Possession

The Bible pictures the last days as a period of time given over to the reign of demonic spirits and their belief and worship of them. Are we already in the dawning of this frightening era?

It becomes important to realize that even in the worst conditions, no person can be Possessed without some degree of their cooperation or permission on his or her part. It is extremely important to be aware of at least some of the factors that are likely to facilitate collaboration between a possessing demon and the Possessed.

The effective cause of Possession is the voluntary permission of an individual, through his faculties of mind and will, with one or more of those bodiless, genderless creatures called demons. While there are no causes of demonic Possession that can be physically dissected or otherwise reduced to our current understanding, it is and always has been both possible and necessary to speak of those causes with theological accuracy.

Demonic Possession is not a static condition, an unchanging state. Nor does one become Possessed suddenly, the way one might break an arm or catch the measles. Rather, Possession is an ongoing process. A process that affects the two faculties of the soul: the mind, by which an individual receives and internalizes knowledge. And the will, by which an individual chooses to act upon that knowledge. Ample experience with the Possessed has clearly demonstrated that there are certain identifiable factors that dispose an individual to collaborate, in mind and will, with a Possession demon. The presence of disposing factors in a person's life does not in itself portend that the person will surely one day be numbered among the Possessed. At the same time, and with only rare exceptions in *my experience, one or several of these disposing factors are operational in genuine cases of Possession.

Some of the most common disposing factors have been with us for a long time, while others are of more recent vintage. Some are in the nature of "instruments" outside the individual - the Ouija Board, for example, and the Spiritual Seance. Others are in the nature of "attitudes," whether taught or self-learned, that are internalized by the person - Transcendental Meditation and the Enneagram Method are two of the most prominent in this category. In the context of Possession, all disposing factors produce within a person a condition of those two faculties of soul-mind and will - that is most aptly described as an "aspiring vacuum. Vacuum," because there is created an absence of clearly defined and humanly acceptable concepts for the mind. "Aspiring," because there is a corresponding absence of clearly defined and humanly acceptable goals for the will.

In the case of the Ouija Board, or that of the Seance or TM or the Enneagram Method, the participants must dispose themselves precisely with a view to being opened up; to becoming desirous and accepting of whatever happens along. The very term; "Ouija," for example, is a display of this opening up, for the term is composed of the French and German words - "Oui" and "Ja" - for Yes. The attitude of the participant in Ouija is literally "Yes, yes." The mind is to be made receptive to whatever suggestions or concepts are presented. If participants also dispose their wills to accept those concepts and act on them, then the predisposing circuit is complete. The aspiring vacuum is operative and is powerful enough to flood the mind with appropriate concepts that can make a bid for the will's assent. Often enough, the mind and the will are opened up in precisely this fashion in view of Possession. Among the vast array of disposing factors likely to lead to Possession, the Enneagram Method is nowadays far and away the most common and pernicious.

______________

*About The Author: Malachi Martin, eminent theologian, expert on the Catholic Church, former Jesuit and professor at the Vatican's Pontifical Biblical Institute, is author of the national best sellers Vatican, The Final Conclave, Windswept House, The Jesuits, The Keys Of This Blood and Hostage to the Devil. He was trained in theology at Louvain. There he received his doctorates in Semitic Languages, Archeology and Oriental History. He subsequently studied at Oxford and at the Hebrew University. From 1958 to 1964 he served in Rome, where he was a close associate of the renowned Jesuit Cardinal, Augustine Bea and Pope John XXIII. He lived in New York City and has since passed away.

Malachi Martin, in his book "Hostage to the Devil" submits a condensed letter from its original version from Carl, who was Possessed and almost died in his possession. This is his letter to his students and colleagues after his long convalescence from exorcism.

"I want to tell you the truth as I now see it, Carl wrote later to his former students and colleagues.

"I was wrong in my personal instructions to each one of you about your lives.

"All through my childhood and youth, I had an affinity with God. Especially after my first vision.

"I'm certain God was there. Somewhere. But then came Princeton, Stanford, Tubingen, Cambridge, London. After that, my guruship and the efflorescence of the gifts I had. I became confused. Somehow I lost God. At the same time, I wanted to help. Really to help. To be of service. All around me, I could see floating neon images of pain, of putrefaction, of illness, of corruption and decay. I saw strange people who did not give a damn. Give a damn, please, I said. They took God's name in vain. As I did. They were bright and cold and hard as storage ice. They liked gratuitous evil and upholstered innocence.

"I signed a moral contract to change all that. I was young, eager-beaver. I was determined to succeed. All uptight, you might say. I was going to be a good psychologist, an honest and conscientious and understanding servant of mankind. Servant. Not slave. And then I was going to be a good parapsychologist. And then a thorough going guru.

"I grouped, even prayed, searched, never took no for an answer. And I found that lyrical liar, the Devil.

"I knew with whom I had to deal, of course. But, first of all, the Devil was not the Devil preached by the Churches. There was no room in my universe for a principal of Evil. Not at that time of my life. And I thought, the bond and contract would be, could be temporary. Of course, it could not be. But when pride gets hold of your mind and heart, you cannot see clearly.

"Solemnly and of my own free will, I wish to acknowledge that knowingly and freely I entered into possession by an evil spirit. And, although that spirit came to me under the guise of saving me, perfecting me, helping me to help others, I knew all along it was evil.

"After my conversations with Father F. Hearty, I put everything into perspective intellectually. And I must ascribe my liberation, or, to speak correctly, my desire to want to be free (because I was not allowed any simple desire to be free) I must ascribe all this to what Father F. calls the grace of God and the salvation of Jesus.

"I never enjoyed astral body-travel, only the illusion of it. I never achieved the privilege of a double-if that be a privilege. Bilocation never succeeded, never was a fact for me. Of myself, I could not see things happening hundreds of miles away, read the future, see the past, peer with minute detail into people's minds. I could give the illusion of these only by being prompted by someone who could see from a great distance, could read the future, had a detailed knowledge of the past, could peer into people's minds. Any idea of reincarnation I championed was an attempt to trick. I was not a shaman. Just a sham.

"I never willed to be rid of possession until the day that Father F. explained my basic error about consciousness and spirit. "My central error, which was both intellectual and moral in character, concerned the nature of ordinary human consciousness. Like many before me and many others nowadays, I found that with rigid and expert training I could attain a fascinating state of consciousness: a complete absence of any particular object (in my awareness). I found I could attain a permanency on this plane of consciousness. It finally became a constant environment within me, during my waking hours, no matter with what I was doing. It seemed to be pure and therefore sinless, undifferentiated and therefore universal, simple and therefore without parts-and therefore incorruptible and unchangeable, and therefore eternal.

"My error started when I took this psycho-biological condition of life as the life of spirit. Consciousness basically means awareness, being alert. And such awareness can be measured by certain physiological data. It can be phenomenally described, because it is a phenomenon.

"If it were not for one further mistake, that initial error would, I believe, have been corrected as time went on-simply because finally the scientific imperative would have taken over and forced us to look at the facts in the face.

"With the passage of time, I began to experience a further state of consciousness. It is difficult to put it into words. Before that, I was in a sort of state of suspension about my aware state. I was aware that I was in awareness. One day, I realized through a faculty which I have not been able to identify, that there was some other activity taking place which was so refined and subtle that, while I was dimly aware of it, I knew absolutely nothing about it-what it was, where it was, what it accomplished, whether it began and ended, or whether it had always existed, did then exist continuously, and would go on existing-whether I was aware of it or not.

"It lay beyond all my developed capacity to reach. It was utterly transcendent. Indeed, this was its mark; and this is how I realized its differentiation from all other levels of consciousness. They, no matter how subtle, were subject finally to my senses-at least to representation in images drawn from my sense-life. This further state of consciousness was not so subject.

"But this was sufficient indication for me, I thought. I took this as the absolutely spiritual state of my being. I took it for granted that religiously speaking I was out beyond that Dark Night of the Soul described by John of the Cross and well into something the Eastern mystics had called by various names like satori and samadhi. The fact, that, at least in afterthought and reflection, I could measure and quantify this state of consciousness never struck a warning note. And that was crass enough on my part. What confirmed me in my error was that I refused to take into account the fact that this state was in complete disjunction from all historical religion-and without any chance of linking up with historical religion. It was, in other words, pure subjectivism. And from then on, the door was open to any influence and any distortion. What crawled through that door was Evil Spirit. Tortoise.

"I did arrive at part of the truth about spirit - the neither part, the negative part. But in the flux of spirit life, that was the only part uncovered. And it necessarily attacked the human in me. For it is not that I am part animal, part human. I am not a human animal. I am a human spirit. We are of the spirit in its fluid, non-static, non-quantifiable existence. And, in matters of spirit, neither and upper, bad and good, these are terms that refer to its approximation to or distance from the source and sum of all spirit.

"I have been the subject of the cleverest of illusions: that spirit was a static quantum of more or less determinable dimensions; that Christian authorities had obscured the truth about the spirit; and that only by parapsychology and preternatural gifts could one arrive at the truth.

"The truth is that all along, despite my triumphal career until Aquileia, since the advent of possession I had a sorrow I could not shake. Such a deep sudden sadness. I looked for joy everywhere and lived beneath a winter moon that made a carcass of all my days.

"My advice for all who engage in the study and pursuit of the parapsychological is simple but vitally important: do not confound effects with causes, or systems with what maintains the systems. Do not take it that a photograph of Kirlian dots or auras is a photograph of spirit, Do not accept the feats of seance mediums as results of spirit from God. But do not, on the other hand, tamper with or treat of parapsychological phenomena as if you could do this without ultimately impinging upon spirit. You cannot. And that fact will, depending upon what you do, be to your detriment or to your betterment-in spirit."