✅the Septuagint,
✅the Vulgate,
✅Codex Sinaiticus,
✅Codex Vaticanus,
✅the Dead Sea Scrolls,
then Luther had no historical or theological basis to remove it.
📖 𝐇𝐚𝐧𝐮𝐤𝐤𝐚𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐀𝐫𝐞 𝐌𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐜𝐜𝐚𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐬, 𝐁𝐮𝐭 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐏��𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐫𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐁𝐢𝐛𝐥𝐞
The verb "call" (qara') appears only 9x in Lev, but it's the first word of the book and the Hebrew title (wayyikra', "And He called").
It's a great title, far better than the LXX-inspired Leviticus.
*The initial waw links Leviticus back to Exodus.
*The call is Yahweh's personal address.
*The call ripples out: First Yahweh calls Moses (1:1), then Moses calls the priests (9:1), finally all Israel is summoned to holy assemblies (23:2, 4) and to the year of release (25:10). "And he called" embraces both sanctuary and land.
*Yahweh designed all the complicated apparatus of Leviticus to enable Israel to answer that call. Leviticus is Yahweh's fatherly "Come near."
*Leviticus ritualizes Abraham's hinneniy in response to Yahweh's call (Gen 22:1). Through obedience to Levitical torah, Israel says, "Behold, I am here" (cf. Isa 6:8, where hinney is Isaiah's first word after cleansing).
*No wonder Yahweh hates hypocrisy and lying lips. False worshipers say through their sacrifices, "I'm ready to give all," but close their ears to His call.
6 years ago today, we lost this generation’s great apostle…
Ephraim, a kind and humble Elder, who rooted the Greek monastic tradition in the U.S., had one message to everyone…
“Love one another”
From our C.E.O, an old friend of the departed Saint… we miss you. Help us☦️🤍