Spirit Channeling at Wallkill's Bethel

by Marie33 84 Replies latest watchtower scandals

deegee

"You said you also read the WT. I believe they have false doctrine." ~ knowsnothing 1
So God sees my earnest, sincere, deep desire to draw close to him and to have a personal relationship with him through prayer and meditation on what I read in the Bible and WT and what I hear.
He sees my earnest, sincere, deep desire to make the doing of his will the most important thing in my life. He sees that I only wanted to do for Him and so I would do as the Bible exhorted - meditate deeply in order to connect with my inner thoughts so as to transform my mind/thought process and rid myself of selfish desires.
AND YET God seeing all of this, didn't tell me that meditating on what I read in WT literature and heard from talks etc, which you claim is false doctrine, was making me vulnerable to demonic attack?
I would earnestly and incessantly pray to God seeking to do his will YET God rather not tell me to stop reading and meditating on WT literature and WT talks etc as this would make me susceptible to demonic attack?
Why didn't God just simply tell me that I was doing the wrong thing and that I should stop meditating on what I read in WT literature and heard from talks etc and help me to do the right thing instead of just sitting back and allowing the demons to attack me?
It was as just as well that I engaged in spiritism, use a Ouija board etc. since praying to God was of no use and yielded the same results of demonic attack which is also produced by being involved in these things (according to Christians).
BUT WHAT IS MORE is that long after I left the JWs and remained a Christian I still continued to be clairvoyant, psychic, hear voices, see visions etc. So it couldn't be the "false doctrines" of the WT literature and talks etc. that were causing me to become susceptible to demonic attack which resulted in my psychic abilities etc. as you claim.
knowsnothing1

deegee:
Why didn't God just simply tell me that I was doing the wrong thing and that I should stop meditating on what I read in WT literature and heard from talks etc and help me to do the right thing instead of just sitting back and allowing the demons to attack me?
It was as just as well that I engaged in spiritism, use a Ouija board etc. since praying to God was of no use and yielded the same results of demonic attack which is also produced by being involved in these things (according to Christians).
BUT WHAT IS MORE is that long after I left the JWs and remained a Christian I still continued to be clairvoyant, psychic, hear voices, see visions etc. So it couldn't be the "false doctrines" of the WT literature and talks etc. that were causing me to become susceptible to demonic attack which resulted in my psychic abilities etc. as you claim.
Would God give you anything that would make you become crazy? I don't think so. It is true that servants of God would become uneasy about certain visions, but the fear would eventually subside.
You said you also engaged in spiritism and used a Ouija board. You know those things are forbidden. However, I also tried them so I claim no higher moral ground than you. The egg account was very real, not just a sleight of hand. I also began to research the occult more after that and found many accounts of ex-satanists, ex-occultists, ex-witches, that recounted their stories and how Christ freed them from all that.
I'll link you to an incredible account that literally changed my life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_M_8lI0-7b0
I did just as he did, I gave my life to Christ, and it was then that the attacks really manifested. I would be just about to fall asleep, and I would feel a jolt in my chest, it felt as if a push. I had had panic attacks before (they would begin with rapid heartbeats, and a feeling that I was about to suffer a heart attack soon), but this was different. As soon as I would be drifting off into sleep, I would feel the jolt/push on my chest. I wouldn't feel it any other time except then. This went on for several hours. I was really tired and I was becoming frustrated. I would tell the spirits to leave in Jesus' name, but the attack wouldn't stop. I figured I may very well die, but I wasn't going to give up my faith. I also heard a very clear whisper that woke me up as soon as I was drifting off "Psst, hey!". I did a lot of praying in those moments. The night after that I had a similar experience, except I also had a terrible dream where I felt like my heart was being crushed by a hand. I woke up screaming at 4:30 am and awoke my sister. I have had nightmares, but I have never woken up screaming like that. After that night, the attacks and the panic attacks I had previously had disappeared.
deegee, I hope you can go to God again, for he is not far from any of us. I hope you can find peace with him through Christ. God loves you.
deegee

You said you also engaged in spiritism and used a Ouija board ~ knowsnothing 1
PLEASE REREAD MY COMMENT ABOVE. I DID NOT STATE THIS.
knowsnothing1

I'm quoting this:
It was as just as well that I engaged in spiritism, use a Ouija board etc. since praying to God was of no use and yielded the same results of demonic attack which is also produced by being involved in these things (according to Christians).
deegee

knowsnothing 1,
What do you understand from what you quoted in the context of my entire comment?
PLEASE READ MY ENTIRE COMMENT CAREFULLY.
knowsnothing1

Ok deegee, what do you mean by being a Christian after you left the WT?
I understand and feel your frustration. My line of reasoning after leaving the WT was the opposite. I became an atheist and a skeptic. I believed that materialism is all there is, that consciousness is a product of very complex chemical reactions and the summation of physical processes. I came to believe that anyone that had experienced any type of supernatural event was either crazy, misguided (they interpreted the event as supernatural when there was a perfectly natural explanation for it) or something else along those lines.
I figured that since this stuff never happened when put through to the rigorous scientific method or never happened under controlled lab conditions, that all accounts must therefore be false. I even wrote off an encounter I had as something I had experienced merely as an emotional reaction.
Regardless of our beliefs, I've come to the conclusion that there is more to reality than the physical. Based on what I've seen, heard, and felt, I can no longer suscribe to a strictly material universe.
deegee

Knowsnothing1,
Getting back to our discussion.
Your sharing your personal experience of "demon possession" made me see why you were quick to read into my comments that I engaged in spiritism or used a Ouija board (though I subsequently learnt that doing these things have nothing to do with the psychic symptoms which I experienced).
After such an experience and finding relief by turning to God, it is understandable why your mind would interpret everything in terms of the "if it is not God then it must be demons" framework.
There are some things which I find puzzling about "demon possession" however:
God will protect you from demons but he can't protect people in other situations for example, a tree falling on someone and killing them, a fatal lightening strike, someone goes for a swim and unknown to them, inhales some water with a brain eating amoeba, someone goes to wash their hands in a lake when a crocodile/alligator unexpectedly pounces on them, drags them in and kills them etc. etc. etc.
It seems it is more important for God to protect people from demon possession than from these more fatal situations.
Also, some claim that demons don't possess the mentally ill.
Why would the demons be so selective and kind to spare a mentally ill person? It seems the mentally ill/psychologically disturbed have the best defence against demon possession. God gets a break - he doesn't have to worry about protecting such persons from demon possession.
knowsnothing1

Hi deegee, sorry I didn't see your response.
I think you are going a bit off track here, your going into the problem of natural evil, the Epicurean trilemma.
The first question shouldn't be why evil exists, but rather is God real? Then we deal with the problem of evil.
The other question about why he chooses to act in certain situations and not others is also another dilemma, but I don't feel has merit in this discussion.
The question is, was my and your experiences real? Did we misinterpret something that we saw? Are we or were we crazy? Were these experiences only in our mind, or were there external players?
I take it you don't believe in God, you believe these experiences were in our minds only, and that believing in this stuff is rubbish and even harmful at times, and that we should stick to a strictly material view of the world. I don't want to box you into a belief system, I'm trying to understand what you believe and where you are coming from so we can further develop this conversation.
deegee

knowsnothing1,
What you are saying is that God will protect you from demonic attack, but he won't protect you from other life threatening, fatal situations? Why is God's protection so selective? This doesn't make any sense to me.
.......was my and your experiences real? Were these experiences only in our mind, or were there external players? ~knowsnothing1
Here are some reasons why I don't attribute my past psychic abilities to external entities/agency:
(1) My psychic abilities ceased once I stopped engaging in intense, strong, deep prayer and meditation. The same is true for other persons who engaged in meditative practices or other intense spiritual practices. Just stop and the symptoms will eventually go away. I have been symptom free for over 2 years.
There is a whole range of side effects of meditative practices and other intense spiritual practices which has been documented:
http://wisdomuniversity.org/grof/module/week5/pdf/dsmrsproblem.pdf
http://www.atpweb.org/jtparchive/trps-13-81-02-137.pdf
- Psychological Upheaval
- Extrasensory Experiences
- Psychic Phenomena
- Mystical States of Consciousness
- Physiological Symptoms
- Persons may become inflated and grandiose as a result of intense spiritual experiences. Grandiose fantasies evolving into religious delusions with messianic content
- Voluntarily induced experiences of (depersonalization or) derealization
- Precipitation of psychosis and other meditation-induced psychiatric disorders
- Pranic movements or kriyas
etc etc
All you have to do is just stop engaging in meditative practices or other intense spiritual practices and the psychic symptoms will go away. It may take a while but the symptoms will eventually disappear.
(2) Spirit mediums, channellers etc make contact with the "spirit world" when they self-induce/voluntarily induce a trance. Meditation is one of the means they use to self-induce this trance to contact the "spirit world" YET meditation is also the means which the Bible recommends for drawing close to God.
It was puzzling to me that meditation can be used for these two diametrically opposed things. This conundrum was what made me realize that there must be something about the act of meditation itself which makes a self-induced trance possible and it is this trance state which in turn made communicating with God or contacting spirits possible.
This then led me to investigate what takes place during a trance state/altered state of consciousness - you bypass the conscious, active processing of information in your brain and instead "see" directly into the deep levels of your subconscious where "unprocessed files" are buried.
Now I could see why some of my precognitions were right and why some were wrong - I was just unleashing unprocessed thoughts, impressions, images, visions, voices, words etc from the deep levels of my subconscious, and why by following through on them, I was making myself unstable and doing myself harm.
The rate at which images, voices, visions, words, thoughts etc are unleashed from the subconscious seems to be on a spectrum which goes from spontaneous/every now and then, to a rapid constant flooding/flow which manifests itself in automatic writing or channelling communication.
The rate at which stuff is churned up from the subconscious depends on how deep, strong, intense the meditation is and the frequency of it.
(3) It was important for God to get rid of the pesky demons from heaven in order to protect his spiritual family.
But then instead of confining the devil and his demons to the galaxy farthest from earth God decided to banish Satan to our planet for us to deal with and we now have to fight them.
It no longer made sense to me that God would keep feeding into Satan's desire to harm and destroy His creation instead of simply casting him and the demons to some obscure, gaseous ball of hydrogen 45 billion light years away.
(4) I was earnestly and sincerely doing according to the scripture:
James 4:7(NRSV):
"Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you."
I was earnestly and sincerely seeking God and drawing close to Him in prayer yet so-called demons were attacking me and making me psychic? It just wasn't adding up. It just wasn't making sense to me anymore.
(5) How, exactly, does an immaterial spirit interact with a brain and body of matter?
What force or causal influence does it exert, and by what mechanism?
knowsnothing1

deegee,
What you are saying is that God will protect you from demonic attack, but he won't protect you from other life threatening, fatal situations? Why is God's protection so selective? This doesn't make any sense to me.
You still haven't arrived at a conclusion that he exists, so how can you question what doesn't exist?
But you can take Paul's example. God didn't prevent his suffering, not Christ's, nor many of the thousands upon thousands of Christians executed. They happily went to their deaths. Suffering != God's inexistence, so you're going to need a better argument.
(5) How, exactly, does an immaterial spirit interact with a brain and body of matter?
What force or causal influence does it exert, and by what mechanism?
I'm not sure. Just because I can't explain it doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I have not experienced many of the symptoms you have related. When I pray, I don't receive a vision or anything, just peace of mind and comfort. If I've sinned, my conscience draws me to repentance and to confess my sin to God.

Spirit Channeling at Wallkill's Bethel

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