Her exact words are lost to me but I know she started by saying "I can guarantee..." and what she was guaranteeing me was that Christianity is an illusion. This was during the period in which I read my way to Christ and I'm not sure exactly when Sarah came back into town, but I would guess I wasn't yet a Christian believer although apparently I was attracted to the Christians at that point. Probably mostly the Catholic mystics such as Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.
What I'd told Sarah about my explorations I don't remember. She was a Zen Buddhist priestess by then, having practiced for at least a decade. She was in town only temporarily, probably living at the Zendo. We'd been close friends earlier but hardly saw each other any more. Still she contacted me when she came into town and we had some nice conversations, this time all focused on our religious and spiritual experiences. When I described one of mine she said it was a "satori" which I knew to be a Buddhist experience*. She seemed to see what I was going through in much the same terms I was seeing it, as a sort of personalized spiritual practice, which by its intensity was leading me into experiences disciplined meditators would have later in their practice. It was an extraordinarly intense time for me. Belideving in God after a lifetime of considering myself to bean atheist was emotionally explosive, and I do think it was that heightened emotion that brought about some of the experiences that one might not normally encounter in a more disciplinesd progress of meditation or other spiritual practices. In retrospect I think it was a very dangerous time I was going through because all that comes from encounters with the demonic realms. Which at the time I didn't kno9w how to think abhoutt theologically.
So she was guaranteeing me that Christianity was all a delusion. She seemed to think she knew this beyond a doubt because of her experiences in meditation. Some of my do=it=yourself experiences were pretty scary but hers were even scarier. Later I found an article she had written online which describewd Buddhism as a version of shamanism. Clearly that did not go over well with the Buddhist community. I know now what that means but when i first encountered it I didn't really know much of anything about demons, or Christian theology.
Certainly her experiences of the demonic realms, which is what it was, I know now, had convinced her that there was no other reality. The demons or whatever Buddhists call those spiritual beings, are calling all the shots. They create illusions to deceive people about many things. That much is very consistent with Christian theology and it's interesteing to realize she had been dealing with demons and knew it. I'm sure I wasn't yet saved, didn't really know the gospel, or by then I would have tried to persuade her away from all that.
What exactly she had in mind about the Christian world she could guarantee me was a delusion I don't know. I don't remember what I'd told her and maybe she was putting it together mostly from her own dchildhood experience of growing up Baptist in Mississippi. Perhaps the very idea of God was what she had in mind. *I would guesass it was along those lines. There is no GFod in Buddhism, just myriads of spiritual beings and spiritual experiences of many sorts.
One of my coffee house friends during those days also assured me that Christianity was all an illusion. He was into the "Seth" books, about an "entity channelled by the author, who taught her all sorts of what I would now call "Doctrines of Demons' as the Bible calls it. My friend said the dmons put on shows for people to convince them of all sorts of realities that don't exist. And supposedly Christianity is one of those shows they put on for those foolish enough to be drawn into it.
All that is not hard to beleive from a Christian point of views. I think of the recent caccounts of trips to "heaven" in "near-death experiences," in which sometimes elaborate landscapes and personalities are presented to the person having the experience. Often people come out of these experiences convinced they've seen the true reality of what's on the "other side" and voconvinced that's where they are going to go when they die. They may amend their lives to be better people. The great deception in all that is that when they die that is not where they are going to go, to whatever paradise the demons created for them. All of us go to Hell unless we are saved by Christ and the real delusion is that the demons teach some sort of doctrine that denies that Christ is who He says He is in the Bible, perhaps he's one of many "masters" or that sort of thing, and of course there is no such thing as "salvation. All that according to them is a delusion. Interesting that all the religions, all the demons, are very determined to attack Christianity in particular as false. They don't bother much about other beliefs. Does suggest that there's something about Christianity that threatens them. The only religion that's true. All the rest they control.
So many people have been inoculated against belief in the true gospel by such experiences. They are pretty powerful experiences, can be very vivid, very compelling. And I think both my coffee house friend and Sarah knew at least that this is what demons do, they invent worlds and experiences to deceive people. UFOs are one such deception they
;ve invented. Apparitions of Mary are a big one, they've ensnared millions of Catholics and Mulslims with that one. But there's no end tgo their inventions designed to deceive. Just listen sometime to Coast to Coast radio to get a sense of just how many strage experiences they've invented for the allurement of human beings.
So I don't know exactly what Sarah was guaranteeing me is untrue about Christianity but I guess it's probably mainly about the exiistence of God. She described one frightening experience she had had in meditation to me: her hand had turned into a bird's claw, or really a dragon's claw and she couldn't change the her perception. She ran to the Roshi who assured her it would fade and eventually it did. And while she was in town she seemed to experience some kind of freefloating fear which she didn't talk about, but for instance she insisted on walking in the middle of the street as we walked to my apartment and kept glandcing up at the trees with a fearful look on her face.
She had a plant she wanted to leave with me while she went somewhere else for a while so I took care of it for her. When she came back she spent some time examining it very carefully before picking it up and taking it away. I had the odd impression that she was looking at it to see if it revealed signs of whether I was friend or foe. I think she was reassured that I was not a foe.
Oh, by the way, I wanted to mention somewhere in here that she had a long string of beads wrapped around her wrist. A rosary. That was my introduction to the fact that the rosary somes from the pagan religions. It's certainly not Christian. But at the time it was just an interesting fact which I didn't understand until later.
We lost touch again, reconnected briefly online only to find that we'd become so far apart spiritual ly and politically we couldn't remain close friends and we lost touch again. I haven't been able to find her online for years and I fear she's probably died. I wish she were still alive and would contact me and give me a chance to try to persuade her to the gospel of salvation.\
Well I can't see what I; m typinmg, I have to trust the way it feels under my fingers and I'm sure I'm making horrendous mistakes as usual which I may or may not be able to correct later.
But this seems toa story that needed telling. People have all kinds of spiritual experiences these days that really aree delusions. Of course I simply trust the Bible to be B Go'ds word and God has to reveal that to a person, I can say it and give whatever evidence I can muster, but it's God who shows people the truth. In the end I can only pray that He will show many..
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*Although Sarah did call an experience i described a "satori" which was quite flattering as I understood the term to mean "enlightenment" which would have meant I'd reached a spiritual milestone according to Buddhism without even trying, the experience itself never suggested anything of the sort to me. It was one of a series of experiences I'd been having of extraordinarily heightened emotions, and by emotion I mean standarrd emotions such as love, hatred, fear, anger, and so on. The one she called a satori was compassion. All these emotions I'd been experiencing in extraordinarily powerful engulfing episodes that lasted a few minutes, maybe as long as fifteen or twetny minutes. I don't want to get into a description of them here but they were clearly emotions, albeit of an extraordinary intensity. The compassion episode was triggered by simply seeing a person in a wheelchair and being overwhelmed by this sensation of being squeezed by a gigantic hand like a wet rag being wrung out, and the emotion was a supernatural level of compassion. I don't think that's "enlightenment." But I also don't think it was demonic and I shouldn't have put it in the same category. Many of my experiences were demonic but I think these emotions were more like a heightening of normal human feelings, brought about as much of my overall experience was during that period, by the intensity in my pursuit of spiritual knowledge.
