In Reply to: Re: Regarding out of body experiences posted by OT2 on March 01, 2006 at 18:10:07:
Hi OT2
Thank you for taking the time to clarify your position & I very much agree that this kind of on-line communication has to be done with respect. I regret that you misunderstood my motives, as I thought I had taken pains to explain them. I also said in my above post, ‘I realize that telling people about highly personal spiritual experiences not only takes time to tell the story right & do it justice, but then you’re setting up your personal experiences up for public scrutiny by those who may be prepared to mock it or dismiss it out of hand. That's not easy.’ What I mean was that I do NOT approve of mockery or being dismissed without considering & recognize the courage it takes.
It was with that attitude that I asked, ‘But about your original claim that 'two or more' demons work together to set up false out-of-body experiences, how do you know? Did you read that in some book? Or were you having what you thought was an out-of-body experience & suddenly the mirage vanished & there were two demons sitting there? I know this question seems like I'm poking fun at your statement, but I'm not. I sincerely want to know.’ I definitely was NOT poking fun at your statement. I actually did want to know. It’s just that I had never heard that doctrine before & wondered how you had come by it. If it was by a spiritual experience, I wanted to hear it.
Also, you said, I do NOT believe that “all NDEs are of the devil”, and, frankly, your misquoting me here to another poster is somewhat suspicious; don’t you think? Again, you have misunderstood me. What I did was ask, On a related subject to out-of-body experiences, OT2, I’d like to ask you if you believe that all NDE (near-death experiences) are ‘of the devil'? I didn’t say one way or another what I thought you thought, because I simply didn’t know, so I wanted to hear from you. I asked you what you believed as a matter of information, since that position is one many Christians take. I wanted to know where you stood. I regret that you feel my question was an accusation.
I did quote you directly when I posted what you had said earlier: ‘I discovered that demons not only impersonate the "dear departed"; I found that 2 or more of them can easily set up a counterfeit experience of what is falsely called "astral travel" or "astral projection", and these somewhat complex "demonically controlled hallucinations", as I prefer to call them BECAUSE of my experiences with them, are categorically NOT just a willed "leaving of the body".
Here you’re entitled to your opinion & I am to mine. I believe that leaving one’s body can be a ‘willed’ event & can lead to either good or evil, & you disbelieve it. You believe it’s a ‘demonically controlled hallucination’ & I believe it is a real experience, but not one I’d recommend because of the danger it could lead to.
This ties in to your statement, Observer, you then related part of our discussion, and then called me “ready to call [your] experiences demonic”. That’’s a little unfair: you previously said that some of your experiences were “dark’, and I was identifying with that, and then YOU gave a rather knee-jerk reaction of your own, by saying what you did regarding my own experience. You really cannot have it both ways; can you?
Perhaps I have not been as clear as I thought I was being, but my beliefs are this: I do not consider the soul’s ability to leave the physical body either demonic or dark. I don’t consider it a demonically controlled hallucination. I consider it a real experience that can lead to either good or evil. In one of my initial experiences, as I said below, I was buffeted about by dark forces. What it convinced me of was not that the out-of-body experience was a demonically controlled illusion, but that it was dangerous to leave my body because there were dark forces out there. See what I mean?
Again, thanks for clarifying your views. I hope my clarification of my views helps you.