Your experiences of spiritual attacks

cloudyday2 said:

According to the gospels we should "bless those who curse you".

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Yes, thank you for reminding me.

About demons > God knows if they could be turned back. Jesus does not say they can.

Also, what we are told to do is >

"Therefore submit to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you." (James 4:7)

Resist does not mean I am uncompassionate, though. I do feel for how horrible it is to be Satan and to have no hope and spend eternity in the flaming sewer which burns with fire and brimstone. But I think there is a practical reason for that fire > evil beings are so stubborn that only fire can control them.

Also, it says,

"nor give place to the devil." (in Ephesians 4:27)

So, I understand it is wise not to be wishful about Satanic beings which are not humans. Also, do not trust Satan or his, at all. If God says to give no place, at all, He knows.

What I get, now, is God already has sorted out who will be His holy angels and who are the fallen ones.

Now, He is busy with saving those who will be "conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren." (in Romans 8:29)

awitch said:

Spiritual attacks? No, I don't believe that's a thing.

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Same.

I was asleep and having a lucid dream about being in space. I was in a small shuttle going to explore something but the shuttle started being pulled into a black hole. It was a pretty good lucid dream until I actually started to become afraid about what I was headed into. A sense of dread and apprehension began to rise in me until the lucid dream ripped away dumping me out entirely in the waking world. But there was a problem. The thing I feared was still there, approaching me. The dread grew tremendously until it arrived like a shadow at the edge of my bed. It then gripped me with incredible power. I started to slide left and right like a pendulum in reverse, starting ever so small and growing into wider and wider swings. I couldn't move, and the creature that had me in it's grip was more powerful than I could imagine. It gripped me with a kind of muscular strength, it was exerting it's strength upon me physically and spiritually. As the pendulum swings grew wider it began to feel like my innermost being would crack in half like an egg, with my soul plopping out. I knew I was about to die.

From the bottom of my spirit I screamed out a word that was a mere whisper on my lips. "God". Immediatly a light emerged and I was released, and a holy being approached. The being I was so afraid of fled in greater terror than what I felt from it. The power of the being that came was nothing like the power of that shadow. It did not act out of strength, but authority. It does not try to do things with effort and strength. It's hard to put into words but it's intentions are just accomplished. There is no exerted strength, no powerful force, just an unassailable will that cannot fail to accomplish. To witness both powers was world changing - to see such tremendous power flee like a roach from indomitable will left me with an entirely new perspective of the greatness of our God.

I do not believe spiritual attacks are anything other than the mind playing tricks. I've never experienced anything that could be called a spiritual attack.

cloudyday2 said:

My aunt had been through something like that earlier and gave me some words of comfort and a simple prayer to get rid of demons (I can't remember the Christian term). I didn't like saying that prayer, but it seemed like it helped the few times I prayed it - something about "blah blah blah ... in Jesus name ... blah blah blah".

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What you describe is a prayer of exorcism. The majority of exorcisms are just sitting in a priests office and reading a prayer, or Creed. No pea soup, no seizures, just reading aloud.

Unclean spirits and fallen angels will try and draw you in with sympathy, and get you to try and help them. As Admiral Ackbar would say, "It's a trap". They will draw you in to them, by putting you on a mission to redeem them, but they will refuse to claim that Jesus is Lord.

Sanoy said:

I was asleep and having a lucid dream about being in space. I was in a small shuttle going to explore something but the shuttle started being pulled into a black hole. It was a pretty good lucid dream until I actually started to become afraid about what I was headed into. A sense of dread and apprehension began to rise in me until the lucid dream ripped away dumping me out entirely in the waking world. But there was a problem. The thing I feared was still there, approaching me. The dread grew tremendously until it arrived like a shadow at the edge of my bed. It then gripped me with incredible power. I started to slide left and right like a pendulum in reverse, starting ever so small and growing into wider and wider swings. I couldn't move, and the creature that had me in it's grip was more powerful than I could imagine. It gripped me with a kind of muscular strength, it was exerting it's strength upon me physically and spiritually. As the pendulum swings grew wider it began to feel like my innermost being would crack in half like an egg, with my soul plopping out. I knew I was about to die.

From the bottom of my spirit I screamed out a word that was a mere whisper on my lips. "God". Immediatly a light emerged and I was released, and a holy being approached. The being I was so afraid of fled in greater terror than what I felt from it. The power of the being that came was nothing like the power of that shadow. It did not act out of strength, but authority. It does not try to do things with effort and strength. It's hard to put into words but it's intentions are just accomplished. There is no exerted strength, no powerful force, just an unassailable will that cannot fail to accomplish. To witness both powers was world changing - to see such tremendous power flee like a roach from indomitable will left me with an entirely new perspective of the greatness of our God.

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How long had you been living in the dwelling where this took place?

Do you know who lived there before you?

Robban said:

How long had you been living in the dwelling where this took place?

Do you know who lived there before you?

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I lived there 2 years before leaving for college. When this happened I was home on Holiday from college, maybe 2 years after I left. It wasn't an old home, maybe 10 years old when I moved in. Not sure who lived there before. That was the only thing that happened there.

Robban said:

How long had you been living in the dwelling where this took place?

Do you know who lived there before you?

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Was just thinking of some stories,
like,
when an impure spirit is evicted it roams around seeking a new dwelling,
when it does not find one it returns to it,s old one to see if it is vacant.

Though I do not focus on these things.

King David with all his struggles and troubles never mentioned these kind of things,

rather it is people who caused him such distress.

Sanoy said:

I lived there 2 years before leaving for college. When this happened I was home on Holiday from college, maybe 2 years after I left. It wasn't an old home, maybe 10 years old when I moved in. Not sure who lived there before. That was the only thing that happened there.

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Thank you for replying

cloudyday2 said:

I was curious if anybody wanted to share their experiences that seemed to be spiritual attacks. I may have experienced such things in the past, and that is one reason why I call myself a "generic theist" instead of an atheist. I feel there is something more than the natural world, but I am pretty confused about it - especially now that I lack the Christian metaphysical framework. I suspect these things happen more often than skeptics realize, but those who experience them prefer not to talk openly due to the giggle factor and a desire to forget and return to normalcy afterwards.

Here are some of my questions:
- Was there a warning sign first?
- How did you react?
- How did the experience affect you long-term?

To be honest, this type of thing bothers me, because it adds a lot of uncertainty and confusion to an otherwise tidy naturalistic model of reality.

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I've had a few dreams a year back that I believe were messages that I was under demonic attack. I will preface this post that I believe that dreams sometimes are spiritual messages. I had been dream journaling after I was in a spiritual gifts group. I backed away from doing that because I studied dreams in college and a little bit in graduate school in psychology classes. While dreams do contain insights into personality, conflicts etc. one of the biggest ingredients of our day is our waking life. So it drove me crazy seeing Charismatics and other Christians trying to find meaning in everything they dream. Because so much of it is both based on the stuff from what they were doing and thinking about. But also there is a lot of randomization that happens in dreams etc. And it drives me crazy because many Christians are naive about the psychology of dreams where they treat them spiritualize all of them in a way that is very reminiscent of Shamanism.


Anyway, I do believe this there are sometimes spiritual messages but that is only when a person believes a dream to be a kind of rhema word. A rhema word is when a person believes that a particular bible passage has some kind of revelatory meaning to what some particular problem or issue they are experiencing. Anyway I had a few dreams 2-3 years ago that suggested (or I interpreted) that I was under demonic attack.




1) I dreamed I was exploring a large deserted building complex. It somewhat reminded me of the Mines of Moriah in the Lord of the rings but more modern. I remember scenes of a giant black Komodo dragon that was roaming around outside. At some time, I saw it through the window and we looked at each other. I got the feeling that it was pursuing me and wanted to get into the building and me telling it that if it did I would give it a knuckle sandwich.


2) I had another dream I don't remember the details but I recall one event that I realized that there were these ravens that were sucking my blood. They actually reminded me of these creatures in the game of Dungeons and Dragons called stirges that are like these giant mosquito bats but they were ravens. That dream did have especial meaning for me because I was going through depression and other kinds of negative emotions at the time and I have heard from multiple folks to suggest that demons do seem to feed off that stuff and ravens have been associated with demons since the days of the New Testament.


3) Finally I did have a dream that was highly reminiscent of the famous Darth Vader final scene of Rouge One. The difference is I had prescient knowledge of the attack that allowed me to keep ahead of Vader, jam the air locks and eventually escape. Now this dream, out of all the others I would be more suspicious of it just being a reflection of day time activity. especially since I love Rouge One more than any other Star Wars films. Still I believe it does reinforce a theme that I was under a kind of spiritual emotional attack.

cloudyday2 said:

@Zoness , @jacknife , @awitch ,
Your responses lead to another question: why do some people claim to experience spiritual things several times in their lives and others never?

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Because their religion is a catalyst for their paranoid psychology.
Their religion tells them that they are good and everyone who thinks differently is evil. It's them vs. the world. It tells them that there are demons hiding in every shadow just waiting for the chance to tempt them back to the darkness and their eternal souls are on the line. It doesn't surprise me that any unfortunate circumstance, bad dream, or sneeze is seen as some unmitigated attack. It's also an excuse to explain why bad things happen to devout people.

But there are no demons or any other boogeymen men hiding under my bed. Bad things happen sometimes because that's just how life works. Bad dreams happen because I ate that ice cream too soon before going to bed. And I actually have cool nightmares...it's always me getting chased by the xenomorphs from the Aliens movie.

I find it amusing when some Christians claim that Satan personally attacked them. Not just some Joe nobody demon but the big guy himself. Sometimes I think people like to think they're being spiritually attacked because it gives them an ego boost.

cloudyday2 said:

@Zoness , @jacknife , @awitch ,
Your responses lead to another question: why do some people claim to experience spiritual things several times in their lives and others never? If these things were random then I would expect some people to have 1-2 experience and others to have none, but it seems that some people have 5-10 experiences and others have have none. That indicates a difference in people to me, but maybe my perception of the statistics is incorrect. Maybe random chance alone can explain why some people have no experiences.

Here are some possible explanations:
- Maybe a single spiritual experience that is hard to deny leads a person to be less skeptical and in some cases even gullible in future experiences, seeing spiritual causes where natural causes suffice? This effect would cause some people to have many experiences (1 undeniable and many more questionable) while others have none.
- Maybe there is a difference in personality between those claiming experiences and those not claiming experiences? Maybe some personalities are biased to imagine experiences OR maybe some personalities are biased to DENY experiences. My sister and I are an example of this. We are similar in many ways, but I am more imaginative and have more mental health issues. I claim to have had 5-10 experiences, and as far as I know my sister has had none. She is more rational and methodical in her thinking than me. I see lots of possibilities where she tends to see only the most likely possibilities. I solve problems by imagining a jumble of puzzle pieces until something seems to fit, but my sister tends to solve problems step 1, step 2, step 3. Thus her results are more consistent and my results are more hit-and-miss.
- Maybe as @Zoness says experiences ARE "the mind playing tricks", but maybe this is how spirits interact with humans. A seismometer is unstable and can detect small earthquakes that are not noticeable to stable devices. So maybe a mentally unstable mind is like a seismometer that can detect spiritual signals that a more healthy mind cannot.

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I think its psychological in nature, a wise man once told me demons are as real as you make them.

Back in my "flirting with Wicca and Hermeticism"-days, I practiced sensing energy, becoming more aware of the psychic "backround noise" around me etc.
Right until I visited the remains of a Siberian gulag, and found there was a reason to our natural filters and blocks.
I'm still sure there's considerable psychological merit to be potentially gained in experiencing unfiltered information and peeling away at the hardened shells of our ego-constructs. But only in rigorously controlled settings, and not without professional supervision unless we are at the peak of our mental stability. (This is also why Psychedelica are disastrous as party drugs.)
Some doors should stay closed most of the time.

Yennora said:

You know that in Egypt there are hidden monuments, that is, monuments or tombs/temples that are underground and not yet opened/discovered. (Not sure if any of them aren't underground, but I think some of them are found in mountain caves)

I knew recently that for them to open these temples/tombs they have to interact with evil spirits (use magic).

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That sounds like a load of rubbish without any evidence. I have yet to see an article where appeasing dark spirits did more to open something that diamond tipped drill could not.

cloudyday2 said:

Has anybody else experienced warning signs before the attack?

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Is that not verging on a negative commandment?

Deuteronomy 18:10-11

Superstitions are signs or omens of things supposed to happen, that some people believe in.

Animals it is thought to have a sixth sense whereby they can sense danger and flee.

Not sure if really a "spiritual attack". But when I was a kid this fat housewife told a story about how she was scuba diving in the ocean.. and she claimed she saw the gates of hell. My sister and I used to always bring the story up and laugh. Their whole family was kind of a meme between my sisters and my church friends.. lol.

Robban said:

Is that not verging on a negative commandment?

Deuteronomy 18:10-11

Superstitions are signs or omens of things supposed to happen, that some people believe in.

Animals it is thought to have a sixth sense whereby they can sense danger and flee.

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We need air raid warnings, for example.