I'd like to re-emphasize the importance of actually having done inner psychological work, along the lines of Focusing, for this struggle in discernment. If there's fear in doing something like Focusing, which can even take the form of "I don't have issues such as these," then it's quite likely a casting of the psyche's shadown that is at work in some large measure, making it even more difficult to "discern the spirits." Given the fact that the vast amount of our psychological functioning occurs unconsciously, a resistance to this kind of exploration could easily lead to major blind spots. We're really not that conscious anyway - most of the time in a trance state - and so the more subconscious processes are bound to shape our views on matters that are transcendental.

I agree with you,w.c.I can't say I have ever had a lot of resistance to inner work, it is part of my culture I guess as an Episcopalian/Quaker type. But it is wonderful to have a spiritual director to discern the movement of Spirit in my life, and to help me separate the psychological I guess from the spiritual.I think all my negative emotions --anger,jealousy,resentment,maliciousness,etc. -- are great fodder for the transformation of my life, however Christ does His work in me.Right now it seems to be this rich combination of Focussing and Pilates,and not much energy for even journaling or talk therapy.But, there is also a sense at times of being attacked spiritually, with no feeling it seems behind it, just attacked for the sake of it, I guess, which I associate with evil intent outside myself.This is not a big deal,to be honest, it is something that goes away with prayer, something to endure.
The great book on discernment of spirits is St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises -- he writes a lot about felt sensation.De Caussade's letters to the nuns of the Visitation is really helpful, too, but what is best for me is to talk it over with my director (who is also a therapist).
There are all sorts of books on the Spiritual Exercises, the one I like the best is The Spiritual Exercises Reclaimed by Katherine Dyckman,et al.I think that 16th century Spain had lots of people who would be very much at home in a Pentecostal congregation, and it worried SJOC and STA, in the same way I hear you concerned, Stephen.And I know some holy people who are Pentecostals, fundamentalists, liberal Christians, Buddhists...it is a matter of discernment to know where I am being led, one size certainly doesn't fit all.

One thing worth metioning about the Focusing process, at least as I've experienced, and as it may relate to this thread, is that at no point have I ever felt truly, completely whole. There is always a sense in which, even as exiled parts are allowed to speak their painful and sometimes embarrassing truths, that no final alchemy or healing arises; this may be why Ann Weiser Cornell speaks of four human powers in the process, followed by a fifth, which isn't our own power: grace. I'm not sure exactly what she means by this, or how related or not it might be to the Christian notion.

And so a process like Focusing shows our deep, fundamental inadequacy, but supports an acceptance or state of presence that isn't burdened with toxic shame. C.S. Lewis, in his chapter on Human Wickedness in "The Problem of Pain" talks about the post-modern loss of shame which is so essential to a Christian's understanding of a flaw we can't remedy or heal ourselves. The shame he speaks of here seems to be a kind of moral shame, where we are both oriented to our harm of others and our own inadequacy, but before remorse sets in and we attempt to step out of concealment and make amends and/or ask for forgiveness. We cower before the moral law, the sense of being broken before it, but before it turns, or twists, into self-absorbed loathing, and we may also sense we've come to the end of ourselves and can't budge without creating further deceit, which is strangely freeing in the context of Grace. I'm not confident I've understood Lewis here, but would make that distinction myself as it relates to knowing we have fault lines which run beyond our reach.

So are you saying that the end result of inner work is to come to the end of ourselves, and to rely on grace to bring us through?That sure makes sense to me, and if the wholeness doesn't come in this lifetime, it will still surely come, in ways we can not fathom.
I get so easily discouraged with myself, and I have to remind myself never to underestimate the power of Christ, and to pray for openness and honesty.

Yes, but with several distinctions to keep in mind, at least for me. Our intractable tendency to merge with an exiled part is ultimately due to our exile in general, where we are never fully living the life of grace, short of perhaps transforming union; but even then, the saints that seem to have reached this summit of spiritual growth may still have waited upon purifications, or true wholeness, that aren't possible this side of death. The basic thing in all of this, for me, isn't the idea of being able to achieve what only grace can procure, but in being as aware as we can be of our limitations and tendencies in an embodied way, which includes seeing how we exile aspects of life from its Source. When we banish parts, it seems God cannot touch them without violating our will. So even though He works beyond our awareness, much of our psychological life can be exiled without our conscious consent. Only He can find ways of touching or attracting these places without violating our free will (such as during dreams or deep prayer/meditation), yet much of our will operates below the level of awareness anyway.

Perhaps the ultimate psychological state of openness, which implies our need of grace, is the state of gratitude; however, gratitude is so easily distorted into heavy moralized injunctions. How many of us heard how grateful we should have been from abusive parents? Not exactly an invitation to see the gift of aliveness in painful areas of experience! So while the moral weight of the fall presses us into recognition of the Natual Law, where we feel our deficiencies, there is a difference between moral-shame and toxic shame. Toxic shame, in the spiritual life, produces abdication of will via self-loathing, a state of psychological exile without knowing it. We see this often in 12 Step groups where psychological exiling is never addressed, such that surrender to God is often full of exiling as a protective response, creating other avenues of addiction to compensate for the loss of mood alteration. This may also be true with a hypervigilance over evil, where loathsome parts of childhood pain appear as inner demons and generate a certain familiar relief in not having to question oneself or parents, or just errant beliefs defining the established inner terrain as forbidden.

So I'd guess the capacity to appreciate darker regions of experience, very simply, sensing the longing, the aliveness inside them, and thanking and receiving these places without trying to push an attitude that isn't real, would tell us something about coming to the end of ourselves. We often come to the end of ourselves when something painful arises that never had the support for further forward movement, which isn't the same as deep creaturely awareness.

quote:

Originally posted by w.c.:
...My bias regarding evil is simply that, until one can really sense inside the body, and touch wounds, which we all have, with awareness, and listen and let them unfold, it is likely we are projecting these shadows as evil. ....

I do see the important insight here, w.c. and this is a major pitfall in discerning evil vs. projecting our unconscious, especially in folks who must rigidly defend fragile ego structures.

However, I also see that there are at least two other dynamics we could consider on this topic:

1) as we've mentioned, there's the interaction of our own pathology which attracts or is exploited by external, supernatural evil.

2) one may be so focussed on their pathology or inner world that they may attribute a psychological effect to what is more accurately a supernatural evil. Here, I don't necessarily mean the 'devil' per se, an entity with a will, but some twisted, dark energy that can cause psychological distress. so, the opposite of what you say above can also be true for some people at some times.

I've seen this many times as evidenced by the instant relief from emotional distress that people sometimes get from deliverance prayer.

While praying for a woman at the MacNutt School of healing prayer, I witnessed her experience instant relief of long-standing anxiety and sense of worthlessness when my prayer partner commanded that these 'spirits' be gone in the Name of Jesus. As soon as he spoke those words, I felt a crashing down of Power so intense, it almost knocked me off my chair and I nearly shouted. Waves of Power hit me several times as the heavens opened up over my head and poured over me. This woman said she felt a hole was blown open from her neck upward and all the anxiety suddenly lifted off of her. The next morning, she looked like a different person. I had to go interview her about what happened, and she confirmed that the anxiety was still gone and that she felt something had lifted off her head.

One time, I was on a retreat with a friend. The first night I felt a strange oppression over me. It was a subtle sense of being down. There were no specifics attached to it, no thoughts or feelings or conflicts which I could identify as connected. After a full day of this, I finally decided to share my burden with my friend. Without asking her to do this, she lifted her hand over in my direction, about 5 feet away, and said a tired, undramatic prayer, something like "Lord, set her free of this thing." Suddenly I felt two powerful explosions of energy erupt in front of me and I FELT something was literally broken off of me. I felt completely, instantly relieved of this oppression and refreshed. This was not the placebo effect or some merely psychological shift. I slept great that night and awoke with a keen interst in the reason for my being on retreat, which had been crushed by that weird oppression.

Another time I was driving in the car with a relative. We were heading to pick up groceries for a family picnic. She shared about a recent development that deeply disturbed her; she had begun having a number of emotional problems but was especially frightened by what sounded to me like near visual hallucinations. As she talked about this, I knew I wanted to pray against this thing, and a part of me thought, "Wait till she stops the car and ask if you can lay hands on her to pray." However, I was so seized with a kind of righteous anger at this thing that I just reached over to touch the back of her head and words of deliverance were just gushing out of me. As I spoke, the car suddenly filled up to overflowing with a tremendous Power. It was God's Power. Right through the metal roof of the car, the Power crashed over me and I kept right on going, speaking against everything she had said that was troubling her. A year later, this person reported no return of those particular symptoms since that day.

So in these instances, what manifested as a seemingly emotional problem, turned out to have a supernatural cause, an evil force which is banished in the Name of Jesus. Of course, some go too far with this thinking, attribute any disturbing stirring of anger, lust, hatred, etc. to the devil, and stop short of examining their inner worlds for unsavory impulses and pain that is important to acknowledge as psychological. This is the problem that many of you have pointed out in some religious circles.

However, in some cases, attributing emotional pain to purely psycholgical factors is wrong and we are missing supernatural evil (which may be inner or external or both). And especially in energy sensitive folks, as it seems you all are, this can be a tricky disernment issue.

It seems that learning this kind of discernment is a long process which requires being open to learning from our mistakes and intimately tied to our maturation--both psychological and spiritual. Thank God who teaches us who are eager to learn, humble, and want to grow in love.

Dear friends, Mt., Stephen, bdb, w.c. & Phil,
I appreciate all that you have shared above concerning your experiences on this subject.

Shasha:

It's also possible to ask Jesus to be with us during the Focusing process. His greater presence can help with the darker, more forbidden aspects of the psyche which are often rooted in trauma and attachment deficit. My concern with your description is that the laying on of hands, especially in group settings, often seems to arouse kundalini, where energy field interaction between people can be mistaken for the Holy Spirit. I'm not saying you don't know the difference between the Holy Spirit and the human energy field, but know from a small prayer group I attended for several years how this can be. As soon as we started praying for each other in this way (laying on of hands for healing), the energy in the room thickened, much more like the human energy field expanding, even though we prayed in the name of Jesus. So we quite doing this and went back to our Lectio-style of prayer, with long periods of quiet where we just let God love us, and where the Holy Spirit would descend on each of us. We'd still pray for each other, but much of the group was this meditative focus on a small scripture passage leading into prayer of quiet, when it was given.

So my concern is that with laying on of hands being so kundalini evocative, what is being banished can easily be psychological pain, since such pain is always embodied in the kundalini. I know what evil feels like, and it seems the more we're dealing honestly with psychological pain, especially letting the longings untwist and re-emerge in the heart, the less vulnerable we'd be to Satan's deceits. And as these longings which heal in the heart involve longing for the Source of love, we're not far away from prayer in any case. But I haven't seen a case, at least in Focusing, where wounded parts blur indistinctly with the possession of an evil spirit; this may be because Satan has far less ability to impact our wills than our intellects and imaginations. And the Focusing process isn't so much like Jung's active imagination, where hypnogogic imagery is followed, but in letting the "felt sense" within the body communicate its own point-of-view (and therfore more of the will via longing). Once experienced, it is noticeably different than the active imagination process. Not that what you're describing isn't possible, but my impression is that the banishing of wounded parts is far more likely, especially among Christians who've never seriously engaged their families of origin, let alone a process like Focusing.

I would also suggest you consider a Focusing session with someone like Ann Weiser Cornell (she does phone consultations) to really know what I'm talking about when I describe the Focusing process. Most psychotherapists I know think they know this process from having been meditators over the years, or even having done biofeedback, etc. I spent years doing Vipassana-like body-oriented meditation, along with hypnotherapeutic work, and still didn't tap what is really involved in Focusing. And, even the founder of Focusing, Gene Gendlin, didn't understand how to work with some of the darker aspects of the wounded soul until his student Ann Cornell begain developing her own model some years later. Reading Cornell's books aren't going to give the reader a real sense of the Focusing process either. Even Richard Schwartz' model "Internal Family Systems Therapy" can slip by the really sustained "felt sense," at least in my experience working with one of his student therapists. I benefited much more from Schwartz' work by having had training with Ann Cornell many years before. Other models like Peter Levine's, Pat Ogden's, and Hakomi, all give a serious nod to the "felt sense," but may not have a structured way to stay with that thin region of awareness long enough for it to develop.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: w.c.,

quote:

Originally posted by w.c.:
Shasha:
... My concern with your description is that the laying on of hands, especially in group settings, often seems to arouse kundalini, where energy field interaction between people can be mistaken for the Holy Spirit. I'm not saying you don't know the difference between the Holy Spirit and the human energy field, but know from a small prayer group I attended for several years how this can be. As soon as we started praying for each other in this way (laying on of hands for healing), the energy in the room thickened, much more like the human energy field expanding, even though we prayed in the name of Jesus. ...

So my concern is that with laying on of hands being so kundalini evocative, what is being banished can easily be psychological pain, since such pain is always embodied in the kundalini. ....

I guess we're getting more into the issue of prayer for healing now and maybe we should move discussion over to that thread although this topic overlaps with discerning false gods.

Yes, I've experienced kundalini activation in healing groups where people are touching each other. This is often very irritating to me and when asked my opinion I share Derek Prince's good warning about indiscriminantly laying on of hands and unwanted energy transmission. Prince didn't call it kundalini, but he was astute enough to recognize there was personal spiritual energy floating around. (BTW, I've also often felt the need to just allow the prayer of quiet to float down on a meeting moreso than the vigorous word-filled stuff that often happens in some gatherings. At the same time, I've seen that the spoken word which is truly God praying through prayer warriors is the kind of move of the Holy Spirit that I hope some day will put all health workers completely out of business! People will flock to the Church for healing of every kind!)

Back to your points, OK, In any case, my experience was that of Power crashing down, not so much feeling any kundalini and if there was k. movement, it was totally eclipsed by God's Power. There is nothing like it. It is intense to the soul, not just to the body/spirit. There is a holy kind of astonishment in the face of a Power which 'moves mountains' and often uncontrollable praise in tongues that accompanies this power. Kundalini doesn't produce this kind of response. K. doesn't come down like a waterfall from what feels like an open heaven.

Re: what is being banished, yes, it appears in these examples that what is being banished is psychological pain, maybe distinct from external evil, but maybe not in some cases. It's hard to know for sure. I hear your point that not all sickness is demonic even if the Power of God does the banishing. However, psychological pain often feels like a demonic stronghold to me when you see/feel it leave and hear the results. One woman, a close friend, describes being freed INSTANTLY of a terrible depression the momenet she received prayer. She said sth like: "I actually felt like a pair of talons that had gripped each of my shoulders was being released as she prayed." She hadn't felt her depression as a pair of talons until the prayer produced the sensation that she was being freed of their grip. Her description of talons doesn't necessarily mean there was actually a demon on her, but I've heard so many stories like this that suggest a strong link between psychological pain and the demonic.

In particular, when there is a family history of abuse, incest, occult invovlement, certain patterns of tragedy, etc., there may be generational curses or unholy soul ties (with beings in the natural or supernatural world) that are considered high-risk for demonic infiltration. This is the theory behind the inner healing models I've studied which seem open to praying conditionally concerning the demonic.

The kind of healing work you're suggesting is important unto character transformation which produce the fruit of learning to trust and love. I'll take a closer look at Cornell's Focussing work. Thanks for the suggestion.

peace to all you guys!

Shasha

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Shasha,

Hi Group:
Don't know if this is the correct forum for
this question so please bear with me.

Is The Sacred Heart of Jesus in Union
with The Immaculate Heart of Mary a physically
experienced experience within the Traditional Mystic Christian Tradition?

Thank you

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mary Sue,

I've never heard it put that way, Sue. Have you a reference?

Maybe this deserves its own topic, if you'd like to continue the discussion.

w.c. - "letting the longings untwist and re-emerge in the heart".

That's a great insight and a wonderful expression of the insight, w.c.

Lately, I've been experiencing lust/desire as a pain in the chest area, a real twisting in the heart which feels like anger, but I'm not angry, and which I'm able to watch and let pass to some extent.

This may not be exactly what you are referring to but it shows how psycho-sexual woundedness finds expression in the heart.

Stephen:

What you're describing sounds familiar and may be quite positively responsive to something like Focusing - not that you're asking for additional help. But I'll briefly outline the distinct approach I'm advocating for wounded parts, which as you know I've done before many times, and recently.

Wherever there is a wounded part like this, there is usually a hidden part or parts, which is reactive, either exiled but still active beneath our threshold of conscious awareness, or with which we're merged and therefore unaware of. In the latter case, we may be merged with the critical part that is afrad of another part's intensity and attempting to protect us from something. Or we can merge with the lust itself, as in acting out the yearning without relationship to another person or God, or with the wound that the lust and critical voice keep well quarenteened. The merging can be with any of the parts, but rarely with the traumatized, deeply wounded part which remains mostly exiled. Merging with a traumatized part can lead to a state of overwhelm, or even psychosis (I've never seen this happen in Focusing, since it doesn't force the issue), if the other conflicting parts aren't ready to yield their forward-moving energies in concert with one another. And we're seldom even consciously aware of the traumatized part from its own point of view, since we're merged with one part or another who's current job is to keep the traumatized part from further pain.

Ann Weiser Cornell, in her book "The Power of Focusing," outlines steps for gently developing a felt-sense dialogue with each of these parts. To do so, she says, one must enter into the state of presence (not equated with Divine presence or Grace, which she seems to recognize as distinct from human powers) which allows all the parts an opportunity to be sensed and heard. Her formula, I believe, is "Distance + Connection = Relationship." Presence is described for its qualities, such as acceptance, wonder, curiosity, gratitude, allowing, open to not knowing for sure, kindness, tolerance, patience, willing to learn/unlearn, etc . . . Whenever we're reacting to pain, we're surely merged with one of the parts and unavailable, or not in presence, for either the one we're merged with or any of the others. And presence cannot emerge to a significant degree when we are reacting.

If we open to the wounded part, or less deeply, to the lust, or the longing which is usually more than sexual, without coming into presence with the reactive parts, we usually won't be able to stand the intensity, since these other parts need their place in the heart before the wounded part can feel safe to emerge.

If you look on www.focusing.org or www.focusingresources.com you may be able to find an outline of Ann's steps. I prefer Ann's approach (and her colleague Barbara McGavin, who lives in England), to Gendlin's when dealing with conflicted parts, although he has learned from his students and has so much to offer for how Focusing has become a co-creation of many people, and for his profound philosophical contributions. His book "Focusing" gives us some uniquely time-tested basics, and he's gone on to develop these concepts for practical application for the Focusing-oriented psychotherapy model. Brilliant man.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: w.c.,

So we relate to the hidden reactive part as a defense against the overwhelm of the woundedness, and being present to this is as important as attention to the wound itself.

I'm starting to get it without actually realising what this reactive part might be in myself. I'm also slightly unnerved by the energetic bonding in my own psyche and how it might relate/react to these wounds and their emergence, which is where the complexity of the issues regarding occult attachments to psychic wounds gets a bit beyond our ken and can only be worked out through the Holy Spirit.

I do know that acting out the yearning, as you put it, stimulates the occult attachment and leads to an infusion of malevolence, and that it's therefore necessary to allow these wounds to emerge and transform in the grace of God's healing, with a kind of abandonment and tearful surrender that feels like the end of oneself. Anything else is just unbearable suppression. Easier said . . .

Yes, if you can be with each part, with Christ's help, just letting them unfold into Him being with you, or letting Him come into the these parts as He will.

And of course there are those times, as you describe, when no approach, even a relational one with the parts, seems possible.

quote:

Originally posted by w.c.:
...Presence is described for its qualities, such as acceptance, wonder, curiosity, gratitude, allowing, open to not knowing for sure, kindness, tolerance, patience, willing to learn/unlearn, etc . . .
....

This is ideally what a therapist's 'energy' conveys to the patient, providing a safe context for the emergence of the unconscious determinants and characeristics of longings, woundedness. In psychotherapy, patients pick up on this energy and may benefit from it maybe moreso than the verbal exchange, I wonder.

On a more mystical dimension, this is how Peter's shadow could heal or touching the garment of Jesus. Some people just possess these qualities to such an extent that healing cannot help but leak out of them.

I just love, delight in, MELT at the thought of our Lord leaking with healing love...

quote:

Originally posted by samson:
... the complexity of the issues regarding occult attachments to psychic wounds gets a bit beyond our ken and can only be worked out through the Holy Spirit.

. . .

Hey, Stephen. I agree with this point.

I'm moved by and so sorry to hear of the struggles you've shared here. I pray that you are set free of occult attachments, and I am asking the Father to send the Holy Spirit to bring about your deep healing.

BTW, I can see by your picture that your Momma really adored you, the wee little boy.

Thanks Shasha!

Let me say too that things are a lot better. There has been a slow, gradual healing and deliverance which has gone in tandem with purification. God knows what He's doing!

BTW - Got a good wee maw there n her wee boays noo a big lump ae a lad .

[QUOTE]Originally posted by samson:
Thanks Shasha!

Let me say too that things are a lot better. There has been a slow, gradual healing and deliverance which has gone in tandem with purification. God knows what He's doing!
[QUOTE]

Yes, He does, and we can be grateful that despite our missteps, He will truly "work all things to good for those who love Him."

Shasha:

I want to respond to your post some time ago, more directly than I already have, or more completely. Here's the post I'm referring to:

"w.c. has acknowledged that in theory evil can manifest as an "angel of light," but I join you in calling into question his criteria for determining whether it is the evil of a repressed and split-off part of one's psyche or an external evil. w.c. is suggesting (if I understand correctly) that real external evil does not respond to love whereas the wounded, split-off parts do . . . . There can be many different kinds of love, right? One can be blissfully 'in love' with a goddess, bow to her 50 times per day, enjuoy her sexual intercourse at will, have a love-feast of sorts with her and all this will certainly not repel her! Those who have genuinely encountered the love-sex bestowing 'form' f Kali will attest to this - if they dare talk about it! But this kind of love is more of an ddiction or a seduction and not how we're called to give love to one another."


Agreed, mostly. And I think it is not too difficult to differentiate real love from addictive, seductive passion, whether human or supernatural variety. Of course, while in the throes of that passion, there is little perspective, except after a while one begins to sense how these fusions with archetypal forces, or with supernatural ones, lack a quickening of the heart in terms of virture, sorrow for one's selfishness, awareness of just how vain we are at our core, need to love one's enemies, limits of the soul in being able to grow in this way regardless of how active kundalini becomes, or even in spite of it! etc . . . but there is also near the core, in this, a kind of grief, knowing that real love isn't really being experienced, regardless of how saturated we are with bliss. For me, I knew I was just becoming more selfish, and there was always a kind of emptiness in my heart, regardless of how many ravishingly blissful events occured. My heart wasn't really being dilated in the painful way where true sorrow for sin and wounding of others is awakened. I knew I wasn't loving others for their own sake, but for my own pleasure and convenience, however rarified it was. Jesus calls us to love our enemies! Yikes!! He even gives this teaching in a way meant to make us laugh at ourselves, while feeling how sad it is only to love those who love us. We can only do this by knowing we can't, of our own power, or of kundalini's, love in such a way; yet, our hearts open in grief to this knowledge of limitation, and yearn to true Love, not merely consolations of love.

As I said elsewhere to you, Shasha, I did experience something like what you describe here, during my Qingong days, which lasted about 5 years. Interestingly, the Roman goddess I've described never did saturate me; she was always separate, limited, kind, non-intrusive, never wanting to be worshipped, and even confronted me when I was doing some alterate nostril breathing (nearly 20 years ago), telling me my ego wasn't stable or mature enough to experience and integrate these intensities. I was rather offended she said this, but stopped what I was doing. But the Qigong was very bliss-oriented, mood altering, and didn't lead to increased compassion or humility, to say the least. It was quite addictive. At one point I quite doing it and just received acupuncture treatments from a physician who had nothing to do with Qigong or the tantric Buddhism which was also involved. It seems the more we have suffered attachment disorder as children, the more prone we are to seek mood-altering experiences that numb us to the pains of conscience, as this numbing serves our sense of entitlement.

I'd say the more we grow in true love, human and Grace-based, the less we think of ourselves, in a grandiose sense. We do become more integrated, but also more humble as we see more clearly the difference between creature and Creator, self and other. The "Other" becomes more other, or is seen as different from us as He is infinitely deep in a painful (truth-bearing) love we can't contrive. We cannot love perfectly, and certainly not perfectly while in pain. A little bit of pain in the wrong place and we're bitching and moaning like we've never been touched by Christ! But this does change slowly, and one can say the real saints, rare though they are, are able to love in a true way even when all human comforts are lost, as Paul saying it was no longer he who lived, but Christ in him. Yet Paul seemed to have his imperfections to the very end . . . a bit vain, that Paul! But thank God for that, as the bliss or saturation you describe leaves little room for knowing imperfection.

And so it seems that there are some simple things children would spot in us as imperfections which we might not see in our mood-altered states. You're a mom! Your kids must have seen this from time to time, I'd guess.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: w.c.,

[QUOTE]Originally posted by w.c.:
.. . . but there is also near the core, in this, a kind of grief, knowing that real love isn't really being experienced, regardless of how saturated we are with bliss. For me, I knew I was just becoming more selfish, and there was always a kind of emptiness in my heart, regardless of how many ravishingly blissful events occured. My heart wasn't really being dilated in the painful way where true sorrow for sin and wounding of others is awakened. I knew I wasn't loving others for their own sake, but for my own pleasure and convenience, however rarified it was....

It seems the more we have suffered attachment disorder as children, the more prone we are to seek mood-altering experiences that numb us to the pains of conscience, as this numbing serves our sense of entitlement.

...QUOTE]

Thanks for taking the time to share more of where you're coming from here, w.c. Yes, the emotional abuse I suffered as a child clearly left me vulerable to seeking this addictive, seductive kind of energy also. I remember going into mini, self-induced catatonic-like trances as a little girl and then again in college. I suppose they were moments of dissociation that I'd learned to enjoy to defend against a harsh and lonely environment. The kundalini and yoga came alongside to support this tendency already in me to check out of this world, so to speak. And yes, being a mom is an excellent context for receiving needed "wake-up" calls as to what loving is really about, how deeply broken we are despite mood alterations/bliss. In fact, I was sitting in the semi-lotus position one day recently and I began to slip in what I was begining to feel like samhadi-like state. I was actually offended by this thing and said, "Get out of here!" recognizing that there is a well-worn illusive path to peace that I wanted to never travel again...so, yes, for me, it's a kind of grief at the waste of time/energy of that path.

Speaking of brokenness, I have to check out of SP for a while to attend to some challenges that have come my way.

Bless you, in our Lord,
Shasha

I wish you well, and will keep you in my prayers, and others probably will also.

Hi Shasha -Thank you (and Phil, w.c., and all) for taking the time to write about these things. It's very much appreciated, and you will be in my prayers as well.

I originally found Shalom Place because of a discussion of Eckhart Tolle on an equine forum; I wasn't looking for anything more than a Christian review of his books. But I am amazed at the richness here--it's profoundly helpful, and I am deeply thankful.

Hello,

Like Ariel Jaffe I was looking for a Christian perspective on Eckhart Tolle. I don't want to ramble on but in a nut shell I have been touched beyond words by y'all...I don't believe it was an accident that I stumbled onto this web site, the wisdom here has spoke volumes to my heart and reawakened my sleeping love for Jesus. Thank-You! You are precious. Gail

AJ and G:

Thanks for your support, kind words, and mostly silent fellowship. Feel free to post as you wish. Phil has created a good place for all seekers.

Hi All,

I've been away from Shalomplace for a while but have wanted to post about something that happened about 3/4 weeks ago.

It was during the time that this discussion thread was very active and I had been thinking about my past experiences and wondering whether I would ever come to any conclusions regarding my experiences of evil spirit/woundedness projected as evil.

Well, one evening after spending some time with a very close and spiritual friend I went home and climbed into bed. As I closed my eyes images of demons and monstrous faces started flashing in my mind.

My first instinct was to try to suppress or reject the images, to drive them out of my mind. But instead I thought to myself, let me experiment a little here. I could not bring myself to show love to the images, but, I did try to center my love on Christ and simply create an attitude of acceptance of these images. Shortly after doing this I began to see a vortex/tornado of light begin to swirl in my mind's eye. This swirling light caught up the images within it. Every few seconds the images would be thrown out of the swirling light and appear at the front of my mind. But instead of being scary or horrible these images appeared in pairs and were kissing or hugging each other. This continued for a while and then the images and the light were gone and I fell asleep.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: w.c.,