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== Prophecies ==
There exists a category of prophecies that are designed by the spirit world and then passed on to mediums in the physical world. These prophecies are actually plans of the spirit world and angels and human spirits will make effort to let the prophecy come true. To undo the prophecy in case it is unfavorable, a victory must be made over the spirits.

== Sensitivity for the world around us ==
We have immediate sensitivity for the world around us. Our spiritual senses, our immediate awareness of what is outside the self, extends as far as our love, or our feeling responsible goes. Depending on what it relates to, this sense can be called the 'extended mind,' or its effect 'telepathy' or 'precognition'.

.... A person who loves his or her family has this kind of awareness for what goes on with the family, even when there is no physical contact.
A person who loves the nation will feel what goes on with the nation, what is the condition of the nation.
A person who loves the world will have such sensitivity on a global level.
This awareness can also be extended to the entire cosmos, including the spiritual world.
== Sleep paralysis ==
Sleep paralysis: You become wide awake but can't move a limb.

I know of a few possibilities here.
 
One is that a spirit tries to control your body. If the spirit is successful, it leads to full possession. If not, you yourself gain back control. When your spirit is pushed out, it becomes an OBE (out-of-body) experience.<ref>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-of-body_experience Out-of-body experience - Wikipedia]</ref>  When the ones in spirit world doing this are benevolent to you, your spirit can come back in the body. If not, another spirit may take your body. Sometimes that spirit lives there together with your own spirit, sometimes your own spirit is pushed out. The latter is often the case when the spirits are malevolent.
 
Sometimes more heavenly spirits or angels also do such things. Another spirit temporarily dwells with your own spirit in the body in order to teach you something.
 
Another possibility is that from the spirit world changes are made to the energy systems of your body. Also in that case, the spirit is temporarily hypnotized and cannot control your body. Often this happens in sleep or in an unconscious state. Also this can be done either by good or by bad spirits.
 
When spirits push themselves into your body in an aggressive way, people often fall unconscious for a while. When it happens in sleep, you may not notice it. When you wake up, you may feel paralyzed.
 
The best to do in each of these cases is to pray. Your connecting to God makes your spirit stronger and you can sense if you should cooperate or resist the experience.

== Space and spiritual atmosphere ==
Space is a remarkable thing. You start out with just space and then you make smaller spaces by dedicating them to certain functions and tasks. That's how an atmosphere is created and a sphere in spirit world. There will be some kind of border to delimit and fence off the space. When we build with awareness of spirit world, we make spiritual spaces.

The fall of man can be understood in that the human space was invaded by angels. Original religious spaces can be invaded by what's not God-centered, for example desire to get wealthy and powerful. When we build a space devoted to a higher goal, we need to protect that space. There are many methods for this and i prefer the friendly way, but at any rate, we must be strict in keeping those borders or the entire mechanism of good organization falls apart.

== Spiritual attacks ==
=== The nature of spiritual attacks ===
When you enter a greenhouse, it's warm there. You could think that it's hot because the greenhouse is hot. But actually, the heat comes from the sun. The source is outside.

It's like that with spiritual attacks or influences. We feel them inside of us, but the source is outside. Of course, much also depends on how well we are protected. If the glass of the greenhouse is broken, cold wind comes inside. Our own condition and that of our environment has impact on how we undergo spiritual attacks.

Spiritual attacks can be of many kinds. Spirits are people or angels, and also physical people are spirits and can therefore also spiritually influence or attack you. People speak, act, think and feel, love or hate. All this can be felt as spiritual influences.

You feel a spiritual attack in yourself, in your heart, mind and body. In your heart, spiritual attacks can make you resentful. In your mind, spiritual attacks affect the emotions and thoughts. Our body can be spiritually attacked and it can result in illness or pain.

The medium of spiritual attacks is always energy. Energy can be sent or felt directly, but it also can express in various forms such as thoughts and emotions or actions by people.

Often spiritual attacks are not only immediately directed at yourself. Instead they come to you through other people. People around you can come under spiritual influences and their behavior and words and feelings towards you change. They can suddenly become negative, without having an obvious reason. When the attack has passed, their mood also changes.

A spiritual attack can often be recognized when it's over. Suddenly your despair changes again into brightness. Your feeling paralyzed and tired ends and you have energy and inspiration again to do things. These are clear signs that you were spiritually influenced.

=== Spiritual attacks that come in prayer ===
Many people have difficulty recognizing spiritual attacks because they see the source of all their feelings and thoughts inside of themselves. Of course, we do have our own thoughts and feelings, but nobody lives in an isolated cave of his body.
It's like with the weather. When it is cold outside, you feel your body getting hot. When it's hot, your body gets hot. The sensations are inside of ourselves, but the cause is outside.
Now when you do tough exercises in the cold, you may feel warm again. And when you have a cold fever, you may feel cold in the hottest environment.

So our sensations are a result of our own internal condition and of what comes to us from the outside.
When we have a normal and sincere prayer, there's no indication that the cause of the bad thoughts and feeling is from your inside. Therefore, they must have come from outside, due to spiritual attacks.
The first thing to do if somehow you made conditions that allowed evil spirits to come closer to you. For this you need to pray more and check yourself and analyze what you did. Often this has to be done more often in similar situations until you find a connection. What you did doesn't necessarily mean a sinful thing, it could also be simply ignorance or lack of experience in dealing with these matters.
You can also study the feelings from the viewpoint of observer. When spiritual influences cause bad thoughts and feelings, the content of your thoughts and feelings reveal something about the identity of the attackers.

Sometimes also what we think are bad thoughts are in reality good thoughts. God may have another or deeper viewpoint on people and situations than we have. So sometimes 'bad thoughts' aren't at all coming from spiritual attacks, but they come because we get closer to God and God makes us feel things that may be inconceivable or even outrageous to our own limited mind.
Some 'spiritual attacks' are real spiritual attacks, but sometimes our heart and mind are opened to a truth that we didn't yet perceive as being true. It could even be a combination. When we are enlightened to a new truth, we also are very vulnerable at that stage and evil spirit world often attacks at such moments. Time will tell and is on our hands as long as we continue to do what we need to do, always connecting everything with God and not giving up the tasks we received from God.

Spiritual attacks can come also when you made no mistake at all. It's the freedom of (evil) spirits to attack whenever they wish to do it. It's often difficult to see the logic behind it. They have their own logic which is not always traceable for us. They can attack in so many ways. They can even attack by helping us, but their goal is to invade our environment and to gradually get control over that. So they may present themselves as friends only to later make trouble. That trouble could come only after several years.

At any rate, when we do a task given us by God, it always means pushing the front line farther out. It always means to have to spiritually fight again and again until victory is made, and then new struggles follow. Everything in the cosmos is claimed by some individual or group. This is a spiritual reality.
We can only engage well in such fights if we have solved problems inside of us. These problems come out in the battles. For example, if a warrior in a physical war has a lacking skill in defending himself, it will very quickly become apparent during a fight. So, when he survives, he needs to go back in training and pay extra attention to that weakness. It's similar in spiritual life, but here the skills are internal ones.

== Training the spiritual senses ==
In order to train our physical senses, we need to pay attention to what we hear or see. A painter learns to differentiate colors. A musician trains the ears and learns to hear the finest distinctions in tones and harmonies. Likewise we can train our spiritual senses. It's done by observing the changes in your own moods and feelings as these are influenced by the spiritual surroundings. It's done by paying attention to how your eyes may feel pain when seeing something evil. It's done by distinguishing the energy that people carry in their voice and that can have a spiritual effect on others. It's done by realizing that pleasant or unpleasant odors carry a spiritual element. In short: we must make effort to distinguish between what our spiritual surroundings affect in us and what comes from within ourselves. The spirit world is always around us.

I did not mention a word about communication with the spirit world. Before someone can reliably have communication with the spirit world, the spiritual senses must be developed in order to distinguish between what's genuine and what could be fraud. This training of the spiritual senses must always be exercised in combination with prayer.
For example, if evil spirits would try to make contact, doing as if they were good spirits, our spiritual senses can learn to detect the bad feelings that evil spirits give. However, this will never be a simple matter. Evil spirits know many tricks.
Communication with the spirit world is not necessarily something we should aim for. But development of the spiritual senses, when done in a good way, also means to develop our spirit.
To develop your spiritual senses is also not the same as to open your spiritual senses. It means to learn to use the spiritual senses in a good way. We already have spiritual senses and we need to learn to have control over them.

Intuition can be seen as the most important spiritual sense. Intuition is an extension of the heart, and the development of other spiritual senses and all our spiritual experiences should always be guided by our intuition, that is when we center our heart on God and not on misled love. Intuition has little or nothing to do with emotions. It is an inner spiritual sense that guides us, provided that the direction of our life is right.

=== Sensing spirits ===
The presence of entities in spirit world can often be sensed more than seen or heard. Different groups give off different feelings. Their love can be sensed sometimes, true or egoistic love, hatred, extreme arrogance etc, etc. We can learn to distinguish between these sensations and in that way have a first impression of what spirits are visiting us.

=== Sensing energy ===
It isn't physical and it isn't spiritual. Yet it is the basis of the physical and the spiritual. It's energy.
We have senses to observe the physical world, we have senses to experience the spiritual world. We also have senses to detect energies of various kinds.

==== A question about the relationship between being spiritually open and spiritual attacks ====
To be hurt by spiritual attacks and to be sensitive are two different things. People can be hurt by spiritual attacks and don't notice anything. Other people can be sensitive and use their sensitivity to protect themselves against spiritual attacks.

We can learn to close ourselves for what comes to us spiritually without disregarding possible dangers. Compare this for example to sitting in a noisy place. We can choose to hear all the noises, but we can also choose to close ourselves off while reading a book. At the same time, we could still be open to notice a sound that could mean danger, for example the sound of an approaching car.

This is similar with the spiritual senses. We can learn to control them to pretty much sense as much or as little as we find necessary in a situation.

Of course, some people lost balance in this. Their spiritual senses became over-sensitive and in that case, the spiritual influences hurt them. Also this has a comparison in the physical world. Some people get over-stressed when hearing sounds around them, for example from neighbors playing loud music, while other people aren't much bothered by it. There's no difference in the ability of hearing, there's a difference in how to deal with what is heard.

There is not necessarily a benefit in having the spiritual senses always open. It's much better to learn to control the spiritual senses, to use or to close them when necessary.

Some people become over-sensitive to the spiritual reality because they think that having spiritual experiences is something great. Other people become over-sensitive after they made mistakes in their spiritual lives, for example after they engaged in 'interesting' but dangerous spiritual seances or after they became a member of a spiritual group that isn't focused on God. Curiosity for the spiritual can be an unhealthy trait. Also, such sensitivity can be inherited. Things will improve when that curiosity is kept under control. The spiritual itself is not necessarily something good. The spirit world doesn't only harbor good spirits but also evil ones.

Spiritual life and religious life are related yet different matters. Sound spiritual life can only blossom on the basis of good religious life.

== See also ==
* [[Spiritual exercises]]

== References == 	
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== External links ==
* [http://www.soul-cleansing.org/shakuntala-modi.html Possession: Demon and Earthbound Spirits Silently Inhabit Most Souls] Dr. Modi discovered that during hypnotic therapy many patients claimed to have 'entities" attached to them, living in their energy fields and affecting their behavior. I find it remarkable that the patients under hypnosis seem to 'know' about these entities and how they work, for example patients reported that their souls were fragmented due to some trauma. There's quite some technical details there. How could all these patients subconsciously have similar knowledge? Is it because Dr. Modi attributes his own ideas to the patients' testimonies, or is it because a knowledgeable spirit or angel speaks through his patients when they are under hypnosis? JE

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