Playing a Dangerous Game

By: Dave Hunt; ©2002

Shamanism has become almost a “parlor game” in our occult-friendly society. Dave Hunt warns that this is far more than just a game. There are real dangers involved in listening to spirit guides.

Playing a Dangerous Game

from Occult Invasion, Harvest House Publishers, 1996)

Psychologist/theologian Jean Houston and her husband, Robert Masters, brought sha­manism into the parlor. In their book Mind Games they give detailed instructions for a “guide” to lead a group into “an altered state of consciousness together…. One ever-deep­ening trance.” (The guide is instructed to be careful to retain normal consciousness in case it becomes necessary to rescue the other players from their altered states.) The climax comes in the form of an encounter with an entity called the “Group Spirit,” which will appear to be very real to the entire group. Here are some of the instructions from Houston and Masters to be read by the guide to the group:

We are gathered here in this circle… creating a pool of consciousness…. And we are going to cause to rise now, out of that pool, the entity we have called the Group Spirit…. You will be aware… of the Group Spirit’s location [in the center of our circle]… we can and must materialize the Group Spirit, endowing that entity with a sufficiently material being that it can appear to us all…. We will be able… to see it, and hear it, and we even could touch it, were it not necessary to take certain precautions….^[1]

“Precautions” for what, one must ask? Does the “Group Spirit” not like to be touched, and might it cause harm? This sounds very real, and so it must be in order for the partici­pants to “see it, and hear it” and even to “touch it” if that were allowed.

One need not join a group to pick up a spirit guide. The shamans have always done it alone. Los Angeles physician Art Ulene, a popular television medical consultant and a TM graduate, was introduced to “guided imagery” while making “a film of relaxation techniques with Dr. David Bresler, a psychologist at UCLA.” Ulene, who has his own spirit guide, tells others how they too may pick up a similar life companion. He leads them into an altered state of consciousness, has them visualize a “relaxing scene,” and then tells them:

Slowly look around your relaxing scene until you spot a living creature. Don’t be surprised by what you find…. Move in closer on the creature. Ask it to move a little closer to you….

Now… it’s time for the two of you to get acquainted. … Talk to your creature. Tell it your name. Ask its name. Believe it or not, you’ll get an answer….

When you and your creature have said all there is to say, it’s time to return to this world again. Say goodbye and promise you’ll return again. Then slowly open your eyes….

We all have this inner diagnostician, a creature advisor who can come to us in time of need. Our creatures may not have the proper degrees, but their brand of medicine works….^[2]

Is this madness—or something more insidious and dangerous? Those who get involved definitely make contact with something that began as imagination but becomes an entity with its own personality and functions independently of the one who visualized it.

One of the indications that this is not just “imagination” is found in the “advice” which the inner advisor or spirit guide provides. It offers knowledge and wisdom unknown to those who originally visualized the creature or creatures; and that counsel always presents, in slightly different form, the same lies with which the serpent, according to the Bible, seduced Eve in the Garden of Eden. That fact should provide evidence of who or what is the source of the “wisdom” being offered.

Masters and Houston suggest that the “altered state of consciousness” is the best way to contact occult entities. The reason they give is rather interesting:

[Perhaps] within that range of states we think of as normal, conscious contact with these other life forms has been made impossible by some kind of shielding against it….

By altering consciousness we sometimes drop the shield, and the contacts become possible.^[3]

Indeed, it seems that the various occult techniques for altering consciousness, like consciousness-altering drugs, have been specifically designed and developed to open one to the occult by knocking down a “shield.” Might it not be that this “shield” has been put in place by God to prevent an invasion of the human personality by demonic entities? The best advice would be, “Don’t drop that shield!”

Yet the very techniques which tear down that shield are being recommended and taught not only by Masters and Houston and other New Age gurus but are being promoted in the church. The door of the human spirit is deliberately being opened to an occult invasion! Here is what a former leader in the New Age movement, speaking from years of experi­ence, has to say:

After lengthy observation [from inside, as a leader] of the entire New Age scene, I am convinced that these techniques (rebirthing, yoga, TM, visualization of inner guides, etc.) have an intrinsic power in themselves. They work because they are designed specifically to blow open doors and knock down barriers that God has placed in the human spirit to prevent a takeover by demonic beings that I came to realize are real and very destructive. ^[4]

Rather than being representations of the collective unconscious (one of the lies taught to Carl Jung by these deceiving entities), the preponderance of evidence indicates that the entities encountered through shamanic techniques are forms taken by demonic spirits intent upon deceiving and destroying mankind. Yet Masters and Houston (along with many others involved in the occult) promise that if you “trust the guide and have confidence in the ability of the guide to protect you, then you will be safe from harm.” It sounds hauntingly like something which the disguised wolf might reassuringly whisper in the ear of little Red Riding Hood.

On the one hand, it all sounds ludicrous, conjuring up in the imagination some mysteri­ous entities which then seemingly become “real,” whatever that means. On the other hand, it would be insulting to accuse all of these highly intelligent and well-educated persons of a common madness. Indeed, the very fact that so many people all over the world at all times of history have had the same experience puts the stamp of reality upon it. The fact, how­ever, that these entities are not physical raises the question of how “real” these spirit guides are—and here we confront the question of what is meant by “real.”

One result of the transformation taking place in our world through drugs and other shamanic practices is the confusion about “reality” that now plagues so many people who were once quite certain of the answer to that question. Is what is experienced on the drug trip or in the “higher consciousness” achieved through Eastern mysticism the “real” state of affairs, or is reality found in ordinary consciousness? It has become popular to claim that we create our own universe with our minds, so reality is in a state of flux and differs for each of us. This is patent nonsense that comes from the Hindu belief that all is maya, an illusion.

Logically, the mere fact that the universe existed long before Homo sapiens came along to “create” reality with his imagination should have ended the kind of delusion that Jean Houston and others like her have foisted upon a gullible following. Yet this theory persists. To demolish this fantasy, that we are all dreaming a common dream we call “reality,” and to establish the fact of a real universe independent of our minds, Sir James Jeans pointed out that there are three criteria which are essential for objective reality: surprise, continuity and change. Here is what he meant.

Twenty million people are suddenly awakened from sound sleep by an earthquake in Mexico City which kills many of them by collapsing the homes and apartments they occupy. The fact that they were surprised by this event—indeed awakened by the shaking and roaring of an earthquake that they certainly were not even dreaming of—is evidence enough that an objective reality imposed itself upon its victims. It would be madness to suggest that a hurricane that destroys homes or a fire that guts a hotel were simply part of a common dream which the victims had all agreed upon. Yet the new-consciousness gurus who are so popular continue to promote techniques for getting out of this “ordinary” but delusionary state of consciousness into a new reality created by the mind in a so-called “higher state of consciousness”—which is, supposedly the real world.

Sir James Jeans’ second criterion to establish objective reality, continuity is as easily understood. After a 20-year absence you return to your high school for a reunion. The same rooms in which you once attended class are there, complete with desks, black­boards, and cracks in the ceiling—everything that you had scarcely even remembered during the 20-year interval. All has remained in place without one thought from you. Those young trees you remember have grown large without any help at all from your mind.

Obviously, your old school and its surroundings, like the rest of the world and universe, are not some dream you have dreamed, but an objective reality that exists entirely inde­pendent of you and the rest of mankind. Imagine the chaos if reality were in fact the prod­uct of billions of individual minds of independent and forgetful (or even insane) makeup. Whose “reality” would be dominant, and how often would one person’s self-created “reality” suddenly be overturned by another’s imposing itself? And by what logic could it be imag­ined that the billions of people on this earth somehow got together and managed to create the universe we all experience, from the interior of the atom to the farthest star—a universe that was here long before we even arrived?

There have also been changes at your high school during your absence. The old cracker box gymnasium has been torn down and a new and much larger one stands in its place. Change such as this, coming without our knowledge in places we have forgotten, clearly has occurred without our minds creating it. This too demonstrates the objectivity of the physical universe about us. These three criteria—surprise, continuity, and change—also prove the reality of occult experiences for the same reasons.

When scientists such as Sir James Jeans state, as he did, that the universe is “like a great thought,” they do not mean a thought in human minds but, as Jeans said, “in the mind of some Eternal Spirit,” who alone could be the Creator of the universe. Far from mentally creating reality, mankind has been struggling to discover a reality that exists independently of his thoughts and imagination and that was obviously created by a” mind far beyond his comprehension or abilities. The only sensible thing to do is to stop trying to manipulate reality and allow that Creator to have His way in your life.

Notes

1. ↑ Robert Masters and Jean Houston, Mind Games (Dell Publishing Co., 1972), pp. 199- 201.
2. ↑ Art Ulene, Feeling Fine (J. P. Tarcher, 1977), pp. 97-99.
3. ↑ Houston and Masters, Games, pp. 70-71.
4. ↑ From a personal interview with Doug Glover.