The Mystical Quaballah.

In my last post , I posed the question  - what exactly did Jesus encounter in the man called 'Legion'?

For many people today, the Devil does not exist, and any talk of hauntings or the supernatural is laughed off as mere superstition. On the other hand, many Christians deeply believe that the Devil is out to ensnare people into ' the occult', and some Christian writers would even warn us off of playing D&D and reading Harry Potter.

I have to be  honest, I have struggled long and hard with this question of what to make of the Bibliccal accounts of angels and demons flitting in and out of Christ's ministry. I believe, though, that the best book on the subject was ' The Mystical Quaballah' by Dione Fortune.

Although a Christian , she spent a lot of time in India, and this led her to investigate eastern , and then Western Mystical traditions, including the Jewish Quaballah, a body of lore that really repays study, in my view.

From a Quaballist point of view, God is unmanifest, dwelling in unapproachable light, but causes Creation to happen on several different levels. there is the physical plane , but also an emotional plane , and a Plane of Ideas, as well as the spiritual plane. Force on one plane is Form on another.

In brief, this means that if I think something, it has no efffect on a physical level, however, the force of my thinking takes form on a higher level. What has all thiis to do with Jesus and His miracles , I hear you ask - well, back in the 1970s, if I recall it right, there were a group of phychic reasearcher who decided to test the 'Tulpa theory' and see if they could construct a thought form, so they did. 'Tulpa' is a word meaning ' thought form '. The theory states that a human mind can construct a form on another plane and then let it act as a vessel for non physical energy.

They thought hard, concentrated and invented a fictional character called ' Philip', they gave Philip an outlandishly impossible life story so that they could never stumble upon a real person who matched him by mistake, and then they started conducting seances. Sure enough, 'Philip' came through to them. not only that but other psychics and mediums unconnected to the circle began to get Philip coming in on their sittings as well. A small number of skilled and dedicated psychic researchers had  manufactured a spiritual entity on the Astral plane, which is one level up from the material one we live on.

Now, if a small group of people can raise enough energy to construct something like that , imagine what a few thousand people could so, having their minds directed by someone conducting a magical or religious service. Arthur C.  Clarke once said that any form of technology sufficiently advanced would be indistinguishable from magic - and any form of technology that was still distinguishable had not been advanced far enough!

I should point out that when I left Jehovah's Witnesses in 1984, I went into the ' alternative politics' of the day. Thatcher was in at Number 10, Greenham Common Airbase had Cruise Missiles sitting in it and people came there to protest and link up with others opposed to Thatchers plans. . CND had a lot of members, some of whom were trade unionists and Left wingers, other were people who were into ' New Age', some were conventional Christians,  and some were into alternative forms of Spirituality, like Wicca, Astrology , Buddhism and the like.

It was there that I began to rub shoulders with such people, went to meetings run by groups who were not JWs or even Christian and eventually joined  Ashrams , or teaching circles - in fact I belonged to several such groups. As well as taking part in training exercised and group ceremonies, I was also given a lot of reading to do as homework, and was initiated to several levels in a few groups. I got to meet people who practised what some would term ' magic', and learned something about magical workings myself.

The theory is that humans have several ' energy centres' in their bodies. these are what the Hindus called 'Chakras'  - there are seven , that roughly correspond to the endocrine glands, and these are said to be linked to the seven visible planets.

Basically, if a group of people imagine a form in unison , that form can then contain all the emotional and intellectual energies that are directed towards it on the Astral Plane, and , given enough energy , it will take on a life of it's own. it will even begin to go around seeking energy to draw from.

An Astral being that is constructed out of love and good will therefore, will seek out those of a similar disposition to replenish itself, so to speak.  However, an entity made up of other emotions and ideas - something like a pagan war god, for instance, would seek out other sources of power. Hence it would be that there are several beings, up there on the Astral plane with a definite interest in seeing as much pain and misery going on down here to keep themselves going. These , I believe, were the demons that christ spent so much of His time kicking out. To be sure, some people were simply lame, blind or otherwise physically impaired, but I am convinced that some were in fact spiritually oppressed.

The fact is that Voodoo is drwn from an African word ' Voudon ', meaning ' idol' - the slaves brought to the Carribean from Africa still kept a lot of their native traditions,  and one of these was belief in the Laos. A Lao is a spirit, and it is believed that in a ceremony where there is dancing and strong, rhythmic drumming , that the worshippers enter into a kind of trance where the Laos descend and ride the dancers, like a person  would ride upon a horse.

Temporarily, during the dancing ,the Voodoo worshipper is possessed and controlled by the Lao, or Spirit. yet this is not seen as being oppressive or malevolent. The Voodoo worshipper welcomes the Lao in the same way that the Christian would seek to be controlled and inspired by the Holy Spirit, and reports the same feelings of ecstasy and being lifted up to a higher state.

So why was it different in Christ's time , and why is it different in so many cases of ' demon possession ' in our culture? Perhaps it is that our Western  minds are differently attuned, and contact a different sort of Entity. The Caribbean slaves were contacting Astral beings who were originally made when their people were free - the benevolent spirits forged by their ancestors. Not for so the people oppressed in Roman occupied Palestine, or for modern day thrill seekers who get in touch with things on the ouija board, it would seem.

The salient thing to remember is that Jesus had control of these things. Astral beings come in all shapes and sizes, but none were any match for Jesus. Nor does Christ need them to reach his people, or for they to gain contact with Him.Some may say ' If the pagan gods are just human creations, what about the God of the Bible - isn't He just another product of human thinking, simply another Tulpa ? The short answer is  " No- not exactly  - He is somewhat different, and this shows up in Scripture.' But that will do for another time, I think.  We need to examine Hebrew really closely to even try to begin to come to some sort of understanding of What god is, and then , we only have an approximation and not an exact assesment .We can never know God fully, but we can come to Know Him better.

You are free to post comments and ask questions if you wish , i have tried to cram an awful lot in here, so please seek clarification  if you want it.