Hi James,
First things first: yes, Kevin's alive and well. Also, thanks for that PDF link, it was very interesting.
You asked:
"How do these evil and good external influences affect us?
I'm not talking of outcomes like someone murduring, I'm talking about how and when these intrude and change us. Does the evil one only get in when we are already feeling emotional turmoil, or can it just happen out of the blue to anyone?"
I don't have enough personal knowledge to answer your question in general. I can, though, at least offer my intuitions on how it happened in my specific case, which might or might not be generalisable, and I can also offer some summaries and excerpts from my readings of authors who
do have generalised knowledge.
In my own case, I think it was due to a combination of factors over the course of about five years:
- the emotional impact of the death of my mother from throat cancer when I was in my final year of high school aged 17 (we were very close), combined with the emotional impact of intense unreciprocated adolescent love, and the emotional and physical impact of a car crash in which I could easily have killed both my passenger and the children of the occupants of the house into which's brick mailbox I crashed - the children usually played in that area
- experimentation in psychoactive drugs - marijuana, magic mushrooms (once or twice) and a single (horrifying) acid trip
- over-indulgence in social drugs - alcohol and caffeine (energy drinks mostly; I don't drink coffee)
- participation in the ouija board session I described in an earlier post.
I'm sure there is more to it than that, because other people have had similar experiences without falling prey as I did. Perhaps I had karma that opened me up, or I lack(ed) spiritual/psychic defences that are more developed in other people.
In answering from my readings of expert authors, I'll summarise from a book I mentioned in an earlier post to cousinbasil, Dr Shakuntala Modi's
Remarkable Healings: A Psychiatrist Discovers Unsuspected Roots of Mental and Physical Illness. I know you weren't asking about outcomes, but let me summarise those first. According to reports from her patients under hypnosis (confirmed by the healing, also under hypnosis, of those symptoms), demons can cause "every type of physical and psychological problem", including in the physical, "any symptoms from head to toe. Every organ, every tissue, and every part of the body can be infested and afflicted by the demons. They can cause aches and pains, numbness, weakness, and diseases in every organ and every part of the body". Psychologically, demons in her patients claimed (when speaking through her hypnotised patients) "to be the single most common cause for most psychiatric problems. They cause them directly and indirectly".
To answer your actual question - "how and when these intrude and change us" - summarising from various parts of Dr Modi's book, demonic entities can enter when we (and this is not a comprehensive list):
* drink alcohol or take drugs, particularly if we are alcoholics or addicts
* "watch violent, horror, X-rated and pornographic movies, and listen to music with negative messages"
* are anaesthetised for an operation.
Dr Modi also indicates that some people simply have very weak or porous auric shields that spirits can move in and out of at will.
Some specific techniques other than directly entering and possessing people that Dr Modi cites being used by demonic forces include the insertion of devices, the focussing and amplifying of thoughts on targets, and the focussing and amplifying of thoughts of Satan worshippers.
In
Spirit Releasement Therapy, William J. Baldwin, D.D.S., Ph.D., writes: "Spirits invade us through chinks in our natural armor caused by emotional and physical trauma. If a person gives in to temptation and strongly indulges the carnal appetites or succumbs to the lure of occult or spiritualist practices, he renders himself vulnerable to infestation by demonic energies (Basham, 1972, p. 123-136). Without the proper awareness of this condition, continuation of this life-style can lead to obsession by demonic influence, which is seen as quite common, and finally to full demonic possession, which some people believe to be rare. Diabolic possession, or possession by the devil itself (even more rare), is extremely dangerous both for the victim and for the exorcist (Rodewyk, 1975; Martin, 1976; Brittle, 1980)".
He also writes: "Feelings of anger, hatred, rage, and vengeance open the door for demonic infestation. These emotions distort the consciousness and the offer of assistance in the act of vengeance is accepted all too quickly and all too often".
As well, he writes: "The dark beings can pass from one person to another through sexual contact, whether the contact is consensual or forced".
Of the ouija board he writes:
People have used instruments of divination similar to the Ouija board for more than 2500 years. In ancient Greece, the philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras encouraged such an instrument. Earlier in ancient China, such instruments were commonplace and were considered a non-threatening way of communicating with the spirits of the dead. In third-century Rome, in thirteenth-century Tartary, in North America prior to the arrival of Columbus, in France of the nineteenth century, such instruments were used to predict, divine, and locate lost articles and missing persons (Hunt 1985, pp. 3-4).
In rare instances, the Ouija has been used to release earthbound spirits [human spirits who failed to travel to the light after death and instead attached to a living human, as opposed to demonic spirits --Laird]. Even so, its use is fervently discouraged for this or any other purpose. Without thorough education and preparation, opening the door to one's psychic ability is unwise. One type of opening question constitutes an open invitation to any spirit:
"Is anyone there?"
"Is there anyone on the board right now?"
"Is there anyone who wants to communicate?"
This open invitation will be accepted, and the spirits who arrive may become permanent residents. Many cases of serious and damaging possession have begun with an evening of innocent "fun" with the Ouija board.
I hope that this partial answer to your question is in some way helpful. Feel free to ask follow-ups. I'm happy to look up in the glossary the references Dr Baldwin cites in those extracts if you want me to.
Diebert,
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:The point as always is that having something (A) in mind is a fundamental observation. Which means one doesn't have something else (anything not A) in mind. This is true fundamentalism simply because one cannot get around it. It's beyond good and evil in its simplicity but the focus is different: it's about the camel on which all the gnats are living. It's not about denying or sifting any gnats. Though some interpret it as if gnats are ridiculed by the mere suggestion of any camel.
In other words, "Yes, the QRS trip". This might sound harsh, but equally good words as "fundamental" to describe your observation are "trite" and "facile". Everybody knows this camel, Diebert. Why tout the shallows as the depths?
The rest of your post is, to be honest, quite astonishing. You are not being rational, you are rational
ising (and in denial).
guest_of_logic: One might be able to defend judging a single "highly probable" event as "coincidental", but add another... and another... and then the countless others that one will encounter through the smallest bit of reading... and, well, you get the point.
Diebert: It's a common mistake to think that a string of coincidences somehow would automatically change the statistical probability of each individual case.
It's also one that I'm not making. It's hard to believe your misreading of me is
not wilful. My point was actually a different one: that the more "high probable" events there are, the (much) less is the overall probability that
all of these events are false positives. More than enough such high-probability events have been raised in this thread alone to make the probability outlandishly small.
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:For these cases where someone like you tries to assert a fact in the realm of phenomena, the scientific method and community has been developing over the centuries and it suffices in my opinion. It has its major shortcomings but more often critics just don't understand the basic principles at all.
Science is fundamentally about fair-minded investigation; in you I see instead preconception and denial.
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:Impossible truth violating fantasies
Here's a perfect example of your preconception in operation:
which truth is being violated and how did you come to determine that it is true?
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:You can chain thousands and thousands of easy to refute imaginary experiences together
Easy to refute? You're twisting the truth. You haven't even
acknowledged most of those that have been put to you, let alone refuted them, let alone done so "easily". The best you've come up with in the single example I gave you is that a door was opened unbeknownst the occupants of the house, all of whom were involved in the ouija session - a highly implausible proposal on a remote rural property
aside from the fact that there was no door in the direction that the wind came from (the kitchen, which opened up onto the dining room where we were seated).
Go ahead and "easily" refute the healings I quoted out of Dr Kenneth McAll's book. Even just acknowledge them for a start. Then acquire the book and "easily" refute every single one that he documents. Then "easily" refute the hands-on healing of my friend badly scalded in a motorcycle accident. Then "easily" refute BeingOf1's testimony in the two posts linked to (one by you and one by me). Hey, again, even just acknowledge most of them. Aside from the fact that in that thread he answered your question about how he knew the bullet went through the man's body ("there was a hole in the center of the back of the chair where this man was sitting. We found the bullet later"), you didn't even acknowledge let alone refute the many other specific incidents he documented, even though you acknowledge him as sincere. If the testimony of the following is "sincere", then it's not in the
slightest bit "easy" to refute it - in fact it's effectively impossible:
- "I witnessed my mother speaking in fluent languages she had never learned, seen oil flow out of the pages of scripture, blind eyes opened, deaf ears unstopped, people leaping out of wheelchairs, a bone appearing in a mans head(that had been cut out in surgery), internal bleeding instantly healed, and on and on".
- "I have a friend who was instantly healed of teberculosis in the early 60`s when prayed for by this man".
- "I was instantly healed of the luekemia - without a trace". [yes, you responded to this with the assertion that it was a mind over matter thing - evidence of the way your mind works; rather than accept the spiritual explanation, as congruent with the rest of Bo1's testimony, you offer one inconsistent with the pattern but that better serves your own ideology]
- The synchronicity of the meeting whilst camped out at the river with two mothers whose dead children had known one another: "The two kids had dated each other".
Diebert van Rhijn wrote:And although I believe he's sincere I don't think there was any credible witness to that event [the healing of the female victim of a car crash] making it a personal experience with only value to those witnessing and zero value to prove supernatural events.
What exactly are you trying to imply with this? That he, his friend, the healed victim and the person in the crowd who corroborated what had happened are not credible? How is it that he could be sincere but not credible? Did all four of them hallucinate the same mirage of broken bones reforming themselves - was the victim in fact
not injured in the first place and all of them just hallucinated the injuries as well as the subsequent healing? How is the mental and perceptual congruence required for a group hallucination of that order in any way more plausible than the spiritual explanation, especially taken with the preponderance of Bo1's other spiritual experiences?
David,
To add to my answer to your original question, here's a quote from the section titled "Schizophrenia" in Dr Modi's book that I quoted from earlier in this post. Please bear in mind that Dr Modi is a qualified and practising psychiatrist:
Before describing this case [the subsequent schizophrenic case study that I have not quoted --Laird], I would like to give definitions of terms, for understanding.
Schizophrenia: A disturbance that lasts for at least six months and includes at least one month of active-phase symptoms, that is, two or more of the following: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behaviour, and negative symptoms (DSM IV).
The following definitions are taken from Kaplan and Sadock's Synopsis of Psychiatry.
[for brevity, I have omitted the definitions cited - Psychosis, Reality testing, Hallucinations, Auditory hallucination, Visual hallucination, Olfactory hallucination, Gustatory hallucination, Tactile hallucination, Somatic hallucination, Illusion, Delusion, Paranoid delusions, Delusions of persecution, Delusion of grandeur, Delusion of reference, Delusion of Self-accusation, Delusion of Control, Thought Withdrawal, Thought Insertion, Thought Broadcasting, Thought Control --Laird]
Over the years, working with these therapies [those described in her book --Laird], I have come to recognize that the patients who have auditory, visual and other hallucinations and different types of delusions are often clairvoyant, clairaudient, clairsensient, and psychic people. They can perceive beyond the five physical senses. The voices they hear and people and things they see, which other people cannot see or hear, may be real human, demon, and other spirits whom they are seeing, hearing, and feeling.
These spirits who talk to the patients may be inside the body or outside. The spirits who are inside the patients can directly talk to them or to other spirits who are inside the patients or outside. These visions, voices, and thoughts are also fed to the patients by the demons in hell who have possession of one or more soul parts of the patients. Through these soul parts and their connecting cords, the demons can transmit visions, thoughts, and feelings into the patient's body, who receives them as their own. Some of these patients are also very sensitive and are aware of the feelings in their bodies, which are called somatic delusions.
Because other people around them, including the psychiatrist, do not see, feel, or hear beyond their five physical senses, they think that the patients are imagining things and have lost reality.
Antipsychotic medications work to some extent in these patients because they also sedate the possessing spirits, but as soon as the medication is stopped or reduced, the symptoms return. Shock treatment may work sometimes because the spirits may be shocked out of the patient's body, but they return and go inside the patient again because their shields are often porous and weak. As long as those spirits are there in them, they will continue to be sick.
Many of the specifics in Dr Modi's book were new to me, but the general idea of negative spirit influence and the fact that the things I sensed were the result of conscious entities beyond my mind was one I had, as I wrote in my first answer to your question, known from the start.