Christians, Beware
of the Occult Invasion

 

Table of Contents
Introduction 1. The Testimony of Jesus Christ  2. Who are these Demons?  3. Spiritism: An End-Time Menace  4. Occultism Invading the Evangelical Church  5. “Signs and Wonders”  6. “Christian” (?) Hinduism and “Shaktipat”	7. What Does the Bible Say?  8. “Christian” (?) Psychology 9. Becoming “Gods”  10. The Armor of God  A. The Occult Bombardment on Society  B. New Thought, New Age Movements  C, Visualization, Astral Projection, OBEs

9. Becoming "Gods"

“Ye shall be as gods….” —The Serpent

“I will exalt my throne above the stars of God
…I will be like the Most High.” —Lucifer

Testimonies of Evangelical Leaders

“You have the same ability [as God has] dwelling or residing on the inside of you.” (Charles Capps)(6)

“We have all the capabilities of God.” (Kenneth Copeland)(7)

“We are in God; so that makes us part of God.” (Kenneth Copeland)(9)

“God has made us…the same class of beings that He is Himself…. God took something of Himself…and put it into man…. Man was master. Man lived on terms equal to God….” (Kenneth E. Hagin) (10)

“Did you know that from the beginning of time the whole purpose of God was to reproduce Himself…? Who are you…[but] the expression of all that God is…. And when we stand up here, brother, you’re not looking at Morris Cerullo; you’re looking at God!” (Morris Cerullo)(11)

“To know God, to love God, and to understand God is finally to realize one’s own godhood.” (Rodney R. Romney) (12)

“I am a little god!” (Paul Crouch on international television.)
Christians beware! Most of these evangelical leaders purport to receive messages directly from “God.” 

Definitions

The leading effort of spirit mediums has been to communicate with the dead. This is what most séances purport to be. Today spirit mediums are called spiritual guides or channelers. The fallen angels have lived so long that they know all about many of those who lived in the past or listened in on conversations to know about the deceased. Sometimes they give information that is true concerning the dead loved one.

Channeling. A contemporary term for the earlier Spiritualist idea of mediumship, spirit entities conveying philosophical or spiritual advice or healing through mediums. Mediumship is generally thought of as the special activity of a few people who operate primarily to put people in contact with their dead friends and relatives. In our time, the twist is that the channeler now speaks as if it is actually the deceased person or entity being contacted who is doing the speaking. It is as if the channeler’s mind, body, mouth, and even hands (in the case of “automatic handwriting”) are taken over for a time while the spirit from beyond uses it. (Entertaining, p. 96.) 

Psychic: Psychic is synonymous with “paranormal,” a “term applied to phenomena that presently understood laws of cause and effect cannot explain.” Psychic power is a phenomenon that is attributable to “psi” (taken from the first letter of the Greek word psyche, which means “soul” or “mind”) a term used to “identify an individual’s extra-sensorimotor communication with objects external to his mind.”

Categories of Psychic Powers: 

Extrasensory Perception (ESP): A general term covering… modes of obtaining information about an event or situation outside oneself without using any of the known sensory processes.

Telepathy is the communication of impressions from one mind to another, independent of the recognized channels of sense.

Clairvoyance is “clear-seeing,” or the faculty of getting information about pyhysical objects or distant events of which no one else is aware.

Precognition: Without the possibility of inference from present evidence, the prediction or knowledge of random future events. 

Levitation. The rising of physical objects, tables, pianos, etc., or of human beings into the air, contrary to the known laws of gravitation and without any visible agency. More often the term is used in a restricted sense and refers to the levitation of the human body.

Levitating “Saints” — In Die Christliche Mystik (5 vols., 1836-42), J. J. von Gorres spoke of 72 levitated saints, while Olivier Leroy (in Levitation, 1928) noted that at least 200 had experienced this phenomenon. Among them were St. Dominic (1170-1221), St. Francis of Assisi (1186-1226), Thomas Aquinas (1226-1274), St. Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury (d. 1242), Savonarola (1452-1498), and St. Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556). They were variously reported as having been raised an average elevation of 20 inches, but in some cases exceptional height was recorded. St. Joseph of Copertino who, in the Acta Sanctorum, is credited with 70 separate flights, once flew up a tree and perched on a branch which quivered no more than if he had been a bird. 

Statistics

About 67% of American adults claim to have had a psychic experience such as extrasensory perception. A 1993 Gallup poll indicated that 43% of teens believe in extrasensory perception. About 21% of teens believe in clairvoyance. Another 24% of American adults believe in precognition, that is, the psychic ability to predict the future. One out of three American adults believe that fortune-tellers can actually foresee the future. One in four American adults believe that people’s horoscopes “can affect the course of their future.” 

“As early as 1987 the number of channelers in the Los Angeles area alone was estimated at more than 1,000.” (Naisbitt, John & Patricia Aburdene. Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990’s. New York: William Morrow and Co. (1990); pg. 281-282.) 

It is not cheap to hear the wisdom of an Ascended Master, the departed dead or an alien being from another realm. According to Robin Westen, students who wish to imbibe in channeled truth must pay “up to $100 for a private session [and up to] $1,500 for a seminar.” (Channelers: A New Age Directory, p. 13).

“In 1987 for a group session J.Z. Knight charged $400 per person, Jach Pursel $275. Private consultations with Pursel, for which there was at that time a two-year waiting list, cost $93 per hour. Kevin Ryerson charged $250 per session, [and] has had so many inquiries at his San Francisco office that he is referring business to other channelers” (A Crash Course on the New Age Movement, p. 161).

Dionne Warwick’s Psychic Friends Network employs approximately 1,500 psychics logging an estimated 3 million minutes a month at about $4 per minute according to Baltimore-based Inphomation Communications, Inc. (“Who could’ve foretold psychic spree?” Dallas Morning News, March 19, 1996, pp. 1-C, 6-C). According to those estimates, Warwick’s service alone would gross $144 million annually. In addition to Warwick and Dixon, Mark Plakias, managing director of Strategic Telemedia, a New York research firm, estimated nearly half of the 200,000 pay-per-call entertainment services in America are psychic hotlines (ibid., p. 1-C). 

Richard Dworman, editor of Infomercial Marketing Report, estimates Psychic Friends Network’s gross annual income at a more conservative $100 million. Still, this is remarkable for an organization that started just seven years ago and is receiving between 7,500 to 10,000 paying calls each day. The Philadelphia Daily News, March 19, 1997, p. C-1). The second and third largest psychic networks, Psychic Readers Network and Your Psychic Experience, annually take in about $50 million and $35-$40 million, respectively (ibid.). 

Examples

Jane Roberts (1929-1984) and the entity “Seth.”

In 1963 Jane Roberts (1929-1984), a housewife from Elmira, New York, became the channel for the entity “Seth,” who called himself an “energy essence personality.” Roberts’ first communications with “Seth” were by Ouija Board. Her husband transcribed many as she spoke them in trance; others were recorded by automatic writing. 

Over the next the twenty-one years of channeling, until 1984 when she died, they recorded and chronicled over fifteen hundred experiences with Seth. Roberts’ first books The Seth Material (1970) and Seth Speaks (1972) became best sellers. Seth channeled a total of twenty-three books (totaling over six million volumes sold), giving channeling a popularity it had never previously experienced.

Helen Cohn Schueman (1909-1981) and 
A Course in Miracles

In 1965 Schueman, an atheistic professor of medical psychology at Columbia University in New York, began hearing an inner voice that repeatedly stated, “This is a course in miracles. Please take notes.” The “inaudible voice,” identified himself as “Jesus.” 

For the next ten years the clairaudient dictation messages began with the words, “Please take notes.” It resulted in A Course in Miracles, a three-volume work of over 500,000 words. (Psychology Today, Sept. 1980, p. 75) In 1990 there were over 650,000 sets of A Course In Miracles in print.

The purpose of The Course is “correcting the errors of Christianity….” Its central theme is that “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” Couched in biblical terminology, The Course teaches that the world, sin and sickness are just illusions.

J.Z. Knight (1946- ) and “Ramtha”

Unquestionably, the most famous channeler of our day is J.Z. Knight, a beautiful blonde housewife and mother from Tacoma, Washington. In 1977, J.Z. Knight was visited in her kitchen by a 35,000-year-old Lamurian warrior named Ramtha.

Knight has acted as the channel for Ramtha’s communications to over 10,000 people and has appeared on national television. She has thousands of followers and has made millions of dollars performing as Ramtha at seminars (some reportedly pay $1,500 to attend), at her “Ramtha School of Enlightenment,” and from the sales of tapes, books, and accessories. (Clark and Gallo, 1993) Knight legally owns the copyright to Ramtha. 

Knight enters a trance in order to channel “Ramtha, the Enlightened One.” Throwing Knight into altered states, jerking and contorting, Ramtha delivers its messages in a man’s voice with an Elizabethan English in a guttural, husky voice.

The theme of Ramtha is that we are all gods. “What be you? You are God! Man expressing as God often forgets that which is termed his Godhood... You are a God that needs to remember,” (Voyage to the New World, Ramtha with D.J. Mahr, p. 127). 

Unwanted—Unannounced Visits

One of the side effects of channeling is that spirit guides can come into the mind and take over any time they want. “Sometimes Mithra comes to me, just right out in plain sight. I’ll be walking down the street and suddenly I’m channeling.” (Channeling, pg 35) This is also the situation with J.Z. Knight. Ramtha shows up any time he pleases, unannounced, uncalled. 

Jach Pursel and “Lazaris”

One day while relaxing after a busy program, Jach Pursel, former insurance executive of San Fancisco, went into the trance state in which he was first contacted by the entity Lazaris. Lazaris began to manifest regularly to friends and small groups and gave both personal advice and philosophical teaching. Eventually Pursel gave up his business and devoted himself full time to channeling Lazaris. Pursel grosses more than $1 million a year in seminars, counseling, and videocassettes as the channel for ‘Lazaris, the consummate friend.’

The “Occult” Jesus

Through the twentieth century, other channeled works such as Levi Dowling’s The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ (1907) and James Edward Padgett’s True Gospel Revealed by Jesus have appeared in profusion. Among the basic text books for New Age groups are The Lost Years of Jesus and The Lost Teachings of Jesus. 

“Ancient Tibetan manuscripts say that Jesus spent 17 years (age 12 to 29) in the East as both student and teacher.” (Profile: Elizabeth Clare Prophet—Teachings of the Ascended Masters, p. 7).

“Jesus…is generally thought to have learned everything from Moses…And yet The Life of Saint Issa and other jewels from the heart of Asia say just the opposite”—that he went east “with the object of perfecting himself in the Divine Word and of studying the laws of the great Buddhas.” (The Lost Years of Jesus, p. 397).

The Life of Saint Issa

In 1887 Nicolas Notovitch, a Russian war correspondent, went on a journey through India. While in route to Leh, he heard a Tibetan lama (monk) in a monastery refer to a grand lama named Issa (the Tibetan form of “Jesus”). Notovitch inquired further and discovered that a chronicle of the life of Issa existed with other sacred scrolls at the Convent of Himis.

The holy man Issa allegedly preached the same doctrines in Israel as he earlier did in India. The original scroll, the lama said, was written in the Pali language and later translated into Tibetan. 

Notovitch eventually persuaded the lama to read the scroll to him and had it translated by an interpreter. From the scroll, Notovitch learned that “Jesus had wandered to India and to Tibet as a young man before he began his work in Palestine.”[3] 

The scroll explains how young Issa studied among the Brahmins at Indian holy cities. The priests of Brahma “taught him to read and understand the Vedas, to cure by aid of prayer, to teach, to explain the holy scriptures to the people, and to drive out evil spirits from the bodies of men, restoring unto them their sanity.”[5] Issa briefly visited Persia where he preached to the Zoroastrians. At 29 he returned to Israel to preach what he had learned.

The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ

Another major source for the New Age Jesus is The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ, written by Civil War army chaplain Levi Dowling (1844-1911). The title page of this “gospel” bears the words: “Transcribed from the Book of God’s Remembrances, known as the Akashic Records.” Unlike Notovitch whose conclusions were based on an alleged objective ancient document, Levi’s book is based on an occult form of illumination.

The bulk of Levi’s gospel, first published in 1911, focuses on the education and travels of Jesus. Jesus traveled to India where he spent years studying among Brahmins and Buddhists. Jesus then visited the city of Benares where “Jesus sought to learn the Hindu art of healing, and became the pupil of Udraka, greatest of the Hindu healers.”[24]

The Readings of Edgar Cayce

Like Levi, Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), founder of The Association for Research and Enlightenment (ARE) in 1931, claimed the ability to read the Akashic Record while in a trance. These trances produced over 14,000 documented stenographic records of the telepathic-clairvoyant statements over a period of forty-three years. It was from the Akashic Record that Cayce set forth an elaborate explanation of the early years of Jesus.

Cayce tells us that Jesus had 29 previous incarnations. “These included an early sun worshipper, the author of the Book of the Dead, and Hermes, who was supposedly the architect of the Great Pyramid, Zend (the father of Zoroaster), Amilius (an Atlantean) and other figures [including Adam, Joseph, Joshua, Enoch, and Melchizedek].”[29] He did not become “the Christ” until the thirtieth incarnation. The reason Jesus had to go through so many incarnations is that he, like all other human beings, had “karmic debt” (sin) to work off.

During his alleged studies abroad, Jesus learned healing, weather control, telepathy, astrology, and other psychic arts. When his education was complete, he went back to his homeland where he performed “miracles” and taught the multitudes for three years.