by finnrot 20 Replies latest jw friends
Strange, isn't it, that the only time people are tormented by demons is when they believe in them.
When you were a kid, you innocently believed whatever your parents told you was true. As your sense of self matured and your reasoning ability improved, you began to ask questions, and the deemins began to go away.
I remember your name, finrot! ...and say, is your avatar free friday night?
I know when I was a kid I was terrified of demons . I heard all sorts of horror stories myself and also experienced the encounter of the third kind with some spririts so I don't think it's a load of crap but I think sometimes people do like to scare the hell outa kids by telling stories be they true or not . Some dubs I knew claimed to live in a house very much like the amnityville horror with goat shaped apperitions and the like . I don't know what else you can say about it other than eventually you have to confront your fears and find a way to deal with it . I notice many people claim to communicate with spirits and be chummy with them but I think I can live without that in my life.
lol, an elder the other day tried to tell me that there were 6-10 demons for every witness. and the demons tried to make the witness weak and fall. I immediately called a bullshit, heh. but it is scary of the thought of witnesses scaring the shit outta people into submission with this nonsense (even tho its not nonsense when you are a JW). the witnesses make it very real unfortunately....
It has been awhile since we've talked about the demons and Satan in the forum. Its a subject I guess none of us really talk about it.
I concur with finrot that especially in the 60s and 70s demonology seemed to be spoken about constantly. When our family started out in the org. in 1963, it was demons and the so called "new truth" on the resurrection. However for some reason it was the subject of demons. My mother was deeply invovled with demonic practises prior to becoming JWs. She had ESP and was telekenitic. She was a lady who you wouldn't want to piss off that is for sure. I remember as a kid if for example if the salt or pepper shaker fell over she would say we are having for example a male friend coming over or a female. She was never ever wrong . I remember that when I would come home from school my great grandparents were at the house. I use to say to my mom how come you made a cake or something special the evening before they would come to our home. Oh great grandpa and grandma are coming over, I said did they call and she said no, I just know that they are coming over. And for each time she did this our great grand parents would be at the house. It was always uncanny and scary for sure. Also when I would go to bed at night my mom would say watch out that the black gloves don't come and take your sheets of in the night and when I would wake up with no blankets on she said I told you the black gloves came to you last night. She would frighten me more as the other kids were younger. She would always say something was going to happen and it always did. So when our family became jw it was like the Devil was in our home. Everything we seemed to own my mom would say they are demonized and she would throw things away. It got so bad at times that the old JW committee would come to the house and pray with our family and with my mother alone to be free of demonic attacks. She would see things fly around the basement and we use to have a crawl space underneath the stair well and my mom said she would see the devil and demons in there. My God it was terrible growing up in our home. Soon the brothers decided to place the book study in our home for some relief of demonic attacks . Do you remember when we had the records of the brothers singing on them in the 60s, well my mother went through several sets of these records as they played day and night at our house, my dad bought mom a stereo that could hold seven records and so that is why they would play most of the night. So that is all we ever listened to as I don't recall us having a television. When we did get a television, mom would say oh, you can't watch this or that because they were demonic shows. It just never stopped.
I have to admitt my mother was very spooky. She just never ever stopped having attacks from the demons and of course she would place her fears upon all of us. We were never allowed other JW teens in our home or very few families visited.
I was terribly afraid to go to sleep at night and she would drive you nuts. She said that the demons tried to have sex with her and she was laying paralized on the bed and she looked up and that year the text was "do not become fearful" of those who can kill the body" and when my mom saw the calender in the mirror she screamned out the name "Jehovah" and the attack stopped. I do believe these things happened to my mother as their was always an evil feeling in our home. And unless you have not ever felt that in your home let me tell you your not missing out on anything. But as she started throuwing things out it would let up for a while. I feel that my mother is a paranoid person even today she is like this. I can only tell you that what I have wrote here is truthful and I have not made any of this up. Last year I responded to several threads about the demons and I think I started one. But I went into more detail in these threads. I don't remember how far back but if you look under my name and my posted things are there.
Anyways who would want to scare themselves on purpose I sure as hell wouldn't. So for those of you who said they had things happened to them I believe you because it has happen in our home.
I left home in 1970 to pioneer and so I didn't miss being at home. When I would come to visit my parents their was always a niggly feeling in my mind that my mom would be going through some demonic episode. Being away from our home was the most peaceful time of my late teens and twenties . She (mom) ostracised fellow witnesses with her fears and stories. and she would have few friends as she was always talking about the demons. You can only take so much of the subject of the demons.
I can tell you with all my heart that I am peace today being out of the organization because as far as I am concerned they the Org. thrives on stories that my mom could tell.
I left and was disfellowshipped for other reasons and I have to tell you they the Org. brain wash children and adults with tales of demons and Satan. Some of them love to dwell on these things. That is why alot of us in here still have residual damage from the Org. and parents teaching the evil of things and demons and Satan , no wonder many suffered from terrible nightmares and terrors. Of course you know the Society does this because they love you. Right and I am the pied piper.
May you all have peace to day
Love Orangefatcat....
Orange,
Whilst I believe in the existence of spirit beings, I don't think that every encounter with something "demonic" is necessarily a spirit being. What I mean to say is that human beings are very good at creating their own fears and allowing that to escalate. It may be that your mother had some psychic ability at first, then with the JW condemnation she became very afraid.
By saying we can "create" them ourselves, I'm not saying her experience wasn't very real, but just that I doubt that all of her spirit encounters were actually spirit beings. We can, if we put our mind to it, create a being which appears to be outside of ourselves but in actuality comes from within us.
Its a bit like Wednesday's story of seeing a black cloud in her house - she admitted that there had been unrest in her house and I suggested that perhaps this was a result of the emotional tension and unsettled energy in the house.
Also, there is a distinct difference between psychic experience and forms of mental illness. When a mentally ill person hallucinates "spirits" usually this is always characterised by intense fear, paranoia and horror. It is unrelenting, it is uncontollable and it usually tries to make the person do something they don't want to. Voices will "command" someone to do this or that, or give a commentary on everything the person is doing. It goes away when anti-hallucinogenic drugs are given. Not all people who see spirits are mentally ill, but some people who say they are tormented by demons might actually be suffering from some form of imbalance.
Sirona
I was just a young stupid kid that believed all the stupid scary fables
No. You have the wrong point of view on this entirely.
You were the victim of the WT thru the unwitting assistance of your parents and congregation.
Otherwise, every child who trusts their parents and other authorities are "stupid". Would you condemn all the JW kids who still believe in demons (or similar WT doctrines) as stupid? I wouldn't. They are all victims, too!
finn, you can give yourself a break, here, just like I know you'd give today's JW kids a break.
bebu
orangefatcat...Believe me, your mom knew who was coming over when she told you that she didn't, the phone was invented by then, they called. She just wanted to freak you out. She also pulled your sheets and blankets from your body while you slept, trust me, that is what happened. Things don't go bump in the night. At least for normal people.
heathen.....Yes it is a load of crap.....A thousand years from now, if humanity survives, all religion, and the associated spirits and demons will be considered cute, just like we consider mythology a cute concept. People used to believe that crap also. It is just a part of history. Demons don't exist, and ferries and Gods don't exist also.
Yes dustyb, I was taught as a little Witness that there were tons of demons out there and they were ready to pounce on me at any minute... That's why I lay in bed with the blankets over my head and a cap pulled over my eyes. I did sleep with a night light. I was scared shitless.
sirona...My Uncle who was and is a good Elder in good standing in his congreation, raised his children in a house that looked like it was the origional Amenity horror house. This place was spooky. I don't think this was a mistake on his part. I really think he chose this creepy house on purpose. He was a cruel person, he beat, and I'm pretty sure molested his children at will. All the while he had a good standing at the Kingdumb Hall as a good Elder.
I think that people that are fanatic about anything are mentally ill on some level. I think that super dedicated Witnesses are mentally ill on some level, and that goes for religious fanatics in any religion. It's just that Witnesses let you disassociate yourself form society and justify becoming a truly weird person.
I can't prove it, but I bet there are a disproportionate number of wife beaters and child molesters in the witness religion. No way to prove it, but I bet I'm right.
-fin
When I was growing up in the 70's the demonic theme seemed to be thriving and I was scared witless. I too have felt demons at the end of the bed, watching, taunting. There always seemed to be a experience in the congregation about someone who come into contact, while witnessing, with someone who had demons helping them or that they belonged to a coven or some such. Or the story of buying something secondhand and it bringing demons into the house, they figure out what it is and take it out of the house and try to burn it but it won't burn, or ir screams as it is burning. Dangerous and harmful stories to children.
But looking back from the safety of adulthood and being out of the faith for 20yrs and I agree with Sirona, you make your own demons. The whole thing is a ruse to keep you scared and too terrified to step outside the Org. In my case it was all in my own head brought on by Witness urban myths and a wild imagination. Nothing scares you more than yourself. The fear of something is always more scarey than the reality (I my experience).
Sirona, I really appreciate your indepth knowledge of this subject. I was of the opinion as a teenager late teens that perhaps my mother was an absoulete strange individual and from what I know now I truly belief that my mothers experiences were real to her as you said. I do know that at some point I had thought that my mother was a person with some kind of mental disorder/s. She inflicted much of her fears on herself and it had escalated to something in which she no longer had control. I recall her saying that when she seen the demons and the devil under the stair well it was unbearable for her. Could she have in accualality seen some formation that made her feel that it was the demons. But I have no idea what they look like on depections that we see in magazines or in movies. My mom spoke of ectoplasma formations . So I looked it up in the dictionary and here is an explaination.
.ec·to·plasm ( P ) Pronunciation Key (
n.
n 1: (in spiritualism) the substance supposed to emanate from the body of the medium during a trance 2: the outer granule-free layer of cytoplasm
ECTOPLASM OR BIOENERGY?
Alfonso Galeano and José Garrido (Spain)
In the middle of the spiritualist movement, at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20th century, there were groups which held meetings with the purpose of establishing contacts with deceased people. In those sessions, people in trance had the ability to materialize an unknown substance, of a hazy and milky aspect, which emanated from their bodies (and in some occasions, it also emanated from some people present to the session). Investigating experts stipulated to denominate this substance ECTOPLASM.
At first, it was considered that ectoplasm was formed by a type of psychic fluid which became thicker and emanated from people with mediumistic capacities which would have the ability to imitate all life and material forms and could carry out a great variety of mechanical, physical and also chemical activities. This kind of experiment induced the investigators of that time to admit that the matter could emit some type of energy when its atomic elements were dissociated, and that certain forms of energy, if not all of them, possessed the properties of the conventional matter, which means that they would have mass and, therefore, resistance to movement, weight or submission to gravity - and would also have structure, that is, shape and volume located in the space.
Famous scientists and pioneers in the investigation of the derived phenomena of mediumistic activity, such as William Crookes and Charles Richet, observed there was an enormous effort and energy spent by these people during the process of emission and materialization of the ectoplasm. Some people even lost corporal weight This was meticulously checked and confirmed.
Let us get into the time tunnel and return to our current time. The investigation on Experimental Parapsychology has progressed a lot and thanks to that, we can understand better many physical and psychological phenomena.
Let us concentrate in our greatest interest: the techniques of Instrumental Transcommunication.
Many people around the world say they can contact dimensions of another reality by using technical and electronic means, besides they have recordings of voices and images to prove that. But an authentic enigma comes up when we ask ourselves the following question:
Which is the energy mediator used by these supposed entities to communicate with us?
Obviously, nowadays, and thanks to the technological progresses in Parapsychology, we are able to give this answer to the previous question: Is ectoplasm the mediator? No. Then, which is the mediator?
We will expose a series of reasons to explain why we should reject such hypothesis:
1. - The transcommunicator, the person that receives the messages, never uses the trance channel or works with an altered state of conscience. He feels well and lucid at all times.
2. - There is no case of physical stress or consumption of sugar by the transcommunicator (very common phenomenon in the production of the ectoplasm) nor weight loss. Instead of being worn out, some transcommunicators actually feel revitalized and happy when they observe the good results of their experiments.
3. - All investigations have shown that the light, even when very faint, affects ectoplasm directly.
The transcommunicators obtain results in their experiments with the light turned on or off, during the day, the afternoon or at night. There is no environmental nor luminous factor that affect transcommunication.
We could give countless reasons and we would see that they all attest great differences between both phenomena.
There is no doubt that some people could say that perhaps ectoplasm has different levels of density.
That is the point: these people can understand about ectoplasm, but none of them are transcommunicators as well. They can understand about one subject, but not the other.
One can only get to know transcommunication by practising it.
The phenomenon of the contact is much more subtle than we can imagine!
The investigations accomplished by the members of the Center of Parascientific and Ufological Studies, especially those made by Alfonso Galeano and myself about Transcommunication and Energetics, have always tried to comprehend the experimenter's influence/importance in the occurrence of the phenomenon.
We have been finding many reasons that lead us to understand we are part of an immense Holographic Universe where the Whole and the Part, the global and the local, appear in a subtle form and are tightly tied up together.
All living beings, from the smallest to the largest, are born and they develop and vibrate in an enormous variety of energy FREQUENCIES... How is the co-ordination and mobilization of this energy possible in such a perfect way?
This mobilization would be a direct consequence of an amount of accumulated energy which makes the whole system (for example: a human being) excitable and sensitive to very specific weak signs.
First, these signs (frequencies emitted by an entity from Beyond) would not have to be inserted by force. They can originate anywhere, inside or outside of the system. They would spread along the system and amplify automatically due to the accumulated global Energy at microscopic as well as macroscopic levels.
It is possible to create an intercommunication mechanism that acts very quickly, especially in the living beings.
The reason we believe in these structures can be explained by our physical composition which is based on liquid crystal..
Liquid crystals are the intracellular contents that exist in the body. It has a coherence twenty times superior to the quartz, and this capacity makes the intercommunication mechanism similar to the laser.
The liquid crystals are states of matter that, opposite to solid, are very flexible and sensitive; they have fast orientation change, or phase transition, when exposed to a weak electric or magnetic field. This property, inherent to the human being, can be considered basic for this intercommunication.
Nowadays, we know that every organic structure is polarized on a series of axes, in such a way that the tissues of the body have a system of transmitting information which is similar to the laser.
This intercommunication and coherence could move very quickly through the liquid crystal of the cells and tissues of the body. The body would keep energy above the Space and the Time, it would possess an interconnected range to other Spaces and Times. It would be possible to visualize the human being as an authentic "living antenna" of reception/transmission of signs and frequencies.
The final approach on this reflection would be the following:
Which would be the nature of that structure?
At the present time, there are several lines of scientific investigation that agree and converge on a theory denominated the "New Texture of the Reality", which suggest that the organic space/time possesses a structure that is holographic (the analysis about the formation of the trans-images, by using mathematical formulas, show the fractal structure).
This new vision supports that the natural process, that is, everything that has been created, possesses holographic dimensions. In the reality where we find ourselves immersed, the fractals (holograms) capture a new type of order characterized by a self-similarity phenomenon. Over this chaotic dynamics (from this chaos an implicit order emerges) a movement of fluid and dynamical attraction is produced and that generates new holograms.
The stability of the organic structure includes a dynamic balance based on mutual intercommunication and sensibility. This intercommunication depends on the fact that all parts of the living being receive energy-information in order to participate and to interact in an appropriate way with the Whole.
The holographic architecture would be, after all, the texture or the tissue of the Reality. The human being is the only one which entangles himself in a multitude of Spaces and Times, while he is part of other Spaces and Times. As a work of art, the human organic architecture is more an icon than a symbol. A symbol possess a meaning, while that an icon has meaning and content.
This can be the true challenge: our investigations on Energetic and Instrumental Transcommunication open us a new window towards the comprehension of intriguing phenomena with direct implications about a hidden reality and the existence of a vast and total HOLOGRAPHIC UNIVERSE
Quite interesting isn't..
During that time at home I did mention about this uncanny feeling and an uneasiness. I like Wedsnday example of a Black Cloud. There was a lot of tension and uneasiness in our home which surely contributed to this feeling. My parents were always one to argue big. Sometimes both my parent would go off the deep end. Mom always wanted to argue about things. When dad was baptized after 6 months of study she flipped when he got baptized, It took her over two years to decide if she wanted to get baptized. She knew it was the truth but she felt something was holding her back. I think it had to be her own fears for waitng that long to be baptized. She did lots of researsh and deep study into scriptures and she wanted to know that they were truthful. Well she still is a witness and it worked for her to have done all the researsh. In studing she would seek out other witnesses that had had experiences with the demons. She found a couple nice young couples who had had an extreme time with the demons slashing of the furniture and the walls being cut up. They use to freak me out on how they would talk for hours on end about demonic attacks. I think my mom needed to know she wasn't insane. And the more persons who told her of there experiences seem to make her feel better and that she wasn't insane or mental. I know as the years passed that my mother always needed some therapy and some meds. At times I thought that my mother did suffer or suffers from schzophrenia. She takes med. to this day. She use to say to me Terry if you need drug than your opening your mind to the demons and the Society did give a convention talk about how drugs can be an approach to the demons. The WTS believes it is. or at least back then. So of course mom said she would never ever take drugs. Well how did the society feel about people being treated for mental illness. I mean the WTS has some strange ideas. I truly believe if my mom had be on medication all those years ago non of this would have happened. I do believe my mother is in a highly physcotic and neurotic state most of the time. She is on zoloft and some other meds. She needs them. My mother lives with in herself. I don't know if you understand what it is I am saying. I would say self absorbed.. Here is my last thing I found interesting and now I am going to go. neurotic and physcotic are the two words that best describe my moms conditon and she has compulsive obbsesive disorder. I think in these extremes that any person can slip into believing they are being attacked by spirits or demons. Sirona your profile is amazing and you seem to know a trememdous amount of information about many aspects of this world our realm and of the spritual realm. At oneness and peacefulness with the earth and the universe. That kind of peacefulness rests within ones self if they allow themselves to be guided by it. Thanks for all your input and also you other gals. Love Orangefatcat
Orange,
I'm glad you can see that perhaps your mother may have seen these things due to a mentall illness, and that if she'd have controlled it with medication these things may never have happened to her (at least not in such terrifying ways). That is interesting information about ectoplasm - I have never experienced that personally, I suppose I always think of "ghostbusters" when that word is mentioned! LOL!
Sirona your profile is amazing and you seem to know a trememdous amount of information about many aspects of this world our realm and of the spritual realm.
Oh, I think you are giving me too much credit. I'm still young and I know I've got a lot to learn - about life itself.
Sirona
