Spirit Mediumship By Richard Kieninger A medium is a person who makes his or her entire physical organism available for use by a spirit intelligence in order to allow that spirit to communicate with incarnate human beings. The avenue by which it becomes possible for a spirit to do this is essentially identical to the way a hypnotist gains control over the brain of another person. The will of a spirit, just like the will of a living hypnotist, can gain dominance over the brain functions of a living person and can achieve identical results. The only difference is the manner in which hypnotic control over the subject is gained in the earliest stage of takeover. A hypnotist verbally guides a person into the twilight stage of pre-sleep or uses a light dose of a narcotic drug to induce floating drowsiness. The drug, sodium pentothal, for instance, produces almost immediate submission and readiness for hypnotic takeover. I want to stress that the subject’s brain is utterly at the command of the hypnotist’s will; yet there are hypnotists who seem to be blissfully unaware of this inescapable fact. A spirit, somewhat differently, must find a person who has already prepared his own brain to a state of readiness by means of self-induction of a trance state, and this is like an open invitation to any passing spirit to seize control of the medium’s entire organism. Thereby that spirit acquires the tool to express his opinions to the living either by voice or by automatic writing. After a spirit gains control of the medium’s brain, it is easy to will the medium’s lungs, vocal cords and tongue to speak. The spirit does this just as he did when he had been incarnated in his own body. Similarly, a spirit can direct a medium’s hand to write or type whatever he wills via the medium’s brain. It is just as if the spirit borrows a body for his use, and the medium freely makes it available. It is important to note that it’s impossible for a medium to predetermine which spirit or series of spirits will seize his brain when he enters the trance state. Some mediums claim they can exclude nether entities from taking control of their brain by surrounding themselves with a white light or praying to Christ for protection, and some say their personal advancement prevents negative types from using them; but the fact is that none of those suppositions is true. Once a medium is in trance, it’s first-come, first-served for any and all spirits. However, there are cases where a specific spirit entity will hover about the same medium in expectation of getting the first chance at each trance that is afforded. Some spirits will speak exclusively through one medium to establish identity with that specific medium. Thereby, a spirit can gain a following among the living and become their leader or spiritual guide. The most astonishing thing about mediums is their willingness to entrust their brain, sanity, free will, and very life to unseen, unknown, spirit entities. Evidently, their philosophy has been molded by some teacher or author to convince them that a medium experiences a divine gift and that exalted spirit entities will bring truth and guidance for mankind through spiritualistic intercession. Nothing could be farther from the truth. There are teachers who have already been ensnared by spirit controls, and they are led to try to convince others that they too should provide an avenue for spirit communications to be channeled through them. The spirits themselves proclaim their greatness and misrepresent themselves as God or well-known Archangels or famous men. Thus an unsophisticated person is likely to be convinced of the legitimacy of being a medium. Probably the medium’s expectation of becoming famous or being considered a holy vessel serves as a spur to submitting to a spirit’s control. Great religious leaders and saints have all warned that mediumship, hypnotism, witchcraft, and sorcery result in the degeneration of the soul and the destruction of life. Such practices lead in directions opposed to true spiritual uplift, character improvement, and service to mankind. The saints certainly have not denied the reality of spiritist phenomena, for they recognize that it has been the undoing of thousands. Saints and clairvoyants can recognize the negativity of the entities who operate through mediums by the dark Egoic auras of the spirits. The more clever evil spirits, however, can exercise their control over a medium’s brain from the far side of the world, in which case the degree of the spirit’s negativity is more difficult to determine. Higher Beings and saints who reside in the spirit world are absolutely forbidden to take control of a living person’s brain or to interfere in anyone’s free will. A person’s God-granted self-determination should never be interfered with, but nether entities seek to undo mankind and so do not care for the rights of the living. The only spirit entities who speak through mediums are human Egos of the dark side or else are earthbound (to be defined later). Information from Higher Beings and the brotherhood of saints is transmitted to mankind through living philosophers and saints who have proven themselves to be great men and women of high character and spiritual refinement. A man must uplift himself by means of his intellectual grasp of true principles which he can consciously put into practice to test their verity. One’s sense of incompetence and lack of self-esteem often lead to a desire to receive daily guidance from God or a saint so that one’s path will hopefully be unerring. There are plenty of mediums, card readers, gypsies, witches, and churches who claim to provide God on a personal level whereby He tells one what to do, and thus God accepts responsibility for the conduct of one’s life. People are told that all they must do is get their tiny wills out of the way and instead become selfless vessels for the pure will of God. I have frequently heard the prayer to God, “Let thy will be my will.” What this prayer properly should mean is, “Let me perceive by my observation what Thy will is so I can make my life conform to Thy will through my own independent free will.” Any other meaning would make one a puppet of God and would be a mockery of self-volition. The vast majority of spirits who seek to influence men via mediums are motivated to confuse mankind, obscure truth, create chaos, and gain power over the living. It is almost a universal truism that such spirits always lie and represent themselves as revered historical personages or Angels and higher. That way they know people are more likely to pay attention to what they say or write via their mediums. Even the more-or-less harmless earthbound spirits will indulge in this sort of misrepresentation of who they are in order to have someone take heed of what they say. Some John Doe, to whom nobody ever listened during his lifetime, as a spirit can have the heady experience of people hanging on his every utterance through a medium when John Doe proclaims he is the Archangel Michael or St. Germain. When a person dies, he carries to the spirit world the same attitudes and philosophy he held during life; so if he is questioned at a seance about the truths of existence, he will expound what his beliefs were when he was incarnate. Since he seeks the company of other spirits on the Astral Plane who have the same beliefs as his own, they all reinforce his opinions. A person who was a Catholic will state Catholic doctrine when he becomes a spirit if he chooses to speak through a medium. A former Hindu will espouse Hinduism, and a former Muslim will earnestly describe Mohammedism as the universal ultimate. That is one reason why there is such mass confusion and contradiction if you deal with mediums in your search for truth. There are yet other spirits who mischievously concoct all kinds of bizarre scenarios presumably representing true cosmology and the nature of heaven, etc. And there are the cleverly evil spirits who gain the confidence of the hearer by presenting information that an intelligent person can verify as evident truth. These spirits may then introduce an untruth which cannot be verified but which seems plausible and so is accepted as true. This technique of seducing the earnest student uses truth as the small edge of the wedge by which falsity is then subtly mixed with reality. Moreover, an evil spirit may well claim to be the Holy Spirit or Moses or Buddha or Christ in order to gain the credulity of the hearer. Highly evolved beings never deal through gypsies, mediums, or witches to announce a legitimate message or warning to mankind. But in all fairness, useful information sometimes is transmitted by humans from the spirit world. Edgar Cayce was a sleeping medium through whom earthbound spirits who had been physicians in former lives provided diagnoses and cures for hundreds of sick people who wrote to Cayce for such help. Cayce would put himself into a trance, and then his secretary would ask the spirits questions, and she would record the answers that the spirits gave thorough Cayce’s brain and voice. These transcripts have been preserved, and they match the patients’ medical histories providing verification of the accuracy of the spirits. There were many and different kinds of spirits who spoke through Edgar Cayce. Some of Cayce’s controls spoke of ancient history and others prophesied about coming earth changes and human events. The earthbound former physicians expressed themselves clearly and exactly, whereas the spirit historians and prophets who spoke through him usually were flowery and equivocally vague so as to be obscure in their meanings. Some of the spirits who dealt through Cayce would sometimes volunteer information about a sick person’s former lifetimes if the illness he was presently experiencing was presumably punishment for or the natural outcome of actions initiated during those prior lives and carried over to the present lifetime. There is no one to gainsay the accuracy of those reports about earlier incarnations, but many people began to correspond with Cayce solely to obtain a reading on their former lives. After Cayce’s death, other mediums filled the popular demand for life readings; and people of my acquaintance spent considerable sums of money to have them done for themselves. Those who sent away to two or three of the most famous mediums for cross verification of results could find no correlation between the different lists of their alleged former lives. It also seemed suspicious that the former lives listed for my friends were all well-known historical personages. There are no more than two thousand names on any complete list of noteworthy persons dating from ancient times through AD 1800. Of the tens of thousands of people who obtained personalized life readings, many clients were informed that they had had eight to ten incarnations as famous people. There had to be much duplication in order to share only two thousand names among the tens of thousands of subscribers to life readings. Were the mediums frauds? Probably not, but their spirit controls certainly were. Emanuel Swedenborg, the famous Swedish mystic, declared that spirits who deal through mediums are liars and deceivers who usually brazenly claim to be something greater than they really are. The spirit entities who speak through mediums are usually of lower moral character and lesser intelligence than their mediums. There are many people who never wanted to become mediums but find their brains captured by negative spirit entities as a result of their consciously seeking contact with, hopefully, wise “spirit guides” or “spirit guardians.” These people were tricked by someone into following occult techniques that would supposedly give them advantage over others but which instead caused them to be dominated by spirits. Such techniques include creating mental visions of imaginary guides whom you can consult and ask for advice by calling them forth at will. After a while these imaginary guides begin to take on their own appearance rather than the way you first visualized them. Soon they propose thoughts and actions that are abhorrent to you, but you feel compelled to carry them out. Finally they speak to you continuously, interfering with your concentration on work or getting sleep, and your life becomes a living hell. Another technique that turns out the same way is to stare into a mirror or a pan of still water in a dimly lit room until your reflection begins to blur and then takes on the image of someone else, who eventually proves to be a spirit. The intent of such spirits is to gratify their own personal desires by controlling incarnated persons. The majority of the spirits who manipulate the living by acting through people who chose to be mediums, or through unwitting mediums like the victims described immediately above, are criminal types or were vicious and perversely immoral when they were alive. A good person never stoops to manipulate the lives of others; so after he dies and begins to function in the spirit world, he completely separates himself from the affairs of the living and instead raises himself to the consciousness of higher Astral existence. An earthbound spirit, on the other hand, continues to be so interested in the activities of the living that his consciousness is fixated upon physical existence. He often infests the environment of the living and tries to influence their lives. He or she tends to be an inveterate bathroom and bedroom snooper and often tries to telepathically project thoughts via sorcery upon the living in order to get them to do things which excite the spirit’s interests. Some earthbound spirits perform as incubi (males) and succubi (females) who mimic sexual intercourse with living people of the gender opposite their own. Young people’s violent sexual fantasies are often mentally induced by such earthbound spirits who like to watch and get involved with the youngsters’ responses. All Nature Spirits are earthbound human Egos who love the forests, streams, and plants so much that they seek to remain in earthly awareness of such places rather than move up to higher realms of consciousness. Clairvoyants perceive such earthbound nature worshipers as water sprites, wood nymphs, and satyrs. Because these spirits do not experience the limitation of having to operate through a brain, they can easily influence the growth of plants. All human beings, alive or spirit, can by mental means grow super flowers and vegetables, but we who are incarnated rarely believe we can, and so we don’t really try. Of the different kinds of spirits who communicate through mediums, earth-bounds are the least manipulative and destructive. When earthbound spirits were themselves incarnate, they tended to be simple, below-average people who were generally careless in their morality and scruples. Other kinds of spirits, who in life were murderers, con men, tyrants, and the like, continue their same attitudes in the spirit world, and they eagerly engage in tricking and undermining the living. The worst spirits are wholly evil types whose aim is to destroy goodness in everyone and to bring chaos throughout the world. They are behind witchcraft, devil worship, and the kinds of spirit possession that result in insanity. They have mastered the techniques of telepathic hypnotism, and their character is so warped and negative that their auras radiate dark and murky colors (as opposed to saints’ auras which are made up of clear, bright, pastel colors.) These base spirits are called Black Mentalists. Only nether spirit entities—earth-bounds, criminal types, and Black Mentalists — deal through mediumistic channels. They desire to influence the living or to vent their hatreds in deleterious ways that are almost always disguised on the surface as beneficial. All spirit communications that come through mediums are highly suspect and, until proven correct, should be regarded as false since only negative spirits and earth-bounds hypnotically seize the brain function of living mediums. Sadly, there is a type of person who actively courts affiance with Black Mentalists in hope of gaining mundane power for himself. In exchange, he is willing to give himself over to evil in order to become an instrument through which the spirits’ wills can function on earth. The witch, the sorcerer, and the person ambitious for political power (so he can subjugate others) fall into this class. A well-known example was Adolph Hitler. It doesn’t require much analysis to realize that the motivation for a person’s entering an alliance with evil spirits is antithetical to love. One’s personal drive to attain mundane power is based on the person’s perceived need to control others, which in turn is based on fear of or anger against others. People grow up imagining that the tyrant is in an enviable and even admirable position because he has the power of life and death over those whom he rules absolutely; therefore, he has agents to search out possible enemies in his realm and the means to crush them, and he has at his command armies to defend him against external enemies. Presumably he alone has the ultimate personal safety so long as he is diligently alert to all possible dangers, but his existence nevertheless remains one of escalating fear and anger. Those who seek to emulate the tyrant, even though on a smaller scale, want revenge or security but don’t realize that that path is brutalizing to all concerned, including themselves. The sage comes to appreciate that good works and love of others bring the only security that is valid. Love of others attracts their love in return, and good works return in kind to the doer. Every great religion teaches these facts, but some children have been so abused that, as adults, they cannot accept the truth of the essentially benign nature of the Universe, and so they see everything and everybody as threatening to them. Evil spirit entities are quick to recognize that the fearful and angry person is ripe for their exploitation, and it is not too difficult to recruit such a person into their nefarious plots against the harmless, loving, good people of the world; but spiritual degradation is the price of alliance with evil.
	Interference--The Use and Abuse of Free Will