Some Varieties of Spiritual Deceptions

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.

Part 1 of 2 on the COVID Nightmare by Understanding the Times radio

This week's Understanding the Times radio is a solid primer on the COVID situation, especially the dangers of hospitalization in this current atmosphere where effective treatment is denies and ineffective treatment forced on people. The program gives sources to help people deal with infection that at the moment my eyes are too bad to detail here. Just getting the video embedded was an ordeal. Anyway it's all there and looks very useful.

A few statistics mentioned in the first ten or fifteen minutes: 80 percent of Omicron patients are vaccinated. Over a million vaccine injuries have been reported and nobody knows how many are unreported, over 21 thousand of these injuries are deaths, again reported, unreported of course unknown. I'll also repreat Peter McCullouch's estimate that 85 oercebt of those who have died of COVID could have been saved if they'd received proper early treatment.

I https://olivetreeviews.org/radio-archives/

A Book Exposing the COVID Nightmare

So many books I'd like to read. I've got Mark Levin's but reading is not possible so I have it as documented evidence. I could have Glenn Beck's book for the same reason, and Robert F. Kennedy's, and now this one I just heard about:

Byson and Fareed, OVERCOMING THE COVID DARKNESS

< r> From the blurb at Amazon:

No one needs to die! Overcoming the Darkness of COVID is about two doctors who used a treatment protocol early in the pandemic and early in treatment when the conventional wisdom issued was not to provide any treatment to patients and send them home until they got sick and then go to the hospital where they were then often put on breathing machines – many of whom died. To the contrary, every one of the patients Dr. Tyson and Dr. Fareed treated early in the illness recovered and there were NO deaths. They also treated those who were severely sick and only lost a few. The treatment protocol they used included pharmaceutical and nutraceutical ingredients and has proven to be highly effective and safe with COVID, especially when caught early. This book is their story complete with testimonials from patients and other doctors, research studies, news clippings, and most of all, the reasons why this successful treatment was held back from the public. Overcoming the Darkness of COVID is a must read for anyone concerned about their health and successfully negotiating the pandemic

It's only available at Amazon on Kindle and I would want the hardcover. I don't know why that isn't available. Since there is some reason to think the Kindle version might have been tampered with I don't want that for any controversial book any more,. It's also interesting that there are a number of listings for a book "summarizing" the doctros' book. Why would that be necessary? Makes me rather suspicious that it's an attempt to discredit it, so I certainly don't want that either.

Anyway, this looks like a very important book and I hope it gets a huge circulation.

Can We Reboot the Nation Back to Its Origins and Derail the Destructive Great Reset?

I heard about Glenn Beck's new book on Mark Levin tonight when he interviewed Beck. And I didn't hear the whole interview, I just happened to turn it on while they were still talking. Levin promoted the book as a companion to his own most recent "American Marxism." BBeck's is "The Great Reset: Joe Biden and Twenty-First Century Fascism." They treat each other as partners in the work of saving America. It's a heartening thought.
> THE GREAT RESET, by Glenn Beck

You have to see the problem before you can fix it. Both Levin and Beck see the problem and show it to us. Then how do we fix it? Levin gives lots of good practical actions we can take in his book, but I was intrigued by Beck's answer to that question. First of course he admitted that it's enormous difficult if not impossible, but his answer was that we need to "reboot the nation" though I'm not sure those were his exact words. "Reboot" was certainly his word and that's the intriguing word. We have t turn off the system and turn it back on again to reset it back to its original condition.

Which is a way of saying what I keep thinking, and it does seem to be utterly impossible, but it's the only solution. The entire miserable mess of what leftism has done to this country has to be turned off completely and the country reset to its original foundations. Decades of accumulated distortion of our Constition have to be rolled back, Supreme Counrt decisions that have twisted it out of recognition, laws that destroy its very foundations. It all has to be turned off so that the Constitution can be reclaimed.

Utterly impossible on the face of it.

But nothing halfway will accomplish anything. Piecemeal legislation won't do what is needed even if the juggernaut of the Left could be avoided long enough to get anything through.

The system needs to be reset. And that's not the "reset" of the title of the book, which refers to the Great Reset which is the global plan to destroy America and all the free nations of the world.

How? Well, as usual I'm starting by praying for it.

What's Wrong With Everything In A Few Brief Blurts

There’s too much to talk about and I don’t know where to start. I want to talk about the lies we’re hearing every day about COVID and the “vaccines” that aren’t vaccines, I want to report on Joe Rogan’s interviews with Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, I want to tie in their view that we are in a time of mass pscyhosis which has been orchestrated in stages, with the Holocaust survivor testimonies I’ve been listening to that also reveal how they were entrapped by orchestrated stages Maybe not so much orchestrated as being tried out one at a time to see how much resistance they may generate and since they didn’[t generate much, they were very effective, they escalated their oppressive measures for the next stage. Well, we’ve been through unnecessary lockdowns, unnecessary masking, the propaganda that vilifies a segment of the population by another segment. Step by step we are getting herded where they want us.

I want to link to Chris Pinto’s recent radio show in which he discusses ten issues from the previous year that are following us into the new year, a sad litany of betrayals by the people who are unfortunately in power in this country, and all over the world for that matter, the same people Michele Bachmann called “monsters” in the talk I linked in my last post.

Then Jan Markell’s latest show is unfortunately also an important source of sad news, as she interviews Cary Gordon who made a film titled “Enemies Within the Church” parts of which can be found at You Tube. This is all about how the enemies of the culture have also invaced the churches with their antichristian Wokeness and other abominations. The most shocking revelation to me was that Albert Mohler, who has been a hero to the true born again church for decades, has capitulated to these evil influences. Just a side note of my own: I suspect Chris Pinto could take us behind the scenes even further than this film and show us who has been plotting thes coup and how they’ve succeeded.

I thought I might put together a post starting from one small incident in the part of that film about the takeover and destruction of what had been a solid Florida church. One woman who opposed the takeover and was ousted forher efforts reports that when she came close to one of the main leaders of the takeover the hair stood up on the back of her neck. There’s no explanation for that other than that the man was demon possessed. It’s evil spirits that cause the hair to stand up like that.

And that could lead me into another sad topic which is the growth of the occult in America. Sometimes I tune into the late night Coast to Coast radio show which is usually about the paranormal, and it’s staggering how many people are apparently involved in one facet or another of the various occultic experiences from UFOs to witchcraft to oiut of body experiences and much much more. They even rationalize it in some cases as “Christian” though it is all demonic and it’s horrifying to realize that they have no clue to its essentially demonic nature. Yes I should do a post on that eventually if I can.

The Lying Media. This might be a topic unto itself or maybe its belongs with the COVID topic but I just thought of it: the reports that the hospitals are overlflowing with COVID patients, most of them unvaccinated. They interview such a patient who says she regrets refusing to be vaccinated, giving no information about her even whatever, what she’s in the hospital for – we’re supposed to assume she’s sick with COVID but I don’t assume any such thing any more. Maybe she’s there for surgery and tested positive for COVID. They call people unvaccinated who have had one or two “vaccinations” they classify people who test posibive as COVID patients no matter what their reason for being in the hospital. And then they go and interview a guy who says he can’t get a needed surgery because the beds are full of the “unvaccinated” who are “selfish” to take up beds others could use. The fact is that most of the patients aren’t COVID patiensts at all, and the truly unvaccinated make up a minuscule proportion of those who are. It’s the vaccinated who are getting sick, in fact the variants are probably manufactured by those who have been vaccinated but of course we’ll never get that information from the mainstream media who for some reason are in on this program of trying to scare us all to death and make a villain class out of the unvaccinated. That’s part of the COVID propaganda campaign, but of course there’s the Critical Race Theory propaganda campaign which is making villains of “white people.” Vaccine Passports are in force in some places, maybe they’ll make someo of us wear a white badge that says “racist” on it or something. But I dogresss.

I’ve also had in mind a post titled something like Liberals Live in LaLa Land, to express my frustration with the fact that the great political divide in this country is largely due to the fact that the information people need is being withheld from half the country. It's the liberals who don’t know what’s going on because they trust the mainstream media and the dominant authorities of the current government and never seek out any other sources of information. All other information they consider to be “misinformation” by evil conservarives because that’s what the bogus authorities of Social Media tell them. This is maybe the biggest frustration right now, the engineered impossibility of getting the truth to half the country.

I’ve also got a project in mind that’s still pretty vague, coming off Chris Pinto’s recent film about the Christian foundations of America. How it was more than a mere Reputlic, it was as he quotes Samuel Adams, intended to be “the reighn of political Protestantism.” How it could have succeeded but didn’t and now never can. ,br>
O On the theme of the intended Christian nature of America it would be all too easy to document how unbelievers, both the hsotile and the benign who just don't have a clue to what Christianity is all about, have fought for antichristian interpretations of the Constitution and the framer's original intent. Even the benign as I called them are hostile to Christian principles and the Law of God. Oh yes I need to write more about the Law of God too. Anyway I just heard a wellmeaning liberal talkking about how we're going to need to get used to the idea that it's OK to experiment with different gender expressions, as if it's just very backward of us, simply unevolved or that sort of thing, to fight this "progress" Oh yeah, the meaning of "progressive," I've wanted to do a post on that too. Anyway, this nice liberal thinks we need to explore the variations of geneder as interesting experiences or something like that. I don't know if she knows the Bible condemns the dressing as women by men and as men by women, but I'm sure the bible is just an artifact of human thinking anyway rather than the word of God, there being no God in her thinking, but the fact that that's in the Bible is the reason we cannot, we Christians cannot, play around with gender variations as she seems to think would be a good addition to our lives. I don't see the attraction to such expressions anyway myself.

So the world is going to Hell and we've been watching it helplessly for some time now. I still hope God might show us how to deserve a revival but at the moment things look awfully disposed against any such possibility.

Oh another theme. Yes the Jesus Freaks of the seventies was a revival of corts and I haven't r mentioned it as I've written about wanting a revival. It was a revival but not quite what I've had in mind and it's effect on the Church is not entirely what we should want either. There are half-baked revivals and that has to be kept in mind.

I'm sure there's more but I suppose that's enough misery for one post.

Wounded, Bleeding, Bound and Gagged, We Limp Into a New Year.

Well, sure, of course I WISH us all a happy 2022 but ... but.

Why aren't our prayers being heard? They aren't, you know. I don't think it's for lack of effort or passion, I continue to think that we aren't meeting God's conditions. We're under judgment. Sometimes prayer can divert judgment, but sometimes we're past the point where it can be diverted. I don't know in this case for sure. Is God saying Stop trying to escape, go to Babylon and dig in and make the best of it, or is He telling us He's about to judge the earth and e should prepare for th Second Coming? Or is He saying identify the violation of My will and rectify it and Then pray. Or what?

Maybe not enough of us recognize that we are under judgment and we could start there. Michele Bachmann did a nice job of spelling this out in a talk she gave a few months ago at a conference:



Plenty of people missed that 9/11 was God's judgment on America. I remember wincing through days of silly statements by Christian preachers about how God doesn't do such things. I remember cringing through Bush's prayher gathering in the National Cathedral which included a Muslim leader, a Cqatholic leader and a Jewish leader knowing that such ignorance of the nature of God was only going to bring more judgment on the nation.

Bachmann describes how things have been getting worse intead of b4etter since 9/11. This isn't for lack of prayer, this is because we're under God's judgment and until we RIGHTLY repent, repent of the right violations, there is no hope of turning these things back.

It may be too late anyway, but I don't know that for sure yet.

It's not going to be a very happy year if we don't get it right. Not here on this planet anyyway. If we get rapturexd out of it, hooray, but we may have to go through a lot more than we usually impute to that scenario.

Merry Christmas 2

This is such a good sermon by John MacArthur I had to make another Merry Christmas post for it. He imagines the feelings of Mary and Joseph when they hear that they are to be the parents of a child who will be the Son of God. He inclues a long long list of lines from various Chrfistmas carols which is very inspiribng.