Possession I

With the advent of the Christian church and post the Renaissance Period of the 16th century the “spirit” edge of the older religions had been blunted by a cultural revolution dictated by modern philosophies and the codification of preexisting myths into a comprehensive form of literature leading to a general dismissal of the spirit world as nonexistent or the product of a society that has not yet reached the pinnacle of its evolution.

Often however it is the rituals and practices of these “lesser evolved communities” that provides an answer when none other exists and it only stands to reason that when there is no other scientific or medical explanation available, the answer lies in the field of the occult.

Occult practitioners and black magicians continue to earn a reasonable living preying on the calamities that befall others and isolated schools continue to exist for the astute pupil who is unable to afford the inflated cost of a college education. These schools provide a means to earning a livelihood from what is commonly perceived to be a forgotten art.

After an extended period of service, the graduating student is free to accumulate as much wealth as he desires. Man is by nature a pagan made to conform to accepted norms by the laws and agents of governance. If these laws failed to exist, he’d regress to his old ways very quickly.

The most common and widely practiced variant of black magic is necromancy. It is the art of summoning the dead and it is forbidden in most religious circles because of the devastating results that it can produce. The practice is rampant in many communities and the most likely reason is because causing death by black magic is not yet a crime and therefore it remains the most common means of achieving an end.

Despite the intervention of the church these rituals continue to exist and the church itself does not deny the existence of spirits and other entities, divine or malevolent. The bible clearly tells us that where there is a body, there is a soul or a spirit.

The world that we live in is twofold and it can be divided into the material world i.e. the corporeal world and the spiritual world, a world that many are reluctant to admit or are compelled to find valid explanations for and most of us put it down to a trick of the mind. A trick of the mind it may be but not in the sense that many perceive it to be.

The mind itself is dualistic in nature and it is divided into the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. The conscious mind is that which is most commonly used in our day to day lives and almost 90% of the time we tend to reason things out. 

The subconscious mind is the portion or section of the mind that’s always kept in abeyance, suppressed most of the time by the activities of the conscious mind and it only kicks in when the body goes into a state of paralysis, either natural or induced.

Natural paralysis occurs during sleep and induced paralysis occurs during hypnosis. In the latter state, the conscious mind is at its weakest and the subconscious mind is able to breach any resistance and break the invisible barrier that separates the conscious mind from the subconscious mind and the soul or the spirit is sometimes flung thousands of miles from its place of origin and it is often able to see and feel things that it otherwise would not.

Among the explanations offered for this phenomenon is that, the subconscious minds of all persons, past, present and possibly the future are linked to a super consciousness or a vast warehouse or a natural storage facility and we are therefore able to access the memories of another. It may also be called shared memory.

This would certainly explain the alternate personalities that often reveal themselves under hypnosis like in the case of T.E., a 37-year-old American housewife who under hypnosis became Jensen Jacoby from Sweden despite never having been to Sweden. 

She started speaking in Swedish without warning and she spoke it like a native speaker, with a tinge of Norwegian. Researches later came to the conclusion that Jensen Jacoby, the alternate personality of T.E., was a Swedish immigrant who migrated to New Sweden in the 17th century.

More compelling yet is the case of Delores, who under hypnosis, to cure her back pain, suddenly started speaking in German. She not only spoke in fluent German but she also wrote in the language despite having no knowledge of German.

In later sessions, Gretchen, the alternate personality of Delores, went on to describe her previous life in Germany in detail, including aspects of her home, the names of her parents, the town that she lived in and the political situation in Germany at that time. She was murdered when she was 16.

Interestingly enough Gretchen did not share the same reality as Delores, which is usually the case with possession. Gretchen was under the impression that she was speaking to strangers in the streets of her hometown in Germany, Eberswalde, some seventy odd years back.

Shared memory or something more alarming? The theory of the collective consciousness to some degree explains the case of Delores. The subconscious mind is a vast warehouse, a library of indefinite memories and if this theory were applied, it would explain the link between Gretchen and Delores. It is difficult for possession to occur over vast distances like that which separate the United States from Germany. It would have been different if Delores had actually been to Germany and visited or lived in Eberswalde.

For haunting or possessions to occur the victim needs to share a certain proximity to the spirit for example have lived in the same house or used an item of jewelry that belonged to the spirit - time is but a relative mode of regarding things. Events may, in some sense, exist always, both in the past and in the future.

Time is like a moving picture reel, containing the future scene at the present moment, though out of sight, dream time is an absolute consciousness in which the past, the present and the future, exist as a single perception.

The Austrian Abbot, Alois Weisinger, sheds more light on the subject. According to him, there are methods whereby a person can receive intimation of future events by dreams, of whatsoever his mind meditates upon. “Spirits” he says do show these things and give secret information and warnings, in dreams and visions.

“The Church” the learned abbot writes “does not deny the possibility of diabolical possession and it even has special ordination conferring powers of exorcism for the casting out of devils, but she enjoins us to treat everything as natural until the contrary is proved, a rule that she applies with particular strictness when alleged miracles are cited in the canonization process.”

“In these circumstances, it is surely legitimate to present in the light of theology and of Christian philosophy an explanation which seems to come closer to the truth …. One could call this theory the theory of the spirit-soul and its basic assumption is that the depths of this spirit-soul are as yet insufficiently known to us.”

Max Heindel elaborates on the subject. Spirits and nature according to him are inexplicably connected and therefore there is a nexus between spirits and the land and this certainly holds true in cases of possession.

“In the middle ages, when many people were still endowed with a remnant of negative clairvoyance, they spoke of gnomes and elves or fairies, which roamed about the mountains and forests. These were the earth spirits. They also told of the undines or water sprites, which inhabited rivers and streams, of sylphs which were said to dwell in the mists above moat and moor as air spirits, but not much was said of the salamanders, as they are fire spirits, and therefore not so easily detected, nor so readily accessible to the majority of people.”

From the above paragraph we can adduce that spirits not only exist but can further be divided into different types of spirits i.e. earth, water, air and fire spirits and it further implies a nexus between spirits and the elements, using the contemporary definition of elements.

More compelling then situations where the alternate personality appears under hypnosis are cases where the other personality appears spontaneously without warning and the subject begins to talk and act in a manner that’s completely different to his or her normal self. The case of Uttar Huddar and her alternate personality Sharada is extremely moving.

Sharada first appeared in 1974, when Huddar was thirty-three years old speaking Bengali and dressing in Bengali style rather than in the style appropriate to her home state of Maharashtra. She appeared in a hospital where Huddar was being treated for a psychological illness. Sharada displayed no knowledge of modern innovations and lacked the ability to use modern utensils. It was like she had stepped out from another time.

Sharada provided the names of her family members in Bengal to investigators that were later verified through Bengali genealogical records. Huddar, the actual personality, had no knowledge of these family members.

Sharada was not aware that she was dead and she acted as if she was still alive. Sharada did state however that she was bitten on the toe of her right foot by a cobra, which was the last incident that she described in her life, without realizing that she had died from the snake bite.

Post the First World War there was a surge in occult studies and Freud attributed the desperate search for answers outside the traditional sphere of religion to the political turmoil, economic collapse, and the social dislocation that followed the war.

Freud further went on to speculate that scientific discoveries and theories stimulated public interest in the occult and he cited the discovery of radium and the theory of relativity as two examples that undermined the integrity of science.

He considered a possible connection between occultists and psychoanalysts on the basis that modern science rejected both and discredited both as disreputable. We should he said “be prepared to find reciprocal sympathy between them”. “They have both experienced the same contemptuous and arrogant treatment by official science”.

What many students of the occult fail to understand is that occultism is as much a science of the mind as it is a science of faith and answers unravel themselves quicker when a student is prepared to probe the subtle nuances of the mind. True magic originates from the self and it can only be tapped by developing one’s own inner and lofty nature. The key ingredient is faith.

The field of studying the unknown or parapsychology was for many years regarded as mysticism and the hesitation to formally recognize it as a science of the mind was attributed to the fact that should its nexus to occultism be proven by the principle of analytics, committed to a dispassionate appraisal of the facts, the foundations of modern science would collapse.

Freud predicted that occultists “will be hailed as liberators from the burden of intellectual bondage, they will be joyfully acclaimed by all the credulity lying ready to hand since the infancy of the human race and the childhood of the individual. There may follow a fearful collapse of critical thought, of determinist standard and of mechanistic science”.

Freud feared that the formal recognition of occultism would spell the end of legitimization and exterminate the need for analytics. If occultists were able to provide all the answers, there was no longer a need for laborious procedures. So profound were his fears that he subsequently felt obliged to limit his studies of the occult to his personal capacity and he withheld his findings from the public domain.

Occultism is closely related to mathematics and it is a science of formulas and equations. It is not the random summoning of spiritual matter but the logical step by step accumulation of spiritual knowledge. Mastery of the occult science is the culmination of specific processes and procedures that produce a desired result.

When the apprentice begins to explore the many facets of the mind answers will unfold in numerous ways. The most common method of stumbling across these answers which initially won’t make sense is through sleep either natural or induced. Carl Jung the renowned Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist was a noted proponent of the occult.

Jung was admitted in a hospital after a minor mishap and during treatment he lost consciousness. He experienced a phenomenon commonly referred to as the outer body experience. It is easily distinguishable from a dream because the symptoms are markedly different. In a dream, the sleeper withdraws slipping into a corridor of the mind. During the outer body experience, the sleeper finds himself drifting upwards away from his body before there is a burst and he is flung thousands of miles away from his physical embodiment.

Jung found himself floating thousands of miles above the earth traveling vast distances in a matter of seconds. He hovered above oceans before crossing arid sand filled deserts and found himself seated atop the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas. He was almost propelled out of orbit before he turned back and drifted south towards a huge monolith when he saw the entrance to a temple and before it was a Hindu sage sitting on a lotus. He realized that inside the temple was the answer to his existence. When a person experiences this phenomenon, he has breached the barrier that stands between intellectual imprisonment and spiritual freedom.

Copyright © 2019 by Kathiresan Ramachanderam