To those of you who have never witnessed a so-called Spirit communicating through an entranced body, be assured your wonderment is due mostly because your teachings have not been in that direction.  So it is very difficult to comprehend.  Sometimes it is even frightening, awesome.  Religious teachers have let man believe there is something called the supernatural.  This means we should be very awed if not downright frightened about a condition we do not understand.

Were it not that religion bases its whole system on the belief in the supernatural, there could be no religion.  It is not only the Christian that holds with this, but every religion is based on the supernatural.

There is nothing supernatural anywhere in existence.  And when I say existence  I do not mean alone the physical world for the physical world is but a shadow of the real world.  It is an externalized image.  When we do not know this we believe the reverse.


Many people, masses of people, the whole human race go around with the eyes open and it appears that they are awake.  They're not!  They are aware only of their little outside dream and hoping it will be as they emotionally expect it to be.  They are not awake!  These are the living dead!  All of us must come up out of that state.  By degrees we come out of our dream into a greater state of reality.  Those that leave the physical structure in what is called death, enter a plane called the astral.  The majority enter only what is called the low-level astral plane.  Are these planes stacked up out there like chips?  No!  They are merely states of awareness of this or that human being which he has taken with him as gathered on this earth plane.  Right here in this room, my friends, there are various astral levels.


It is not important that the Etherians are flying in the sky.  It is not at all important!  Unless you have found your own importance to life first.  Only then can you measure the importance of these beings.

Carroll’s fiancee, Leeshawn Navarro, said she could tell something was wrong after he arrived at their San Francisco apartment.  Instead of sharing tour stories and presents, he took a shower and went straight to bed — where he stayed for the next five days.

On the sixth day, March 18, Carroll had trouble breathing.  Navarro rushed him to the California Pacific Medical Center campus on Van Ness Avenue.  Chandra attended to Carroll first and recognized the symptoms — he had a temperature of 102.6 degrees and several liters of fluid in his lungs.

Carroll stayed comatose in intensive care for nearly two weeks, mostly in critical condition.  He was the worst of four patients who were in critical condition because of COVID-19, said Dr. George Horng, a pulmonologist.  Carroll’s heart failed during the first few days because the medication needed to keep him on a ventilator was so taxing on his body.


While in the coma, Carroll said he had dreams of visiting the afterlife.  He saw himself leave his body and plummet down to hell, where Satan — a woman in his case — punished him for the deadly sin of sloth, morphing him into a Jabba the Hutt-like-monster who vomited blood until he had a heart attack.


"I woke up on the hospital bed with tubes coming in and out of me, and there was a nurse right there and my first words were, ‘Am I still in hell?’”  Carroll said. “She ignored me."


Carroll, who celebrated his 47th birthday on Wednesday, May 13, said his near-death experience gave him a new outlook on life.  He now plans on living a healthier life without hard alcohol or bong rips, though he’ll still drink the occasional hard cider and narrow his marijuana use to edibles.  He also adopted a belief in a higher power; he feels the prayers from his family and friends helped him pull through.

"I’m still going to listen to satanic metal, and I still love Deicide and bands like that,” Carroll said.  “As far as for my personal life and my experience of what I went through, I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to.”

When your spirit is released from its body, you are freed from your brain, which is your limitation in the world of matter.  The consciousness now has experiences on our vibrations, according to your grade of evolution, and it is conscious of its experiences whilst it has them.


But if your soul is already evolved and you have reached an advanced state of consciousness, then you are aware of the spirit realms.  Then you can quite easily train the brain to remember.

That which is called God is the natural Law of the universe.  The Great Spirit is within everything.  Everything is the Great Spirit.  Because the soul knows itself, the Great Spirit knows the soul.  Because the sparrow is the Great Spirit, the Great Spirit knows the sparrow.  Because the Great Spirit is in the trembling leaf, the trembling leaf is the Great Spirit.  Throughout the whole of your world and mine, throughout the universe, even in worlds which are not yet known to you, the Laws of the Great Spirit reign supreme.

[At other times, the nuns] struck their chests and backs with their heads, as if they had their necks broken, and with inconceivable rapidity.  They twisted their arms at the joints of the shoulder, the elbow, or the wrist, two or three times round.  Lying on their stomachs, they joined the palms of their hands to the soles of their feet; their faces became so frightful one could not bear to look at them; their eyes remained open without winking.  Their tongues issued suddenly from their mouths, horribly swollen, black, hard, and covered with pimples, and yet while in this state they spoke distinctly.  They threw themselves back till their heads touched their feet, and walked in this position with wonderful rapidity, and for a long time.  They uttered cries so horrible and so loud that nothing like it was ever heard before.  They made use of expressions so indecent as to shame the most debauched of men, while their acts, both in exposing themselves and inviting lewd behavior from those present, would have astonished the inmates of the lowest brothel in the country.

In our time two classes of persons are involved in the perpetuation of ancient beliefs in the power of evil.  The first group and by far the largest, is made up of frightened neurotics.


Our traditional Devil with horns, goatee, cloven hooves and forked tail, is no more nor less than the great God, Pan, a pastoral deity of antiquity who liked to play his pipes among the reeds along the banks of rivers.


The other group which has found Satanism fascinating is made up of sophisticated exhibitionists.  Whether they actually believe the infernal rites they practice is of secondary consequence.  It is the morbid thrill together with the sense of power over the minds and lives of other mortals that brings satisfaction.


There is one account that the Devil cast the bronze doors of Notre Dame Cathedral, and it is also rumored that he cooperated with the architect in designing The Cathedral of Cologne.  In recent years theater, motion pictures and television have catered considerably to the basic fears in man, and it cannot be denied that horror films have a pernicious effect on both young and old.

Today even among some believers, the Holy Spirit is a source of some bafflement.  (As is the concept of the Trinity as a whole.)  But its function was clear to the first Christians.  It was the force or power through which at first Jesus, and then the apostles, performed their healing and miracles.  And, of course, it ended up as part of the mysterious Trinity, along with the Father and Son.

Given Jesus's self-identification as Sophia's messenger, we can make a shrewd guess she was "the Bride."  Which is exactly what the Valentinian Gnostics—those behind the Gospel of Phillip—said.

In the Wisdom of Solomon, Sophia is "the artisan of all things" [Wisdom of Solomon 7:21], echoing her role as creator in Proverbs.  She is "God's chief agent."  [Hurtado, One God, one Lord, 44]


She is also responsible for maintaining the cosmos in good order.  Such is her creative function that in later passages even the distinction between Sophia and God becomes very blurred.  [Ringgren, Word and Wisdom, 115]


Sophia looms large in Philo's teaching, as Helmer Ringgren explains in his classic 1947 study Word and Wisdom: "Here we find Sophia as a cosmic principle, a pre-existent being, the mother and nurse of everything. . . ."  [124] 

Joy Sorman is describing Joey Starr of the rappers NTM in concert — "Joey's body on stage toppling, swivelling, jerking; his crippled piston of a body, mounted on ball bearings, left hanging by the 'scratch' effect, its movements first suspended, then picking up again epileptically.  With a series of breaks and suspensions, he thrashes around like a madman, writhes as a croaking shakes his body, laughs until he cries.  This isn't the spectacle of a man in a trance but a commitment to performance, a giving of himself."

And yet you'd have to describe it as a trance — "Joey is all animals: buzzard, puma, falcon, jaguar, bear, hyena, stuck pig.  He knows all their noises.  Joey Starr is a menagerie."

But no, not a trance.  Just its representation.  "Give the audience its money's worth," says Joy Sorman in this story which she titled "Noise."

The goddess Kali, who reigns over Bengal, sticks out a very long, very broad red tongue.  With her necklace of decapitated heads, her skirt of severed arms and her tigress' fangs, she frightens the Whites but not the Bengalis who call her their Mother, adore her fierce appearance and the blood dripping from the limbs she turns into baubles.
 
Why do they love her so much?