What do I know about spiritual combat? Then again, having once been a psychologist, I was the man you'd see when the combat in your head was getting out of hand. Of course, I wasn't trained in "spiritual combat," but then again, everyone's head is a combat zone, more or less.
Back in grad school, the idea of spiritual combat never came up except insofar as it was a primitive way of talking about "psychological conflict." Thus, it is as if the upper vertical was subsumed into the middle zone of the psyche. But what if this middle zone can't account for certain phenomena emanating from above -- i.e., those powers and principalities we've been discussing?
It's analogous to how a psychological explanation will mislead when the problem is completely biological -- say, hypothyroidism, which can cause symptoms that mimic any number of psychological conditions. Likewise, is it possible that we are misdiagnosing conditions that are completely spiritual in nature, just because they resemble psychological conditions?
Another way of asking the question is, what did we lose when we jettisoned thousands of years of spiritual wisdom for a wholly secular psychology? To a certain extent, Jung attempted to at least recognize relations with the old spiritual world, and to maintain an embassy there. Nevertheless, he too tended to reduce the spiritual to the psychological.
I just remembered that I applied for post-doctoral training at the Jung Institute back in the early '90s, because it seemed like the only option for a guy like me. Instead I decided to cut out the middleman and deal with the spiritual world on its own terms. This being in 1995.
Which meant that I was essentially dealing with a kind of dual citizenship -- psychology by day, religion by... the rest of the day. I never worked full time. Or you could say left brain / right brain: as I've said before, I don't think the spiritual world exists because we have a right cerebral hemisphere, rather, vice versa. It's why all of us have the dual citizenship alluded to above.
Come to think of it, it is why we are all conflicted, and not just in a bifurcated way, but trifurcated; again, at the very least, there is body, soul, and spirit, and each influences the others. For example, if your thyroid is off, it will have both psychological and spiritual consequences. And it works the other way around -- if you are psychologically off, it can and will have spiritual or biological consequences.
For example, over the years, there is no physical symptom I've seen that hasn't been produced by purely psychological causes -- even those of a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I remember one lady who presented with seizures that turned out to be "pseudo-seizures." How could they tell? Because in the ER, when they attempted bladder catheterization, she voluntarily closed her legs. In other words, modesty overrode the apparent seizure.
I remember another guy who had episodes of chest pain and radiation down the left arm, but thorough testing revealed no evidence of heart disease. Unfortunately, I remember another patient who had pain radiating up into the shoulder, for which he was treated with vicodin, and dropped dead of a massive heart attack.
You may recall my own little overnight hospital stay six months ago, when I was having unexplained episodic nausea. They ruled out the heart or aorta, but no one has ruled out demons, least of all me.
To back up a moment, we left off the last post with the promise to "consider some practical advice on now to conduct spiritual warfare -- starting with ourselves." Which comes back to the first sentence of the present post: What do I know about spiritual combat?
To back up even further, this is one of the reasons I entered the church: in a word, for protection. It's the same reason I take a statin and an ACE inhibitor to protect my heart and kidneys, respectively. Different means for different dimensions. Likewise, I exercise every day to benefit body and mind, and I medi-pray every day to benefit the spirit, although I'm sure it trickles down into the mind and body.
It's all very confusing, then again, it's just common sense: we need to address our health on all levels of being, which are in turn interconnected in ways that are difficult to discern, but we ignore at our own peril.
At the moment, it seems as if the world is going crazy, similar to how it must have felt at the time of World War II. In an old post I reviewed what Carl Jung had to say about it:
As Jung said in a 1936 interview, Hitler was a sort of "medium" who had an uncanny ability to articulate what the nation was feeling at any given time: "German policy is not made; it is revealed through Hitler. He is the mouthpiece of the gods as of old. He says the word which expresses everybody's resentment."
It is "rule by revelation": "He is the first man to tell every German what he has been thinking and feeling all along in his unconscious about German fate, especially since the defeat in the Great War." "All these symbols together of a Third Reich led by its prophet under the banners of wind and storm and whirling vortices point to a mass movement which is to sweep the German people in a hurricane of unreasoning emotion and go on to a destiny which perhaps none but the seer... can foretell -- and perhaps not even he."
Fuhrermore, in a 1938 interview, Jung contrasted Hitler with Mussolini, the latter of whom was still "human." But "with Hitler, you are scared. You know you would never be able to talk to that man, because there is nobody there. He is not a man, but a collective. He is not an individual, but a whole nation." Nothing Hitler said makes any sense to the non-German unconscious, with the interesting exception of the Islamic world, where Mein Kampf is always a huge seller.
With that in mind, I wonder if Jung's advice to America would be the same as it was in this 1938 interview:
"How to save your democratic U.S.A.? It must, of course, be saved, else we all go under. You must keep away from the craze, avoid the infection.... America must keep big armed forces to help keep the world at peace, or to decide the war if it comes. You are the last resort of Western democracy."
Keep away from the craze and avoid the infection.
Which is precisely what we haven't done, what with the craze of wokeness and the spiritual infections of relativism, secularism, and ideological resentment in general.
So, yesterday I consulted a number of books on spiritual combat, but was overwhelmed by the amount of material. Lotta ins & outs and what-have-yous, lotta strands in Gagdad's head, so I'll focus on just one. It's from Ripperger's Dominion: The Nature of Diabolic Warfare, and goes to the whole nature of victimology, and how it animates both Hamas and its useful idiots on the left:
Since demons are narcissists and they have contracted around the pain of their self-inflicted wound..., they desire to replicate that in human beings. They will pick constantly at the injustice in the person's mind, so that the person will become focused on the injustice and the pain of the injustice.
This is designed
to block any type of healing process which could result in the person being able to be free and function properly.... if the demons maintain the person's focus on the injustice, the person's weakened state continues, and in fact, increases.
What is this injustice the demon picks at?
Ultimately it is the same injustice the Serpent exploits in the garden: that there's a God, and you are not Him. There is also a chosen people, and you are not them.
Which, of course, does not mean what the enemies of the chosen people think it means. The Jews are just the proxies in a proxy war against God.
In a recent editorial, Dennis Prager wrote that
There is no hatred like Jew-hatred. It is the longest ongoing hatred in history. It is the most universal. And it is the one exterminationist hatred: Those who hate the Jews want them destroyed. There is a Hebrew statement that is probably two thousand years old, and which is recited during the Passover Seder service: “In every generation, they arise to annihilate us.”
But why? Because
Jew-hatred is largely a result of the Jews being The Chosen People. You can laugh at the idea if you are secular and inclined to do so. But those who hate the Jews have not laughed at the idea; they have hated the Jews because of it -- because they believed it and/or because it is true.
Why the Jews? Let us name the reasons:
The Jews introduced to humanity the God in which most of the world believes; brought into existence the Bible that is the basis of the New Testament and the Quran; gave the Christian world its Messiah; and gave much of the world its morality through the Torah, the Prophets, and the Ten Commandments. Those who hate that moral code hate the Jews. The two groups who have tried to exterminate the Jews in the last hundred years, the Nazis and the Islamists (not all Muslims), hate that moral code. And they hate the Jews for embodying it -- compared to the Nazis and compared to Islamic regime of Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS and Hamas, Israel is composed of saints.
Again, the war on the Jews is a proxy war for a much larger war on God.
13 comments:
The world's true nature is that good is forever pitted against evil.
That has never changed. What happened over the last 70 years or so was an interregnum of peace in the West, created by violence against barbarians and facilitated by people willfully looking away from the butchery still continuing at the fringes of the map. The West managed to build a civilization that was – for the first time in history since perhaps the Pax Romana – generally internally peaceful. And the West convinced itself that this was normal.
But it was not normal. It was an anomaly, a glorious one, but an anomaly nonetheless. The world is not a peaceful place, and it never was, and it never will be. Despite the best efforts of the arrogant left, human nature has not changed. Human nature is vicious and cruel. Rousseau’s noble savage nonsense, which we are still dealing with today in the form of eager sophomores in Che t-shirts slobbering over Hamas psychopaths – is a giant fraud. Savages are not distinguished by their nobility. Their savagery distinguishes them. And we need to find the moral strength to do what is necessary to defeat them.
"The moral illiteracy of expecting Israel to care more about the Palestinian people than other Palestinians do is simply bizarre."
For example, over the years, there is no physical symptom I've seen that hasn't been produced by purely psychological causes -- even those of a heart attack, stroke, or seizure.
I know of a woman who suffered hysterical deafness after receiving a diagnosis of breast cancer (back in the 80s, when treatments weren't nearly so effective). She really did go deaf, just for a purely psychological reason.
I remember another lady who had itching throughout her body -- on the inside. It was presumed to be psychological, since physical causes were ruled out, but I really had no idea what was going on.
I also saw a lady who thought she had "environmental sensitivity." She saw a gardener spraying a pesticide across the street through a sealed window, and began having a strong physical reaction, with flushing, throat constriction, trembling, shortness of breath, etc.
Again, the war on the Jews is a proxy war for a much larger war on God.
As we were explaining to younger child this morning, when she was asking what patriarchy is and why feminists hate it so much. As with environmentalism or "anti"-racism, those are simply fronts for communism and all of it is at root rebellion against God.
In my feed reader yesterday, there was a link to a suggested article (at huffpo, which I had almost forgotten existed) by someone who was complaining about her struggles selling a curriculum to the homeschool community. It's a girl power curriculum, so of course the first thing most homeschooling moms ask when they find her booth at a convention is whether it is woke. The answer is that of course it is, and these backward-thinking troglodytes just don't appreciate how she wants to help free their daughters from centuries of patriarchal oppression. She has no understanding of their perspective or concerns, just a deep-seated need to ensure that homeschooling is as toxic as public schools. I wonder how many buy what she is selling?
Re. psychosomatic symptoms, I can sympathize with the environmental sensitivity lady, but at least I know that my problems with bleach are mostly in my head, so long as nobody is mixing it with anything they shouldn't.
Re the internal itching, I think that can be caused by certain types of medications, too. I'm taking a dopamine agonist (for now, eventually will have to wean off it) for a sleep disorder. When I first started it there were a few mild symptoms like that; made me sympathize a little with opiate addicts who feel like there are bugs crawling under their skin. Drugs can be a helluva drug, or something.
This lady had in fact been on opiates for a while, and thought it was a lingering side effect of that. I guess anything's possible.
I saw a number of cases where there was an injury to one side of the body, and then they developed mirror symptoms on the other side. There's a name for the condition, but it escapes me...
Come to think of it, McGilchrist has many examples of weird neuropsychological symptoms in The Matter With Things.
I don't know if anyone will see this. I read through the blog every week or so, so I'm always behind. But, Julie, you said, "As with environmentalism or "anti"-racism, those are simply fronts for communism and all of it is at root rebellion against God." This reminded me of David Horowitz's remark that, with the left, "the issue is never the issue; it is revolution." Which explains somme their seemingly logical inconsistencies ("queers for Palestine").
Hi Olden Ears,
It has to be something along those lines, given how ridiculously irrational their surface concerns tend to be. Trying to understand what's happening outside of the perspective of spiritual warfare is ultimately an exercise in futility, akin to trying to understand a three-dimensional object from a two-dimensional world.
As if you needed more recommendations on spiritual warfare, the late Father Gabriele Amorth (chief Vatican exorcist for many years) has written a few books which are definitely worth reading.
What a bunch of nonsense. The Jews are a chosen people? No they're not. So many cultures have claimed to be the "chosen people," as with so many god-kings, all which are a hang over from ancient Saturn planet worship. The Jews appropriated their morality and their stories from more ancient cultures like the Sumerians, which have huge libraries of untranslated stories etched in stone. Furthermore, the Jews have a history of creating their civilizations on Usury, War, and blood cult practices like genital mutilation, which binds their group together into a sexual abuse cult. These three things are the very reasons why people hate them so much. They sexually abuse their own children as a religion. They enslave whatever nations they move into by using Usury to compete directly with the kings of those nations, which is why they're ultimately kicked out of every country they move into. And most of their "history" was appropriated from older stories as proven by the Sumerian tablets. The Jewish economy is a ponzi scheme that runs on a 80 year cycle, because it's all based on exploitation and war, and thats why the Muslims AND Christians outlawed Usury and hate them.
There's also no such thing as "Judeo-Christian" blah blah blah. No, the Jews are a infant sexual abuse blood cult that that believes it's the "chosen" race to rule all the world. Christianity actually outlawed circumcision and Usury--things that have been revived in the west and that are consequently causing it's down fall. Paul actually called circumcision "mutilation" and preached against it. But misguided western Christianity in America has failed to protect 3 generations of children in this regard, and that's why America is the leading war cult, second to Islam, which also sexually abuses their children as Abrahamic religions require.
The very idea of "second birth" in Christianity may even be directly related to healing from sexual child abuse inherit in Abrahamic religions. There's nothing more disgusting than holding an infant down by their OWN family and mutilating their genitals. Completely Sick and Evil! Soul murder by definition that requires a second birth after the abortion and dissociation of infant consciousness due to the extreme abuse of genital mutilation.
The Jews have little to teach us beside what not to do. Christians were far superior and owe the Jews very little. The Jews didn't even invent their morality, as more ancient and advanced civilizations did. They grew out of Egypt after all, which had records going back 10s of thousands of years. And the chosen people thing...it's just another racial supremacist movement and they'll drag us into WW3 over it.
You literally quote Dennis Prager, who says genital mutilation is "Beautiful," and he said he literally almost cried when a babies dicks getting chopped off, as they sing ecstatic hymns to their jew god, which is non other than Satan himself--a literal satanic ritual. You guys are brain dead and sick. The jews were "Saturns children, and their god is Satan, derived from the dead god Saturn, which was cast down out of heaven long ago. Saturn after all, was the "devourer of his own children." And still devours the world today with all it's death and child abuse cults working in the shadows. Actually, many parts they operate in the open. You guys just agree with it! Because somehow cutting an infant male dick is different than cutting the same tissue out of a girl! Got to defend the Jews sacred rituals and superior morality though!
Wow. I'm still hovering around two months behind on posts, but looking at the last comment, this post really hit the trifurcated target... and I'll bet it still does.
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