Hostage To The Devil

by Неизвестный

  Hearty remained still for some silent seconds, receiving the first weak but unmistakable indication that Carl would mend. He said Mass in Carl's room every two or three days after that. Speech and movement came back slowly to Carl. It was some weeks before he could receive Holy Communion. And it was still longer before he would venture out into the sunlight.

  Today Carl is well, but so changed in appearance and so frail that no one who had seen him on that sunny road to Aquileia would easily recognize him now as the same man.

  “I want to tell you the truth as I now see it,” Carl wrote later to his[2]

  “I was wrong in my personal instructions to each one of you about your lives.

  “All through my childhood and youth, I had an affinity with God. Especially after my first vision.

  “I'm certain God was there. Somewhere. But then came Princeton. Stanford. Tubingen. Cambridge. London. After that, my guruship and the efflorescence of the gifts I had. I became confused. Somehow I lost God. At the same time, I wanted to help. Really to help. To be of service. All around me, I could see floating neon images of pain, of putrefaction, of illness, of corruption and decay. I saw strange people who did not give a damn. Give a damn, please, I said. They took God's name in vain. As I did. They were bright and cold and hard as storage ice. They liked gratuitous evil and upholstered innocence.

  “I signed a moral contract to change all that. I was young, eager-beaver. I was determined to succeed. All up-tight, you might say. I was going to be a good psychologist, an honest and conscientious and understanding servant of mankind. Servant. Not slave. And then I was going to be a good parapsychologist. And then a thoroughgoing guru.

  “I groped, even prayed, searched, never took no for an answer. And I found that lyrical liar, the Devil.

  “I knew with whom I had to deal, of course. But, first of all, the Devil was not the Devil preached by the Churches. There was no room in my universe for a principle of Evil. Not at that time of my life. And, I thought, the bond and contract would be, could be temporary. Of course, it could not be. But when pride gets hold of your mind and heart, you cannot see clearly.

  “Solemnly and of my own free will, I wish to acknowledge that knowingly and freely I entered into possession by an evil spirit. And, although that spirit came to me under the guise of saving me, perfecting me, helping me to help others, I knew all along it was evil.

  “After my conversations with Father F. [Hearty], I put everything into perspective intellectually. And I must ascribe my liberation, or, to speak correctly, my desire to want to be free (because I was not allowed any simple desire to be free) I must ascribe all this to what Father F. calls the grace of God and the salvation of Jesus.

  “I never enjoyed astral body-travel, only the illusion of it. I never achieved the privilege of a double—if that be a privilege. Bilocation never succeeded, never was a fact for me. Of myself, I could not see things happening hundreds of miles away, read the future, see the past, peer with minute detail into people's minds. I could give the illusion of these only by being prompted by someone who could see from a great distance, could read the future, had a detailed knowledge of the past, could peer into people's minds. Any idea of reincarnation I championed was an attempt to trick. I was not a shaman. Just a sham.

  “I never willed to be rid of possession until the day that Father F. explained my basic error about consciousness and spirit.

  “My central error, which was both intellectual and moral in character, concerned the nature of ordinary human consciousness. Like many before me and many others nowadays, I found that with rigid and expert training I could attain a fascinating state of consciousness: a complete absence of any particular object (in my awareness). I found I could attain a permanency on this plane of consciousness. It finally became a constant environment within me, during my waking hours, no matter what I was doing. It seemed to be pure and therefore sinless, undifferentiated and therefore universal, simple and therefore without parts—and therefore incorruptible and unchangeable, and therefore eternal.

  “My error started when I took this psycho-biological condition—of life as the life of spirit. Consciousness basically means awareness, being alert. And such awareness can be measured by certain physiological data. It can be phenomenally described, because it is a phenomenon.

  “If it were not for one further mistake, that initial error would, I believe, have been corrected as time went on-simply because finally the scientific imperative would have taken over and forced us to look at the facts in the face.

  “With the passage of time, I began to experience a further state of consciousness. It is difficult to put it into words. Before that, I was in a sort of state of suspension about my aware state. I was aware that I was in awareness. One day, I realized through a faculty which I have not been able to identify, that there was some other activity taking place which was so refined and subtle that, while I was dimly aware of it, I knew absolutely nothing about it—what it was, where it was, what it accomplished, whether it began and ended, or whether it had always existed, did then exist continuously, and would go on existing—whether I was aware of it or not.

  “It lay beyond all my developed capacity to reach. It was utterly transcendent. Indeed, this was its mark; and this is how I realized its differentiation from my other levels of consciousness. They, no matter how subtle, were subject finally to my senses-at least to representation in images drawn from my sense-life. This further state of consciousness was not so subject.

  “But this was sufficient indication for me, I thought. I took this as the absolutely spiritual state of my being. I took it for granted that religiously speaking I was out beyond that Dark Night of the Soul described by John of the Cross and well into something the Eastern mystics had called by various names like satori and samadhi. The fact that, at least in afterthought and reflection, I could measure and quantify this state of consciousness never struck a warning note. And that was crass enough on my part. What confirmed me in my error was that I refused to take into account the fact that this state was in complete disjunction from all historical religion—and without any chance of linking up with historical religion. It was, in other words, pure subjectivism. And from then on, the door was open to any influence and any distortion. What crawled through that door was Evil Spirit. Tortoise.

  “I did arrive at part of the truth about spirit—the nether part, the negative part. But in the flux of spirit life, that was the only part it uncovered. And it necessarily attacked the human in me. For it is not that I am part animal, part human. I am not a human animal. I am a human spirit. We are of the spirit in its fluid, non-static, non-quantifiable existence. And, in matters of spirit, nether and upper, bad and good, these are terms that refer to its approximation to or distance from the source and sum of all spirit.

  “I have been the subject of the cleverest of illusions: that spirit was a static quantum of more or less determinable dimensions; that Christian authorities had obscured the truth about the spirit; and that only by parapsychology and preternatural gifts could one arrive at the truth.

  “The truth is that all along, despite my triumphal career until Aquileia, since the advent of possession I had a sorrow I could not shake. Such a deep sodden sadness. I looked for joy everywhere and lived beneath a winter moon that made a carcass of all my days.

  “My advice for all who engage in the study and pursuit of the parapsychological is simple but vitally important: do not confound effects with causes, or systems with what maintains the systems. Do not take it that a photograph of Kirlian dots or auras is a photograph of spirit. Do not accept the feats of seance mediums as results of spirit from God. But do not, on the other hand, tamper with or treat of parapsychological phenomena as if you could do this without ultimately impinging upon spirit. You cannot. And that fact will, depending upon what you do, be to your detriment or to your betterment—in spirit.”

  Good, Evil, and the Modern Mind

  The surest effect of possession in
an individual—the most obvious and striking effect common to all possessed persons, whether observed in or apart from Exorcism—is the great loss in human quality, in humanness.

  Curiously enough, the difficulty in talking nowadays about possession and in describing its progress and effects in those attacked does not come from the weird, bizarre, or “unimaginable” happenings that may accompany possession.

  The difficulty comes, instead, from the insistence of latter-day opinion makers that the religious view of good and evil is outdated; that the personality of each man, woman, and child exists only as a cross section of single traits and attributes best revealed in scores we achieve in psychological tests; that the truest and purest models for our behavior come from “lower animals” and from “natural man”—a mythical invention that has never existed and that we cannot imagine.

  The difficulty is increased by additional factors. There is an ongoing insistence that religion and any form of worship and all ideals based openly on.Christian morality should be banished from public, tax-supported institutions—and that this is “objective” and “democratic.” In our mass entertainment-motion pictures, television, novels, theater—there are no hero figures and no concept of right and wrong, of good and evil. We are shown human life as alternating between a bleak despair and a desperate struggle with banal forces against which our only allies are ourselves and our own resources.

  But the Christian viewpoint is still the viewpoint of the majority. It still guarantees that we are, each of us, whole persons, not bundles of separate reactions to be studied in cross sections and pushed to the outer limits of our endurance in a topsy-turvy world.

  The core of the Christian view of individual men and women is that our humanness—our essence and value as separate and whole people—is treasured and protected by the spirit of Jesus. It is, in fact, to reestablish that humanness and its integrity that an exorcist presents himself freely in the name and with the power of Jesus. He makes himself a hostage—as Jesus presented himself as hostage for each one of us—in a battle for one person's humanness. He will win that battle only by the strength of his faith in Jesus and with the fiber of his individual will attached to Jesus' salvation.

  In common sense and in the popular mind, a distinction is always made between human being and humanness. We find a universal agreement about the general appearance and the functional capacity that indicate human being. A certain physical form derived from another human being with the same general form. Certain normal functions: eating, sleeping, walking, talking, laughing, thinking, willing, dying. Certain capacities: learning, growing, inventing, planning, sympathizing, and so on. One or more of these may be lacking or in a reduced state. But a certain number of them enable us to describe their possessor as human.

  As is clear from some of the cases reported in this book and from many others known, possessed people can and do, at least for a time, function reasonably efficiently as human beings, in their jobs and in society in general. Actually, the more perfect the possession, the less likely any disturbance in one's functioning on the level of human being. Jay Beedem, whom Father Mark seemed to uncover as one perfectly possessed, was a model of cool efficiency.

  But between that condition of human being and what, for want of a more accurate name, we call humanness, we always make a distinction.

  In humanness we include qualities that adhere to the inner self and are interconnected with an appreciable outer way of living and doing. These qualities, taken together, confer a commonly recognized aura, a decor, a configuration of winsomeness and worth on the whole person.' The quality of humanness reaches a striking degree of fullness in some of us; when it does, it seems to give a shimmering tonal halo to our communication with those around us, and others feel in such a person a temperament that eagerly responds to fragile but intimately precious values.

  Humanness is a grace, not necessarily graceful but never ugly; not necessarily holy—in the religionists' sense of that word—but never obscene; not necessarily sophisticated by “higher culture,” but always with its own refinement; not necessarily dominant or predominant or dominating, but in itself indomitable. It makes its possessor a connected human being, lovable to some, alive to all others, yet with a personal regnancy; he loves himself but no genuinely vile egotism blinds him to others; he loves others, but no hatred of self makes him a pawn or a plaything for them.

  We always see humanness as a variable quality. Sometimes we think not all have it. Some seem to have little of it. All who possess it, have varying degrees of it, are never constant in it, and from time to time fail in it completely. And, in ourselves, even when we have done “as well as we can” and console ourselves by saying that “under the circumstances we could not have done better,” we are sensible of how much better, how much more perfectible we are, how more perfectly we could have acted.

  For Christianity, the source of humanness in all individuals, past, present, and future, is Jesus of Nazareth. All forms of possession, from the partial to the perfect, are clearly seen as an attack simultaneously on the souce of humanness, Jesus, and on the humanness of an individual man or woman. The process of possession in any individual consists of an erosion of the humanness Jesus confers.

  To explain how possession develops, therefore, one must answer several questions. What is Evil Spirit in relation to Jesus and in relation to us all? What is the humanness of Jesus? How is Jesus the source of humanness for all individuals? How do we explain this in relation to all men and women who lived historically before him and after him? Concretely, how do ordinary men and women attain or miss the humanness of Jesus? And finally, how is this humanness of Jesus eroded-what, in other words, is the process of diabolic possession?

  Some of the greatest minds in our history have asked and pondered these questions. Some of those minds have gone a good deal of the way toward answering them—as far, it is fair to say, as minds in science have gone in answering questions proper to their domain.

  Even though our coverage of these questions concerning Jesus and Lucifer must be brief due to limitations of space, we are not merely indulging in a comforting cliche when we make one observation: the best that latter-day prophets and modern doom sayers seem able to do with these matters is to ignore them and tell us to do the same. They cannot prove them false, but only increase their efforts to persuade us so. And for all their mighty efforts, they cannot repair the damage they do in this way to our humanness.

  Human Spirit and Lucifer

  In the history of Exorcism there is constant reference to evil spirits: to Satan (or Lucifer) as the head or chief of those spirits, and to an entire world of being inhabited by such spirits.

  In the preceding five exorcisms, that world inhabited by evil spirits is most often described as “the Kingdom.” Christianity would be unintelligible if we were to omit or deny belief in that world of evil spirits. In the New Testament and in Christian tradition salvation by Jesus is presented as a victory over an opposing and baleful intelligence belonging to a bodiless being. It is never simply and primitively the subduing of blind material forces. Nor is it merely the setting up of ethical examples and moral rules. And the “Kingdom of God” is always juxtaposed to the “Kingdom of Evil” or of Satan.

  We cannot speak in any ordinary sense of the “history” of these spirits. For their existence did not begin with and is not confined to the space-time continuum in which history's events must take place. Yet it is clear from tradition that the entire existence and fate of these spirits lies in a very intimate and intricate relationship to the human universe we inhabit.

  Tradition speaks of a primordial sin of rebellion against God by some of the spirits, and led by one particular spirit symbolically named Lucifer (“the Son of the Dawn,” to indicate supreme qualities) or Satan (to indicate a function as chief adversary of God). From the sparse items of information in the Bible, from stray remarks made by Jesus himself during his lifetime, and from continuous traditional Christianity, the gener
al “history” of these spirits and their relationship to Jesus and to our world would seem to be the following.

  God's decision to create intelligent beings—spirits and humans, free to love him and free to reject him—was intimately linked with his decision to become a human being.

  But in speaking of that decision of God, we have to make a distinction between the way we Understand and talk about it and how God made and implements it.

  Our understanding of and speech about this decision is a step-by-step process. First, creation of spirits. Then, their rebellion. Then, the creation of mankind. Then, mankind's revolt. Then, the conception and birth of Jesus. Then, the sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus and the consequent salvation of mankind. Then, the life of men and women beset by those spirits who revolted. We have to think in this way. But that is our limitation.

  For God there was and is no step-by-step process. He did not, as it were, first decide to create the spirits, then, as an afterthought, to create humans, and then, on further reflection, to become a man. Creation did not proceed like Topsy. It was one decision englobing spirits, humans, and God-made-man. And it was a decision not made at any given point in time but in eternity. God was never without decision.

  This means that his decision was integral in cause and effect from the start. His view of what everybody would do at any given moment was identical with his view of what everybody did, does, and will do until the end of all time and space. That view was complete always. And every detail of the decision was taken integrally and wholly from eternity in view of every possible human action and reaction and result.

  The centerpiece of that decision was God's own choice to become a man. Just as his own divinity was, to speak in a human fashion, turned in this one definite direction, so all the “pieces” of God's decision—spirits included—were created and ordained in this direction. God was to enter into an intimate relationship with matter-place, time, objects, humans.