Qhile listening to the book, Dominion, How the Christian revolution RemaDE THE woRLD, BY tOM hOLLAND, A FEW MONTHS AGO, i WAS REMINDED OF THE MIRACLES THAT cATHOLIC SAINTS ARE SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO SHOW IN ORDER TO QUALIFY FOR THAT STATUS. hOLAND DOESN'T SAY UCH ABOUT THE cATHOLIC cHURCH AS SUCH, SO WHEN HE MENTIONS THESE SO CALLED SAINTS NOW AND THEN HE APPEARS TO BE THINKING OF THEM SIMPLY AS A cHRISTIAN THING, NOT SPECIFICALLY A cATHOLIC THING, IF HE MAKES ANY DISTINCTION AT ALL.
uNFORTUNATELY MY MMEMORY IS PRETTY BAD THESE DAYS AND i DON'T REMEMBER THE SPECFIC IDEA THAT LED KME IN THIS DIRECTION, BUT IT OCURRED TO ME THAT THE MIRALCES PERFORMED BY THESE "SAINTS" ARE PROBABLY WHAT wATCHMAN nEE IN HIS GOOK thE lATENT pOWER OF THE sOUL, IDENTIFIES AS sOUL pOWER, RATER THAN GENUINE MIRACLES THAT COME FROM goD. iT WAS SOME WAY THEY WERE DESCRIBED IN hOLLAND'S BOOK THAT MADE ME THINK ALONG THESE LINES, AND THAT IS UNFORTUNATELY THE THING i CAN'T REMEMBER. tHIS KIND OF PROBLEM IS PARTICULARLY HARD FOR ME BECAUSE i CAN'T SEE TO JUST GO TO THE BOOK ITSELF AND LOOK UP REMFERENCES TO THE IRACLES OF SAINTS.
i'VE LISTENED TO nEE'S BOOKS, THE lATENT pOWER OF THE sOUL drat, the caps lock was on, sorry. and The Release of the Spirit, at least twice since then. These are hard lessons to understand, let alone learn to live by, and my memory problems make ammany listenings necessary anyway. Nee's books, particularly the oe about soul power, evoke the Hindu category of Siddhis, or attainments or powers that some adepts can reach. Neew says soul powers are cultivated in all the religious practices that aim to suppress the body and liberate the soul, which include asceticisms and medictations and varieties of both. The siddhis can be released by those who practice these things most energetically I gather.
I just ow looked up Siddhis on You Tube and found a program called Enlightenment Today where a man explains the siddhis, and they are very much what the Catholic saints could do.
I should have mentionsd before that I just finished another audible book, They FLew, by historian Carlos Eire, which is his rather obsessive puruist of information about the particularly particular power or siddhi of levittion. That is one of the siddhis mentioned by the guy in the video I just saw. For some reason it caught Eire's interest and most of his book focuses on reports of this particular power as practiced by Catholic mystics mostly in the sixteenth ad seventteenth centuries. Bilocation is another such power they some of them also exhibited though more rarely. Levitation was fairly common it turns out, and in fact that one is often used as the miracle that qualifies a mystic for sainthood according to the Catholic system.
Nee doesn't mention Levitation for some reason, which is rfrustrating at this point, but he oes mention bilocation or the phenomenon of a person's being in two places at the same time, where he or she is able to interact with people in both places, and with the physical environment. Sometimes the person is in a trance at the original location, but in some accounts is conscious in both places.
Eire's book has some very specific descriptions of levitation events. The body seems to be utterly insaensate during the event, sometimes cdescribed as light as a feather so that it could be blown around easily by people nearby, but also nearly impossible to pull back to earth, even when many people exerted themselves in the effort. Eire mentions that often these people who levitated also had other abilities such as telephaathy or the ability to read the minds of other people, bilocation, already mentioned, the ability to see hear and feel thihjngs at a distance, the ability to know future events and so aon. All these things are mentioned by the Enlightenment guy in the previous ly mentioned video. So it is certainly fair to cal all these things Siddhis though that is a Hindu ter for them, and Nee's term is Soul Powers.
It is very clear in Eire's accounts that these powers are released by the extreme ascetic practices engaged in by these Catholic mytics, often extreme fasting or food deprivtion, the wearing of hari shirts, which are garmed made of goat's hair that are veryu irritating to the skin, metal objects wornsn next to the body where they can cause pain , chains on the body, sleeping on hard surfaces, in some cases on a wooden cross without softening materials. As Nee says, suppresing the body is one of the ways the soul powers can be released and although that doesn't seem to be at all the aim of these pracitces in the Catholic context, clearly it is the method that does lead to their release. The mystics are seeking deeper experiences of God, not powers of any kind. THere are some frauds, which Eire' also reports, but most of them sounds quite legitimate. They are trying to mortify the flesh and its sins to become worthy to be in God's preence or some such idea. But in so doing they are inadvertently releasing allthes soul powers that Nee says are hidden in the bodies of all human beoiings ever since the Fall of Adam and Eve.
In the Easetn religions where the term siddhis is used, the aim is toward enlightenment, and ascetic practices are apparently prat of that practice, if I understood him correctly, Unless the asceticism is for the purpose of liberating siddhis, which are not always desired by a particular discipline but are by some. In themselves they have no particular alue, not in any of the religious contexts, not towsrd enilightenment, or toward closeness to God. In a sense they could be said to get in the way of those ultimate aims, but in the Eastern context apparently they are vluled as part of the spiritual journey in some of the religious systems.
My interest has been to try to understand what things are of God and what are not, as Nee makes it very clear that the soul powers are definitely not of God and are to be avoided. So now that I've become convinced that these miracles of the Catholic saints are indeed the same thing as the soul powers and the siddhis Ihave to at least tentatively say they are not of God. Which in some cAAE Qhixh in aomw xAWA IA painful becuase the people are so clearly trying to daraw near to god whom they appear to love genuinely, or at least they love what they think is God and since they are draw to what we know top be genuinely attributes of God I have to say that to that extent they are genuinely seeking God himself. At that is painful if I have to realize that they are failing mightily in their aim and only releasing a power of their own souls that does not come from God.I feel very sorry for them. They are misled by their religion. Which is how I think of Catholics in general anyway, but it hurts when you see epopel so isincerely trying to find God on all the wrong paths.
Asceticism is already a clue that they are not on the right path as scripture itself tells us that won't accomplish anything wheer in the CHristian life. Then when it ceoms clear that the so called Virgin Mary has a big part in all these thigns for most of them I ust want to bury my head in d crayy. How sad. Mary is way too big a part of many of these people's experiences. urely the deil is guiding all these things and leading them all to disaster.
So the very evidences the Roman church uses to determine if a particular mystic deserves sainthood are actually evidences that they aren't anywhere near the mos basic level of relationship with God. I noticed over and over that nowhere is the gospel as Protestants understand it mentioned at all in the accounts of these levitating and bilocating mystics. Jesus is called the redeemer, all too often co redeemer which his mother, oh unholy fact, but what exactly one does to get recdeemed is not mentioned anywhere.
It looks to me like these soul powers are probably the Lying Wonders JwuJesus says will be on display at the very end just before He returns. It's interest ing to me that al lthe things , or I guess I should't say ALL, but many, of the things we are to expence of the very last days are to be seen in the thoudsand year reign of the Catholid Church through the MIddle Ages, the so called Holy Roman Empire. The Anitchrist, who is the Pope, was revealed when the Bishop of Rome took on the role of Universal Bishop back in the seventh century, though the futurist end times system of teoday says he won't be relevealsed until afte rthe true Church is raptured. Not so, He's been in plain sight for over a thousand years, and recognized in may writings by many true Christians outside the Roan arena down the centuries as the Antichrist. The Reforemers were belated joiners of that group.
They've disissed the idea that the Pope is the Antichrist and I'm afraid that is a big big isake. There are other clues to the end times system that have also been fulfilled in the Medieval Catholic CHurch, such as the making of all those martyrs through the Inquisitions, those martyrs we see in the Book of Revelation, and the Lying Signs and wonders too, it seems to me now, as the supposed miracles claimed by the Romean shucrch have been there all along and are not just something to be brought into play at the very end, though perhaps those and all the rest of it wil be an extra intense version of all of it.
Also I realized thathe Antichrist iais also worshipped. You'd think maybe that would wait until the end, but if you think about the throng that gatherwed in St Pet'ers square to see the anouncement of the new Pope a couple of moths ago , many praying, using their pagan rosary beands and so on, you have to call that worship.
I cringe when I hear Cathaolis recite the Lord's prayer or the Hail Mary and call those things praying, and I especially cringe when they come to that last line that asks Mary to pray for us sinners, as if she could hear prays by millions of people just as god can, and answer them. tghe prayer to be prayed for. It's still a prayer, it's making Mary into God. I swish I could jolt a few of them out of their delusion.
It's a hard delusion to bereak because so many of them asre such nice people, ice patriotic Americans, kind people etc etc etc. And they enjoy their community life among their fellow Catholics. Hard delusion to reak indeed.
But Lord, please save many of them.
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