How Effective Is Secular Exorcism?

Internationally recognized psychic Edgar Cayce was a distance healer who also documented numerous encounters with demons he found in patients. In reading 5753-1, he states: "Discarnate entities... May influence the thought of an entity.", and in reading 638-1, Cayce declares with simple, unambiguous clarity: "We have possession." Removal solutions offered by Cayce's helpers include several methods to strengthen the spirit of his patients, and usually involve invoking Christ. Cayce claims that by filling one's mind with the holy there is no room for the demonic. When demons refuse, Cayce simply advises us to proclaim: "Get thee behind me.", and I will have no part of thee." It triggers an important question for non-Christians: "How effective is secular exorcism?".

I've never developed any specific psychic skills, and I don't normally hallucinate, but I have seen extraordinary sights or visions that have taken me a lifetime to process, categorize, and understand. My first extraordinary vision in this category came in my twenties, after a weekend of intensive regressive therapy. I had dumped a tremendous amount of negative energy on the floor mats in the therapy room, and now I was back at work on a Monday morning. I started across campus to get coffee, and as I walked I reviewed my progress in releasing a load of emotional pain. I had worked through some deep, first line feelings around my fears of abandonment as an infant, and as I walked in the warm morning sunlight I felt purged and fresh, like a line of clean laundry.

As I reconnected with leftover feelings I began to feel centered, and a familiar warmth started to spread into my belly, combined with an uncharacteristic light heartedness. I could feel joy rising up in me. A young couple walking a few hundred feet ahead of me stopped to part company for the day. When I slowed down to observe the public affection they were displaying for each other, I felt a surge of joy. Suddenly I noticed out of the corner of my eye, a large plume of dense grey smoke, so dense it resembled wool, rising up quickly from behind my head as though escaping from my body. Like a dark shadow it rose up over 10 feet, still connected to me by its tail, before launching itself forward a few hundred feet in open air, directly towards the couple. As the plume of smoke flew towards them it grew two large arms of grey smoke which opened wide to embrace the young couple who had stopped to kiss goodbye at the approach of a bus. In this moment, there was a student walking nearby and much closer than the couple, but the dense smoke was drawn preferentially to the couple like a magnet. No one seemed to notice, but I was stunned with disbelief as I watched with frozen fascination. The vision was over in seconds, and though it was frightening, I still felt good afterwards. I could not comprehend the situation at the time, and it would take the rest of my life to reach a fuller understanding of that extraordinary event.

About 40 years passed before I would see the smokey creature again, this time in my late sixties. We had retired to the country, where I started to meditate outside in good weather. I was intuitively developing a vortex ritual on my property, in which I would raise Gaia energies from the ground below my feet into an up spiralling vortex of love energy, and release it into the universal grid. One sunny afternoon, as I was walking the path to my meditation spot it happened again. I was preparing myself mentally for my vortex ritual as I walked, when I suddenly stepped back instinctively to avoid a small but nasty prickly ash tree. As I stepped back into a patch of sunlight, a man-sized plume of dense grey smoke jumped out from behind my head on the left side, and flew ahead of me down the path. It rushed past me so quickly that I thought it was a person wearing a dark grey wool sweater. I did not see it clearly until it was out in front of me, and then my brain was finally able to focus and produce a recognizable image. It was old smokey, and I called out: "Hey", as it flew past me down the path. Old Smoke left me with the clear impression that it was in a huge hurry to be away from me. This time I sensed an intimacy with this shadowy apparition, and my mind thought: "Hey, I know you from someplace!". I felt elated though confused by the event.

The first apparition puzzled me deeply for years, until I accepted the reality that the smokey apparition was a hidden aspect of my shadow self. With age, I found the courage to face it, own it, and integrate it into the rest of me as the part that I had rejected and left behind many years ago, for various reasons.

Then last month Michael Harner died, and his passing, like his life, opened doors for me. Dr. Harner was an American anthropologist who lived with various native groups to study global shamanism. He collected and compiled shamanic lore, and shared it with the world through his Foundation for Shamanic Studies. Hundreds of his grateful students posted tributes to him, and some told of their shamanic journeys. I expressed my gratitude in a message as well, and it was key to gaining access to shamanic experiences not normally revealed to the rest of the world. One student with psychic vision described a shamanic training session where he watched dark grey plumes of dense smoke jump out of patients being treated by students, and enter neighbouring patients. That description matched my experience, revealing the universal nature of these particular entities. The information that set me free after a lifetime of searching was found on the shamanic path, confirming that indeed, there are many ways to the top of the mountain.

My heart-mind now accepts the physical reality of discarnate entities. They seem to have little substance, meaning they seem to exist at much lighter densities, but can become visible to the untrained eye under the right conditions. According to shamanic lore, the spectrum of discarnate entities includes helping spirits, as well as harmful ones, and those who thrive parasitically on our dark energies are called demons. Most importantly, they are not me!

Dr. Richard Gallagher is a board-certified psychiatrist, and professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University. He's breaking down biases held traditionally by conventional medicine, as he claims to be the USA's premier "demonic consultant". He bases his declarations that demonic possession is real, on first hand observations, and a growing body of empirical evidence. He claims to be able: "to spot demonic possession" and discern it from mental illnesses. Because of his Catholic faith, he works with the Catholic Church to help clear harmful demons from humans, and reports that demand for exorcisms in the USA is increasing. In just one decade, the Catholic Church had to expand its national team, from 12 to 50 exorcists because of increased demand. He admits that religious exorcisms often need to be repeated many times in order to succeed.

Those of us who recognize historic Jesus the Nazarene as a shaman in his own rite, observe that he spent most of his ministry driving out demons [25 bible references?] in order to heal people. Unfortunately, the most valuable and practical part of his ministry has been buried by the architects of Christianity.

So how can non-Christians protect ourselves against the dark forces, and maintain our own spiritual sovereignty without borrowing or accessing religious holiness?

First, holiness or sacredness is an internal quality bestowed by humans, not gods. We humans render: persons, places, things, and ourselves, holy or sacred, by treating these with high respect, reverence, and love. We become aware of our own innate holiness or sacredness by recognizing, honouring, and protecting our own spiritual sovereignty, ie: our spark of divinity that we must never surrender. Genuine deities will respect and honour your sovereignty, and never try to thieve it.

Second, my real life experiences demonstrate that the secular solution seems to be just as powerful and effective as any religious solutions, in the absence of documented comparisons. On two separate occassions I've observed material demons in broad daylight fleeing my corporeal body when I started to fill myself with love and joy. Sacredness is innate in each of us, and love is our most powerful sacred state that turns our temples into fortresses. No parasitic demons will tolerate holiness or sacred energies in their host environment, so they flee. The common explanation is that they're far less dense than we are, and can penetrate our relatively porous bodies.

Whatever the mechanism of interaction may be, real life experiences inform me that if we reaffirm our spiritual sovereignty to ourselves daily, and stay on the loving path as much as possible, our body temples will fill with the protective power of our own sacredness, and that powerful force repels parasitic demons, and may attract helping ones.