3. The beings contacted in this realm are always (or almost always) demons, whether they are invoked by mediumism or other occult practices, or encountered in “out-of-body” experiences. They are not angels, for these dwell in heaven and only pass through this realm as messengers of God. They are not the souls of the dead, for they dwell in heaven or hell and only pass through this realm immediately after death on their way to judgment for their actions in this life. Even those most adept in “out-of-body” experiences cannot remain in this realm for long without danger of permanent separation from the body (death), and even in occult literature such adepts are rarely described as meeting each other.
4. Experiences in this realm are not to be trusted, and certainly are not to be taken at their “face-value.” Even those with a firm grounding in Orthodox Christian teaching can be easily deceived by the fallen spirits of the air with regard to any “vision” they may see; but those who enter this realm with no knowledge of it and accept its “revelations” with trust are nothing more than pitiful victims of the fallen spirits.
It may be asked: What of the feelings of “peace” and “pleasantness” which seem to be almost universal in the “out-of-body” state. What of the vision of “light” which so many see? Are these only deceptions also?
In a sense, it may be, these experiences are “natural” to the soul when separated from the body. Our physical bodies in this fallen world are bodies of pain, corruption, and death. When separated from this body, the soul is immediately in a state more “natural” to it, closer to the state God intends for it; for the resurrected “spiritual body” in which man will dwell in the Kingdom of Heaven has more in common with the soul than with the body we know on earth. Even the body with which Adam was created in the beginning had a nature different from the body after Adam’s fall, being more refined and not subject to pain or travail.
In this sense, the “peace” and “pleasantness” of the out-of-body experience may be considered real and not a deception. Deception enters in, however, the instant one begins to interpret these “natural” feelings as something “spiritual” — as though this peace were the true peace of reconciliation with God, and the “pleasantness” were the true spiritual pleasure of heaven. This is, in fact, how may people interpret their “out-of-body” and “after-death” experiences, because of their lack of true spiritual experience and awareness. That this is a mistake may be seen from the fact that even the crudest unbelievers have the same experience of pleasantness when they “die.” We have already seen this in an earlier chapter in the case of Hindus, an atheist, and a suicide. Another striking example is that of the agnostic British novelist, Somerset Maugham, who, when he had a brief “death” experience just before his actual death at the age of 80, experienced first an ever-increasing light and “then the most exquisite sense of release,” as he described it in his own words (see Allen Spreggett, The Case for Immortality, New American Library, New York, 1974, p. 73). This experience was not in the least spiritual; it was but one more “natural” experience in a life that ended in unbelief.
As a sensuous or “natural” experience, therefore, it would seem that death is indeed pleasant. This pleasantness may be experienced equally by one whose conscience is clean before God, and by one who does not deeply believe in God or eternal life at all, and therefore has no awareness of how he may have displeased God during his lifetime. A “bad death” is experienced, as one writer has well said, only by “those who know that God exists, and yet have lived their lives as though He did not”33 — i.e., those whose consciences torment them and counteract by their pain the natural “pleasure” of physical death. The distinction between believers and unbelievers occurs, then, not at the moment of death itself, but later, at the Particular Judgment. The “pleasantness” of death may be real enough, but it has no necessary connection whatever with the eternal fate of the soul, which may well be one of torment.
All the more is this true of the vision of “light.” This may be something merely natural also — a reflection of the true state of light for which man was created. If so, it is still a serious mistake to give it the “spiritual” meaning which the spiritually inexperienced invariably give it. Orthodox ascetic literature is filled with warnings against trusting any kind of “light” that might appear to one; and when one begins to interpret such a light as an “angel” or even “Christ,” it is clear that one has already fallen into deception, weaving a “reality” out of one’s own imagination even before the fallen spirits have begun their own work of deception.
It is also “natural” for the soul apart from the body to have a heightened awareness of reality and to exercise what is now called “extra-sensory perception” (ESP). It is an obvious fact, noted both in Orthodox literature and in modern scientific investigations, that the soul just after “death” (and often just before death) sees things that bystanders do not see, knows when someone is dying at a distance, etc. A reflection of this may be seen in the experience Dr. Moody calls “the vision of knowledge,” when the soul seems to have an “enlightenment” and to see “all knowledge” in front of it (Reflections on Life After Life, pp. 9-14). St. Boniface describes the immediate experience after death of the “monk of Wenlock” thus: “He felt like a man seeing and wide-awake, whose eyes had been veiled by a dense covering and then suddenly the veil was lifted and everything made clear which had previously been invisible, veiled and unknown. So with him, when the veil of the flesh was cast aside the whole universe seemed to be brought together before his eyes so that he saw in one view all parts of the earth and all seas and peoples” (Emerton, Letters of St. Boniface, p. 25).
Some souls seem to be naturally sensitive to similar experiences, even while still in the body. St. Gregory the Great notes that “sometimes it is through a subtle power of their own that souls can foresee the future,” as opposed to those who foresee the future by God’s revelation (Dialogues, IV, 27, p. 219). But such “psychics” invariably fall into deception when they begin interpreting or developing this talent, which can be properly used only by persons of great sanctity and (of course) Orthodoxy of belief. The American “psychic” Edgar Cayce is a good example of the pitfalls of such “ESP”: once he discovered that he had a talent for accurate medical diagnosis in a trance-state, he began to trust all the messages received in this state and ended by giving himself off as a prophet of the future (sometimes with spectacular wrongness, as with the West-coast cataclysm which failed to occur in 1969), offering astrological readings, and tracing out the “past lives” of men in “Atlantis,” ancient Egypt, and elsewhere.
The “natural” experiences of the soul when it is especially sensitive or is separated from the body — whether these be experiences of “peace” and pleasantness, light, or “ESP” — are therefore only the “raw material” of the soul’s heightened awareness, but give (we must say again) very little positive information about the state of the soul after death, and all too often lead one to unwarranted interpretations of the “other world” as well as into direct contact with the fallen spirits whose realm this is. Such experiences are all of the “astral” world and have in themselves nothing spiritual or heavenly; even when the experience itself is real, the interpretations given to it are not to be trusted.
33
David Winter,