Chapter Eight
Astral Projection and Soul/Spirit Travel
One sees many strange things when ministering to satanically ritually abused persons. One of the strangest is when voices speak out of them claiming to be the spirit or soul of some other human being. These beings will have personalities and mannerisms characteristic of the person they claim to be. It all looks and sounds very convincing to the minister pondering whether or not this could possibly be true.
Additionally one hears accounts of human spirit or soul travel known as astral projection or out-of-the-body experiences. Persons speak of seeing a thin silver cord connecting them to their body while they are having their out-of-the-body experience. They are not speaking of a near-death experience, but rather soul travel in that a person goes somewhere and sees and experiences things apart from his physical body.
When a Christian searches the Bible for an explanation of this strange phenomenon, he will probably come upon a verse in Ecclesiastes that may confirm that astral projection really happens. Speaking of death, this passage states, “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” However, it is important to note that this passage is speaking about death. There is nothing about astral projection implied here.
Is it possible for a human soul or spirit to travel out of the body and project itself into another person? Many persons who minister for satanic ritual abuse believe this to be true. One counselor related to me that he led the soul of an abuser to salvation as he talked to it when it manifested in the body of the SRA person to whom he was ministering. There are some who say they were raped by human spirits or thrown around the room by them.
There are many reasons why I do not believe a person’s soul or spirit leaves his body and travels around or enters into the physical body of another person. For one thing, the Bible makes no mention of such a thing. It does say that a demon can leave a human body, travel and come back in.
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest; and finding none, he saith, I will return unto my house whence I came out. And when he cometh, he findeth it swept and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh to him seven other spirits more wicked than himself; and they enter in, and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26).
If human souls or spirits were entering in and out of other people or accosting them, surely the Bible would have something to say about such an important concept. Paul in 2 Corinthians where he speaks of being caught up into paradise says, “Whether in the body, or out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth.” Whether or not Paul was in or out of his body, it was an experience with God, not with other humans on earth and therefore cannot be an example of astral projection.
People truly believe they are having this experience of soul travel, but it is a delusion. Spiritual dreams and visions often seem incredibly real. It is not uncommon for a survivor to whom I am ministering to report having dreams in which I abuse them. These dreams are so real they have trouble believing they never happened. This is merely a tactic of the enemy to try to get them to break off our relationship.
Rick Joyner writes about visions in his book, The Final Quest, where he gives an explanation of different kinds of visions. Some are merely impressions that are seen with the “eyes of the heart.” Others are revelations that come with a conscious sense of the presence of the Lord. “Open visions” are a higher level of visions that are external and seen as though one were viewing a movie. The highest form of a vision is a trance. Instead of viewing something on a screen, it is like you are in the movie…like you are actually there and interacting with other persons A trance seems real like a dream but you are awake. Peter had a trance at the time he was instructed to go to the house of Cornelius. Paul experienced a trance as described in Acts 22. Rick Joyner writes of incredible experiences with God and departed saints in heaven, but he never mentions leaving his body.
If God can give people trances, the devil can give trances to those whom he has been able to deceive. A person can go into a trance and believe he is experiencing leaving his body and traveling to some distant place where he interacts with other persons. Demons know about the scripture that speaks of a silver cord, so they show a silver cord connected to the body as the soul or spirit of the person “leaves.” Demons are able to give a number of people a similar trance at the same time and make them believe they met somewhere when they “astral projected.”
Why, one might ask, would the devil do such a thing? Why deceive people and make them believe their soul or spirit left their body and traveled? This deception is of great benefit to the enemy in regards to satanic ritual abuse. If Satan is able to make a counselor believe the spirit he is encountering is human, then the counselor believes he cannot control the spirit (or soul) and cast it out. We have authority over demons but we do not have authority over the soul or spirit of a human being. In this way the demons trick the counselor into believing he cannot cast them out or tell them what to do. I have had SRA counselors tell me that human spirits come and rape and assault some of their survivors. This should not be! It has never happened to the people I minister to. The reason it happens to their survivors is that they and the counselor believe human souls have astral projected and are doing these things. Actually this is all demonic activity.
The counselor who related to me that he led the soul of an abuser to Christ as he manifested through an SRA person was not willing to even listen to my explanation of what may have happened. He was totally closed to any suggestion that it could have been anything else. He said there was no way that any demon would renounce Satan, pray the sinner’s prayer, confess sins and ask for forgiveness. He said he had seen it all with his own eyes and he knew it was true.
I too have seen these manifestations of human spirits in SRA persons. They are extremely convincing, but I realize the power and craftiness of evil spirits. They have no loyalty to Satan or anyone else. Satan would probably congratulate a demon for deceiving the counselor by renouncing him, faking repentance and prayer. The whole experience described above gave incredible power to the belief that human spirits can accost people and thereby opened the door for powerful demons to harass and assault this man’s counselees. He could also convince other counselors about his belief in his experience and without intending to, open a door for their survivors to be accosted also.
This counselor who related the experience of leading a human soul to Christ through a survivor assured me that many counselors believe this and there are tapes and articles explaining why it is all true. After receiving a few of this man’s emails, I pondered it all for an entire day and continually asked God to show me if I was wrong. I thought I had the matter all settled but I needed to be absolutely sure.
That night I had a dream. In my dream there was a man over the Internet who was trying to sell me a string of beads. I had a friend who had bought them, but I was more cautious, and as I looked closely at the beads, I could see there was something defective about them…their surface was slightly marred. I decided not to buy them.
When I awoke and considered the message of the dream, it all became clear to me. The beads represented the concept of astral projection and human souls projected into other humans that the counselor related to me. With deception, one false belief leads to another and another like a string of beads. My friend who had bought them I knew to be a fine Christian woman but a little naïve. God was showing me this whole concept was defective and I was not to “buy it.”
Adam’s Soul Power
Some persons believe in something called “the latent power of the human soul.” This concept suggests that Adam had incredible soul powers as evidenced by his ability to name all the animals and dress and keep the garden. This soul power was lost when Adam and Eve cast all creation into sin, and death came upon all living things. It is taught that humans still have this power within but it is locked up in our flesh. There are certain individuals who have been able to suppress their body to such an extent that they have been able to utilize this latent power of their soul.
Some latent powers of the soul are believed to include clairvoyance—the power to perceive things which are out of the natural range of human senses, telepathy—communication by scientifically unknown or inexplicable means such as thought reading, psychometry—the ability to read the past like an open book, statuvolism—the ability to “throw one’s mind” to any distant place and see, hear, feel, smell and taste what is going on there.
I have encountered these phenomena in SRA persons and found these powers to be demons. Once the demon was cast out, the person lost the ability to do these things. If one believes these are soul powers, one might be tempted to try developing these powers and could find themselves enslaved to demons.
As I was writing this, my daughter who lives in another state called to tell me something that just happened in her home. Her teenage daughter was watching television and called to her mother about something she was viewing. A man on the program told a woman to open a dictionary, mentally choose a word, and then close the book. The man was able to tell the woman the exact word she had chosen.
My granddaughter asked, “Mom, how did he do that” My daughter replied, “Demons are all around in the place. A demon saw the word the woman chose and told the man.” “Oh,” said my granddaughter. “I thought it was something like that.” That settled the matter and the issue had been dealt with.
What if my daughter had said, “That man practiced until he was able to subdue his flesh to the point that the latent power of his soul was released. That was possible because he has been able to gain back some of the power of the soul that Adam had before the fall. This potential is in all of us if we could only learn to use it.”
My granddaughter would have had a lot to ponder. She may have thought, “Gee, if I could do that people would admire me as someone really special. I’d be the life of the party.” If she had tried to pursue this power, she would have put herself in contact with demons.
An examination of the New Testament Greek words translated “power” indicates that power comes from sources outside of human ability. The two most common words for power are dunamis and exousia. The following are taken from The New Strong’s Expanded Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible:
Dunamis – force, miraculous power. Dunamis almost always points to new and higher forces that have entered and are working in this lower world of ours.
Exousia – authority…superhuman, delegated influence.
There are two other New Testament Greek words for “power” that are used less often:
Kratos – force, might, strength. Kratos means might, relative and manifested power chiefly from God.
Chalchalah – the strength of God bestowed upon believers. The visible expression of the inherent personal power of the Lord Jesus. It is said of angels. It is ascribed to God.
Clearly these Greek words with their definitions show that power comes from outside our human soul.
The idea that the human soul can leave the body and travel around is further refuted by the biblical explanation for the Old Testament Word translated “soul.” The Hebrew word for soul, כפש, nephesh, indicates that the soul and the body are bound up closely together in such a way that the soul could not leave the body except in death. The following is from the introduction to Gesenius’ Hebrew-Chaldee Lexicon to the Old Testament:
According to the Genesis account of creation, after “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life,” man became “a living soul” (2:7). What does the word soul mean? Or more precisely, what does the Hebrew word mean that is translated “soul”?
The first and most basic definition of כפש is breath. The second definition is more complex: the soul, or that vital principle “by which the body lives, the token of which life is drawing breath…hence life…” From this definition it is apparent that the concept of the soul is bound up closely with that of the body. The third definition is the mind, the whole inner being with all its faculties. Yet the mind and all its inner motions cannot be known by men apart from its employment of the body and the five senses, which fact is implied in this definition. The fourth definition is animal, “that in which there is a soul or mind…living creature…There is something that all the various species of the animal world have in common with man: they are breathing bodies or living creatures. Thus כפש points to the body as well as the inner being, the vital principle, and the breath of a creature or person. The fifth definition is summarized by the word self and the various ways in which self is used, singular or plural, with or without pronominal prefixes. Self basically means “the whole person or entire being of an individual.” According to the Bible the human soul is the whole human personality, composed of a breathing body and all of man’s inner faculties, expressly created by God to bear His own image and likeness (Gesenius 1979, vi).
From this explanation of the Hebrew word for “soul,” it is clear that the soul is the life, the breath and the vital principle by which the body lives. The soul cannot leave the body and travel around or project itself into another person.
In Ecclesiastes Ten there is an interesting verse that states, “Curse not the king, no not in thy thought; and curse not the rich in thy bedchamber: for a bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter.”
Birds in Scripture are sometimes used allegorically of demons. The parable of the soils in Matthew Thirteen is a good example: “And he spake many things unto them in parables, saying, Behold, a sower went forth to sow; and when he sowed, some seeds fell by the way side, and the fowls came and devoured them up.” Jesus then explained the meaning as, “When any one heareth the word of the kingdom, and understandeth it not, then cometh the wicked one, and catcheth away that which was sown in his heart.” Birds are likened to the evil one…the devil or his demons.
This passage reveals that the one who is spying on people is not a human soul projected into the room, but probably a demon. If a human soul could be there in the bedchamber reading one’s mind and listening to their voice, wouldn’t Scripture indicate this somewhere? Scripture does verify it could be a demon.
In 2 Kings there is a remarkable account of Elisha knowing the enemy’s battle plans and relaying them to the king of Israel. With this information the king of Israel was able to save himself from the king of Syria many times. In exasperation the Syrian king called his men together demanding to know who the traitor was in their midst. One of them answered, “None, my lord, O king: but Elisha, the prophet that is in Israel, telleth the king of Israel the words that thou speakest in thy bedchamber.”
The Syrians went to destroy Elisha and surrounded the city where he was during the night. When daylight came and Elisha’s servant saw them, he was terrified. Elisha’s response was, “Fear not for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.” Scripture continues, “And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha. And when they came down to him, Elisha prayed unto the Lord and said, Smite this people, I pray thee, with blindness according to the word of Elisha.” The Lord blinded them and the rest of the story can be read in 2 Kings 6.
The point I want to make here is that Elisha’s miracles were all done by prayer with heavenly angelic beings and the Holy Spirit performing them. Some might believe Elisha projected his soul into the king of Syria’s bedchamber, but this is in no way implied in this account. Elisha knew what was being said because he was a man of prayer to whom God revealed secrets.
As to the soul having power to do miraculous things, principles learned during SRA ministry reveal that power is not from the soul but from the demons controlling the soul. This is why the survivor who has the greatest dissociative ability will be the person with the greatest powers. Each alter formed will have possibly four to eight (or more) demons attached to her. The greater the number of alters, the more demons can be attached…and demons are powers. Paul said in Ephesians Six, “For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (italics mine).
If one personality had 6000 demons (approximately the number in the Gadarene demoniac of Mark 5), there is no way all those demons could each have a turn at controlling the person. (For my explanation of why I believe this man was multiple, please see my first book, Restoring Survivors of Satanic Ritual Abuse.) They would be continually fighting over who got to be in control. But when there are many personalities, and each personality has a small number of demons, each demon gets to control someone. There is always the strongman in charge of the lesser demons. In this way, the inner world is kept in order and there is greater power. If the power were coming from the soul, it would need to be unified because there is more power in unity than in division.
To sum it all up, I have noticed that survivors whose counselors believe in astral projection and human souls projecting into other persons, have trouble with harassment from these “human souls.” People may be raped or thrown around the room in terrible abuse. However, I don’t believe in this, and it doesn’t happen to my people. This is because I know these are demons and can, therefore, take authority over them. If I believed they were human spirits and that I had no authority over them, I could not help my survivors. It is my prayer that my writing on this subject will help destroy this widespread and dangerous belief in soul projection.
People who minister to those who have been satanically ritually abused are seeing behind the veil through their survivors. Demon powers are confronted continually. These spiritual beings will deceive us if we are not careful to continually search the Scriptures to find the truth behind the strange phenomena we are encountering in this ministry. If we believe something on the basis of what we and others are observing apart from biblical explanations, we will be led into deception.