The nature of the spiritual realm
After learning to meditate at a Buddhist centre, I practised meditation mainly at home. I loved it and wanted to meditate more and more, especially when I discovered it could help me heal physical pain and cured me of a backache that chiropractors and osteopaths hadn’t been able to fix. I was surprised when one day during my meditation practise I heard what I thought was the voice of my boyfriend’s (now my husband) dad speaking to me. It was at a stressful time in our life when we were packing up to leave the country. The voice said, ‘’don’t worry, just be happy.’’ It was something that he would of said, my boyfriend told me.
I was quite amazed, as I’d previously thought that we are all just energy, and when we die we just dissolve into some kind of universal oneness. I had no idea that spirits still remained intact in the afterlife. It wasn’t something they’d ever mentioned down the Buddhist centre. It made me question the Buddhist philosophy, although I’d only heard little snippets in lessons for beginners. Why was I hearing from a dead relative, rather than seeing Buddhas and Boddhisatvas?
It made me wonder about the nature of reality, and I decided there and then to go on what I perceived, rather than anything I was told. Meditation was so exciting I could just go swimming out in that cosmic sea and just see what I discovered. Admittedly not that much. Most of the time it was just thinking about stuff while failing to focus on my breathing. But occasionally, very occasionally I would perceive things, like a presence in the corner of the room, or a microsecond where it seemed that space and time had disappeared.
When my grandmother died I felt as if the veil had thinned between this world and the afterlife. I felt her presence in my life, often taking up empty chairs, or walking with me when I went into the forest near our house. She even told me I was moving to Florence two weeks before my husband saw a job advert. I visited psychics and read about how to hone our psychic skills. It was all so exciting, and wonderful.
Or so I thought. Till I realised that psychics mix truth and lies. And why would they do that? Because it’s a particularly hard skill and none of them can do it perfectly. That must be it, I thought, and just continued on my way, listening to psychics and trying to sift the truth from their mistakes, and wondering what was really going on in our spiritual reality.
Then a friend who seemed very much against ‘channelled’ information mentioned ‘new age to Jesus testimonies’ on YouTube. I started watching people like Doreen Virtue, an ex-psychic called Jenn Nizza, and lots of other people who were sharing their stories about shifting from ‘spiritual’ beliefs to following Jesus.
As I listened to more and more of these testimonies, something became apparent to me. Something that completely shocked me, and even now over a year later, I’m still pretty stunned by it. All the testimonies seemed to point to the idea that our spiritual reality is fundamentally Christian. There are no Buddhas and Boddhisatvas. More than that there are actually no dead relatives speaking to us. There are no spirit guides. There are no aliens. There are no spirit animals or fairies, or elves, or unicorns.
There is God and there are demons. There are angels, but it seems that their interaction with humans is incredibly rare.
So you might be reading this and thinking, what about the voice that spoke to me, what about the presence of my dead grandmother? This has been the hardest thing to let go of, but having looked at all of the evidence, and using logical thought as well as my own perception to understand the nature of this reality, I believe that the nature of these encounters was demonic.
The Bible warns us that ‘Satan himself transforms himself into an angel of light.’ The Bible warns that the supernatural realm is full of deception. The Bible has instructions on how to ‘test the spirits’ and there are testimonies of how when people do this, spirits shapeshift into their true being. The spirit guides and aliens become demons when confronted with the name of Jesus Christ.
Think for a moment, if you’ve been researching things in the last few years, just how much deception there is in the media, about the nature of our physical reality. This deception is mirrored on the cosmic plane too. If we innocently explore spiritual realms in the same way we would naively pick up a newspaper or turn off the TV then we are going to be deceived on a massive scale.
Sometimes I receive comments from people who think that a belief in God comes from a need for some comfort, like a nice fairy story to send us to sleep at night. My journey to Christianity was the complete opposite. I had to let go of all my ideas about how the universe is all love and light, and we are all ascending into a higher state of consciousness. I had to let go of the belief that I could stay in touch with my dead relatives, and hone my own spiritual power. I know people have radical shifts overnight when Jesus comes into their life, but to me it felt like a huge loss, not just of belief, but of people, and activities that I could no longer take part in.
It’s only a year later as my relationship with God has developed that I can actually say that it is so much better than any ecstatic, blissful, otherworldly spiritual experience. People say it’s all about man-made religion, but actually it’s about having a supernatural relationship with God.
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