Uprooting Satan's Grip - Opening to God
Psychological & Spiritual HealingBy Anneliese WidmanAuthorHouse
Copyright © 2009 Anneliese Widman
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4490-0734-8Contents
Acknowledgments...................................................................ixPreface...........................................................................xiIntroduction......................................................................xviiPart 1 - The The Story of Gabrielle, Natas, and Jesse.............................1Part 2 - The Concepts Underneath the Story........................................59Introduction......................................................................61Chapter 1 - Exposing Satan........................................................63Chapter 2 - Exposing the Parental Demonic Voices..................................85Chapter 3 - Recognizing the Satanic Voices........................................93Chapter 4 - The Construct for Processing the Parental Demonic.....................103Chapter 5 - Forgiveness: The Ultimate Transformation..............................111Part 3 - Gabrielle's and Jesse's Voices in Therapy................................115Introduction......................................................................117Section 1 Gabrielle's Voices in Therapy...........................................119Chapter 1.........................................................................121Chapter 2.........................................................................125Chapter 3.........................................................................133Chapter 4.........................................................................139Chapter 5.........................................................................145Chapter 6.........................................................................155Section 2 Jesse's Voices in Therapy...............................................159Chapter 1.........................................................................161Chapter 2.........................................................................163Chapter 3.........................................................................173Chapter 4.........................................................................179Chapter 5.........................................................................185Epilogue..........................................................................197The End...........................................................................199Afterword.........................................................................203End Notes.........................................................................205Bibliography......................................................................207
Chapter One
Exposing Satan
What is the satanic energy?
In this world, man's inhumanity to man, his irrational behavior toward man, his schizophrenic lack of feeling, and his mindless cruelty are rampant. In New York City, a young person was pushed in front of a subway train by an assailant who had no conscious motive other than what his voices told him to do. The hand of the victim, a violinist, was severed from her wrist. Or take, for example, a young mother who doused her constantly screaming baby with boiling water and then placed it into a lit gas oven to release the Devil from his soul. When the husband arrived, the baby was beyond help. Countless individuals suffer at the hands of those who torture, kill, maim, and destroy with little or no conscience. What accounts for such behavior?
Even those who are considered outstanding examples of virtue struggle with evil in themselves. St. Paul wrote:
For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do-this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. (Romans 7: l9-20)
He, too, was enslaved: A war waged between his demons and his love for the Holy Spirit. St. Paul represents the human being's struggle between the darkness and the light. All human beings wage this war. It is when we do not recognize the dark forces in our psyches that they become powerful.
Philip, the author of the Gospel of Philip, which was found at Nag Hammadi in 1945, advises the reader:
... let each of us dig down to the root of evil within us, and pull out the root from the heart. It will be plucked out if we recognize it. But if we do not recognize it, it takes root in our hearts and produces its fruits in our hearts. It masters us, and makes us its slaves. -cf Gospel of Philip, NHC 11, 3, 74.5-12
But what exactly is that root of evil? Where did it come from? And how do we pluck it out? We will remain slaves until we understand exactly what-or who-we have become enslaved by.
Theologians have written and argued endlessly throughout theological history about the story of two angels defecting from heaven at the beginning of time on Earth. The first to defect was Lucifer, who-because of God's seeming preference for his younger offspring, God's first human creation, Adam-fell from heaven through pride and envy. Lucifer's love turned into hatred, and Lucifer threatened to take up its throne against God and to divide the universe. Making good on its threat, Lucifer became the personification of sin and the lord of fornication, war, bloodshed, exile, death, panic, and destruction. It took a horde of angels with it.
The second angel to defect was Samyaza, who developed an insatiable lust for the daughters of men upon Earth and to beget children by them. Samyaza convinced two hundred angels called Watchers to join its mission. The women they coupled with gave birth to giants whose appetites could not be satiated. In time, these giants turned their needs on homo sapiens, literally consuming them as food. God's wrath resounded in the heavens, as God claimed that angels are of the spirit and cannot mingle with the dense matter of earth inhabitants. Nine-tenths of the angels were condemned to the underworld and were never again able to have access to God or his domain.
Certain scholars believe that one-tenth of these angels still exist in our world-influencing its politics, its society, its culture, and its people. Since the Watchers' credo denies the sovereignty of God, they will seek out the righteous to entrap or slay them. Bound to Earth by God's judgment as long as the world endures, the Watchers create havoc to this day, affecting the planet and all humankind. God's judgment proclaims that they shall remain as evil spirits upon Earth and they will never obtain peace. Their effects are multifarious, creating patterns of behavior in the psyche of humanity that can explain its stuckness, its inability to seek wholeness-and at the extreme end of the spectrum, what we call "human" cruelty. These sinister patterns are manifested by Lucifer and its followers; they are master puppeteers, and until we discover how to contend with them, we are their victims.
Thus they are a force that needs to be recognized, challenged, and fought by humanity, particularly when our quest is to seek the wisdom of God and to listen to God's voice at all times. Is it not ironic that not only do we have to undo the aberrations of our parents and of society in general, but we also have to be discerning about Lucifer and its "gang" and the Watchers' infiltration into our psyches? Life on this Earth is a full undertaking, to be dealt with seriously and to be valued as an important experience on the way not only to healing but to becoming a whole being.
How we fall prey to Satan
Satan exists. Its passion is to destroy, to obliterate, and to possess any vestige of reason, sanity, and desire for our I and our I Am identities. We, the recipients of such malice, develop and nurture the ingredients for its infestation because of our indulgences. Why? Because we have fallen from Grace.
We, like Lucifer, have felt irrationally rejected by God because we are not his only love. On numerous occasions, I regressed my patients to the beginnings of their creation. All of these sessions revealed a common denominator: Each patient reported leaving God's heaven, reluctantly blaming God for casting them out. And forever after, like Lucifer, they blamed the Deity for ostracizing them. This separation resulted in human sin, making the chasm between God and his children almost irreparable.
As one patient said in her hypnotic trance:
I followed him, like a child. I was always under him, around him, on top, inside, outside. Sometimes God tripped and fell over me. I whined: "I want to be like you." He said: "You are you. Be you. I am who I am. You are who you are. Be it." And then he said most gently: "Get out from under my feet, or I will blow you out of heaven." I heard, but did not listen. The war began. Not his-mine. And mine alone. "You don't want me? I'll fight you all the way. You are no longer my God!"
Whether or not the above experience is the product of my patient's rich imagination, it is a believable metaphor that can spark us to understand the age-old concept: As above, so below. When we descend from heaven and are filled with rage at God, our souls become easy fodder for the evil forces. Isn't God Satan's worst enemy? In our efforts to justify our rage and our separation from the Divinity, we can become undefined, hateful creatures steeped in Earth's ways-disconnected from ourselves and from his teachings of wisdom, love, humility, and honesty. Our heavenly, protective shield is dissociated. We intuitively feel alone, and this aloneness is an elixir for the forces of evil. Their evil proliferates as our susceptibilities to their evil germinate.
In my second book, Rage at God: Ascending to Reunion, I explain that just like Lucifer, many people have feelings of rage toward God and therefore are incapable of connecting to the Deity in a true way. Further, they cannot have a direct experience of God that is not in some way distorted by the relationship with their own parents. The rage at the mother or the father, as an authority, becomes rage toward God. For example, when I asked a patient in my practice-who mouthed the word "God" as though she were chewing tobacco-about her real feelings toward the Divinity, she was at a loss to understand her ambivalence. I directed her to visualize God on the right side of her body and her father on the left side. With no hesitation, she screamed at Jesus, "You alcoholic zombie-get off those two sticks, come down, and take care of me!" She was speaking to her perpetually drunk earthly father, unconsciously equating him with the Divinity. This type of parental transference onto God, I have discovered, is commonplace.
Without this realization, she might have continued her disconnection to God, remaining cut off from her Source. It might have been only a short period of disconnection or it could have taken centuries before a meaningful illumination became possible. Like Lucifer, all of us might be consumed by venomous rage toward Father/Mother God for eons of time.
Separation from God and deviation from God's covenant lead to darkness. Our journey in life then becomes a walk in an unlit labyrinth. But-we always have choices.
Free will
Free will has been ordained by God and is a necessary ingredient for human development. Renowned psychoanalyst, Dr. Eric Fromm, claims that we are not created evil or forced to be evil, but we become evil slowly over time through a long series of choices. Through free choice, the being defines himself or herself. The soul stands by, desirous to be heard, but when the self is separated not only from its soul but from God, it is mastered by its own will, not the Will of God. The being has lost the realization that the soul and God monitor its life. The self is thus often thrust back for centuries to remain in its maze.
Free will can thus lend itself to satanic infiltration. If the soul defects from her heavenly home with rage at God or other disgruntlements, she will become bound to a Not I credo, which will estrange her from God's heaven and make her prey to Satan and its cohorts. An example of such rage at God was given above. As has been said without equivocation by M. Scott Peck, M.D., a world-renowned psychiatrist:
There are only two states of being: submission to God and goodness or the refusal to submit to anything beyond one's own will-which refusal automatically enslaves one to the forces of evil.
I am in agreement with Dr. Peck, and I vouch for the fact that willfulness leads to misdeeds. These misdeeds create partners in crime-one misdeed paving the way to the next-not unlike the alcoholic in a saloon who is invited by other alcoholics to "have another drink for the road." The trap is set. The susceptible one falls into the trap. Satan, the hunter, bamboozles its new acquisitions. It wants the destruction of human beings, and human beings listening to the forces of evil will soon succumb.
The circle begins its repetitive motion. "What was done to me, I'll do to you," says the parent to the offspring. "I never had it any better, so, why should you?" Or, "Isn't the Jesus of the Bible known to have drunk a lot of wine while he was on Earth? Do you want to be a follower? Then go all the way!" The evil ones are masters of deceit.
Patterns
Free will enables us to lie to ourselves if we choose to. When we make that choice, patterns ripe with satanic influence begin to form instantly. When these are not seriously addressed, we end up tucking them away, consciously or unconsciously, in a subterranean vault in our psyche. We secretly hope that the patterns will never be seen or heard from again. We have then fallen into a state of laziness and indulgence, shifting out of reality-and onto the dangerous road to satanic infiltration.
A dramatic example of such a state is that of fifty-year-old Bill, one of my patients, who consistently used his extensive knowledge of psychology to manipulate those around him. Another patient, a woman who was befuddled by Bill's explanation about why he had lost yet another job, said of him, "He's a real conundrum." We become conundrums when the dark forces take over.
Bill's explanation, spoken with confidence and clarity, lulled the listener into believing his fantasies, illusions, and psychological logic. But one day during a group session, the real reason for his job loss was exposed: As a child, he had made an ironclad decision not to be self-sufficient. To punish his parents for their abusive behavior toward him, he had decided that he would always be taken care of. When this early resolve was exposed, he sat before us naked, a fish caught in a net. He then tried his most effective ploy, a very serious one for me as well as for his listeners-the threat of suicide. His bluff was called. No one flinched. He eventually backed off, mouthing, "I got the attention I wanted, didn't I?"
This pattern had worked for him all of his life with his family; they had become his pawns. Little did Bill or his family realize that all of them-including Bill-had become the slaves of an eminently more skillful and dangerous enemy: Satan.
Bill's inner rationalized thinking can sound something like this:
No one will know, no one will see. Do I have to look at everything? I'm sure they're my secrets only. I'll get others' help with them. They'll be glad to give me the support I need. It'll make them feel good. It'll take the pressure off the truth. Too tired. Too busy. Besides, God's too busy to pay attention to insignificant me.
Such droning thoughts are satanic. If only we were aware ... but we choose to ignore the pattern and we choose to not hear clearly. Consequently, the patterns and the voices accumulate and re-form their energies until a person becomes dulled to their existence, yet is guided and lives by them.
Another patient, Janice, who was severely infiltrated by the dark forces, had identified and worked to extricate herself from a number of destructive behavior patterns. One day during a therapy session, she looked at me wistfully. At the same time, there was a self-satisfied, smug smile on her lips. She announced, "I've just untangled my last pattern. I hope that my earthly mission will now be complete. I've been working so hard. I fantasized returning to the heavens, standing before God, and saying, 'This time I've finished, my Creator. Haven't I done well? Do with me what you will. I know I'll get the rewards I deserve.'"
I listened to Janice, astounded at the requests she-the cured one-was making of the Deity. I didn't intervene.
She continued, "My soul longed to hear from this Source, 'Welcome, my child. Well done.' I imagined myself bowing in humility, without a trace of narcissism, without the need to be considered special, without any vestige of possessiveness-without, without, without ... Hadn't I worked on the withouts until I saw their kite tails wafting away into the ether, out of my psyche, out of my aura? To be free of them-no further scrutiny, no further effort, no more pain?"
She hesitated, expecting bravos for her poetic expression as well as her insights. When none was forthcoming and I simply continued to listen, Janice added, "Well, no sooner had I expressed these desires when I heard another voice roar at me, 'Of course. You're right. You should get rewards. Look at how hard you've been trying. See, nothing good happens without my intervention.' This voice justifies my asking for accolades and was most welcome to my now-victimized state because I was tired of trying and I wanted gratification for my efforts like-right now. What's wrong with that?"
"Janice, can you understand that this was a satanic voice? Responses like these come when lies and deceit are in operation," I explained, "when your motivation for doing things is askew and when you want special attention from God for your efforts. God rewards in his time and in his ways. If you project your un-giving parents onto him, you will remain in the patterns of behavior you've been trying to extricate yourself from since you were born."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Uprooting Satan's Grip - Opening to Godby Anneliese Widman Copyright © 2009 by Anneliese Widman. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
