"So what's the point here? Jesus saves? What a hackneyed fundamentalist cliche.
"The world is a dark place filled with evil spirits? Not my world. Mine is a quantum world filled with the light of Spirit and angels, energy and endless love and possibilities. Whatever I can imagine for myself I can create in material reality. I can advance in spiritual wisdom, climbing ever upward to higher spiritual plains of knowledge until I reach ultimate bliss, because I am one with All That Is. I AM All That Is!"
The following not-so-brief account is a testimony to how a lack of understanding of the spirit realm and an acceptance of New Age/occult philosophy and practice can lead one into spiritual deception, darkness and ultimately an eternal spiritual death. I learned about the dark reality of Satan and the demonic through the pursuit of occult knowledge and practices, much of which today is made respectable by a New Age vocabulary and veneer. I had no idea, no warning about the path I had so happily chosen for myself.
People enter the occult for many reasons. As is often the case with people embarking on an occult path, I suffered a traumatic loss and sought a way for healing, a way to regain my sense of identity. I needed help piecing back together my "fragmented self" and regaining a sense of control of my life. That need along with a predisposed interest in the mysteries of reality, and the manipulation by demonic spirits led me into the occult.
It was the "Dawning of the Age of Aquarius" and I was a bell-bottomed 23 year old photography major at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. After the experience I mentioned, I would frequent Pickwick Book Shop on Hollywood Boulevard desperately looking for something to read that would give me some hope for the future. In the cheerful, comfortable atmosphere of the book store, I felt at home in the occult section and poured through books about meditation and metaphysics, astrology, extra sensory perception (ESP), mediums, spirit guides, and mind control.
A whole new world opened to me, and a guide from the spirit realm seemed like something a could use. My reading led to charting my own horoscope and contacting spirits through a Ouija board (yes, Ouija boards are made by Milton Bradley; no, they are not games). I took part in a research project on mental telepathy conducted by a Ph.D. student in the then active Parapsychology Program at UCLA, directed by Thelma Moss. I met my first witch, a model from Mexico City I photographed. After the shoot at her home, she explained to me the reason for the candle burning on the mantle over her fireplace: it was a spell she was casting to steal the heart of a man she desired.
I was taken by another model friend to a "Bible study" in South LA, then known as Watts, that much to my delight turned out to be a psychic reading for the group of us who met in a woman's small living room filled with religious bric-a-brac -- statuettes of Jesus, Mary and the saints, framed religious pictures, and talismans used in animistic religions. At a psychic reading, ones past, present, and future are supposedly "read" by the psychic/medium in order to give guidance and help. The psychic's sister had been murdered a few weeks earlier and her spirit was said to be hovering overhead. At meetings like that you can be sure there are plenty of spirits present, but not of the formerly human kind.
The book that deepened my attraction for the occult and spiritualism was The Seth Material, by the medium Jane Roberts. Seth was a self-proclaimed ancient "spirit guide" who dictated his books through Roberts. It was through "Seth" and Roberts that I learned about mediums and spirit guides, increasing my hunger for knowledge of the occult.
At age 24 I was on my way to London to live and work. London was then a center for spiritualist activity and I was determined to use my occult knowledge and practices and the help of spirit guides to gain a quick foothold in the highly competitive fields of fashion and advertising photography. Soon I was involved in the spiritualist associations like the Society for Psychical Research, meeting with mediums and talking to spirits through them. A large room, which seemed almost sacred, held the large, ornate Victorian chair owned by Sir Arthur Canon Doyle when he briefly presided over the Society, and it was used by the mediums as they channeled spirits. I worked at developing my psychic abilities using Rhine cards, and practiced automatic writing, i.e. allowing spirits to control my hand while I listened to the words being spoken in my mind.
I spent a lot of time in an eastern form of meditation taught by Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Indian philosopher. As a teenage boy he was believed to be the awaited "Ascended Master" by Charles Webster Leadbeater, a leader in the Theosophical Society, and was groomed to be the spiritual leader of the Society.
In his many books Krishnamurti believed and taught that one should believe in nothing (a bit of a philosophical problem much like Buddhists who desire to desire nothing). Krishnamurti taught that by clearing one's mind of all judgment, all thought, one would experience pure love and a oneness with all things. There were times when I did experience that, as though I was experiencing a oneness with God, or "All that Is." I did successfully learn to vacate my mind of active thought through pure awareness, at least for brief moments. Ones mind and will become so quiet that it opens to the thoughts, ideas and will of demonic spirits, such that, one thinks the ideas are their own.
Just as things seemed to be going well and I began aspiring to become a medium myself, everything changed.
One night after visiting the home of a spiritualist friend of mine I sat in my tiny one room flat on the top floor of a Victorian apartment building, reading a book and listening to music. Suddenly a wave of agitation and dread came over me. As the night wore on I grew more agitated and confused and wore myself out pacing back and forth in my room, trying to understand what was happening to me. Finally I decided to just go to bed. In bed with the lights out I closed my eyes and faces started looming up in front of me in the darkness.
These were not faces one sees in a dream or with the imagination. My imagination was not powerful enough to create the faces I saw. They were three dimensional, colorful, animated faces making every kind of expression at me. I began hearing noises -- thumps, bumps, cracks, clunks, like doors slamming shut. Then I sensed I was going to die, right there in my bed. Even if I had not died physically, had I submitted to what was happening to me, I believe the person I knew myself to be would have died.
As I laid there with my eyes closed a feeling of mental suffocation closed in on me. I felt as though my mind was being smothered and losing consciousness, and I believed that unless I opened my eyes and stayed awake, I would somehow die. Since that time I've come to understand that I was being attacked for the sake of being used as a medium by some powerful spirit, or for the sake of possession, the complete take-over of my mind, body and soul by a spirit or many spirits -- perhaps the spirits I saw in the darkness.
I did not sleep for two nights while I consulted mediums about what was happening. They agreed that it was a spiritual attack. The last medium, an elderly woman I visited, gave me two suggestions that were to help me. The first was an exercise to close my "psychic centers" known as chakras in Hinduism. They were supposedly opened through the Eastern meditation I was practicing, releasing the "kundalini" power throughout my body. The chakras were said to be the entry point through which demonic spirits could enter and attack me. I didn't know about the reality of chakras, but I believed God was real and the second suggestion the medium gave me is something I practice to this day for any situation. I was to simply ask God for help. The medium meant it as a last resort, but it became my first line of defense.
Like in an old TV western, something inside me said to "get out of town, fast." Two weeks later I was living in New York City. There I eventually realized my life of sin for what it was. Through meditation I learned the centrality and importance of love. While in London I extended myself in kindness to others, even strangers, but was met with coldness and rejection. After reacquainting myself with the Bible in New York, I realized I had rejected God's love and kindness to me. I had rejected him by rejecting Jesus just as my offers of loving kindness had been rejected by others. Although I grew up going to Sunday school every week, for the first time in my life the Bible made sense to me. Instead of going to God who loved me for healing from my trauma, I turned to the occult filled with spirits who hated me and wanted my destruction. There are good reasons God condemns our involvement in the occult. I confessed my sins to God, asked for forgiveness and opened myself in faith to his Son Jesus Christ, who delivered me out of the hands of demonic spirits that had tried to rule my mind and life.
Not everything, however, has gone as I anticipated in my life as a follower of Jesus, and that has led to the creation of Restless Seminary.
Conflicts with the demonic are not limited to those who live without Christ, but can and do take place in believer's lives, often without notice. The acknowledgement of those spiritual conflicts in unbelievers and believers alike is the purpose of Restless Seminary, the blog and graphic novel to come.
