(Note: This is a repost. Substack was having technical issues and not everyone got the email.)
Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.
1 John 4:1
The ego. The id. Identity politics. Identity. I.D. ID? Id. Cogito Ergo Sum. I think, therefore, I am.
Edwin Abbot Abbot wrote a book called “Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions” in 1884.
Fascinating work. The plot revolves around the adventures of a two dimensional protagonist (named A. Square) and his interactions with both the apparently supernatural inhabitants of the 3D realm and the curiously primitive occupants of one dimensional space. The so called “line people.” Being infinitely thin lines they were by definition exceedingly sharp. So much so that the major crime of line and was getting too close to someone else. Such could certainly be fatal.
At one point in the novel A. Square has a brief encounter with the inhabitants of “pointland”, the zero-dimensional realm. “Inhabitants” is only speculative. We can’t really be sure if the citizenry of pointland were singular or plural, their entire universe being collapsed into a single point and all. As it turned out, communication was similarly impossible or at least exceedingly difficult. Unable to conceive of anything outside themselves, the inhabitant(s) of pointland instantly interprets anything that is said to it as being its own thoughts. To illustrate what I mean, I now give you a half-remembered simulacrum of the exchange between A. Square and the citizenry of pointland. This is the best I can do, I have not read the book in over a decade.
“Hello there!” Our two-dimensional protagonist shouts, trying to establish communication with pointland.
“Hmm? What’s that? Hello? Why yes I do deserve a hello this morning, don’t I. Hello me. Cheerio!”
“No, no. That was me. Over here! I said hello.”
“I know I did. Why am I arguing with us?”
“No I was just trying to tell you that…”
“Tell me!? We don’t need to tell us anything, we already know everything I know.”
And so, eventually, our 2D friend gives up, finding the task of communicating with the lower dimensional being somewhat pointless (pun intended). Anything A. Square says, point man considers as words from his own mind.
That’s Wetiko.
That’s the Counterfeit Spirit.
Wetiko is a Native American term. It means something like “whisperer” or “wormtongue.” They are spirits. The Wetiko are spirits who parasitically attach themselves to people and, through whispering, hide themselves and feed upon their hosts.
They’re demons.
Demons are very, very real.
If you’re having a personal problem that seems to have no prosaic solution, it is very possible that you are under demonic attack. That’s no good, is it?
Here’s the upside though!
Once you see them for what they are, the demons are easy to dispel. Like all things unclean, they are killed by sunlight. The entire game of the Wetiko therefore is to stay hidden. The whisperer, the counterfeit spirit, it tries to convince its host that it is apart of the host. That’s what makes it a counterfeit. It wants the host to believe that its whisperings are the host’s own thoughts. That way the host will protect it, believing that by so doing he is protecting himself.
I am depressed.
No you aren’t. Depression itself, the spirit, is trying to get you to identify with it. If you do, you won’t want to change. Worse, you won’t even believe change is possible because you will come to think of your illness as just the way you are. “That’s just who I am. I’m depressed.”
Or perhaps your Wetiko whispers this:
I am worthless.
Again, a lie. This is a lie. A whisper. A counterfeit spirit. You are not worthless. Not in the slightest.
As I discussed here, spirits are always seeking to concretize themselves. To take on flesh, take on matter. The spirits of rage or jealousy or lust or greed or depression or fear… they need matter to manifest in our realm.
They need a host.
That host is you.
Without you they’re stuck in a kind of quasi nonexistence, which is what Hell is. And, if you shrug them off, that’s exactly where they fall back to.
Intense motivation to keep you from shrugging them off, no?
I have at times suffered attacks from the spirits of OCD.
(Incidentally, these sorts of spirits are exactly why cathedrals and temples used to be adorned with mazes, because such spirits, being OCD, would have to check every nook and cranny, and thus get trapped in the maze. You can actually contain spirits by such methods. That stuff is all real.)
You check the doorknob. You know you checked it. You know that you know that you checked it. You turn and begin to walk away.
Then the whisper.
But…. what if you were wrong?
Yeah. What if?
So you walk back downstairs and check it again. Good. Okay. We did it. Now we’re sure.
(Do you see how you switch to speaking in the plural in such instances??? We. Who is “we”. A part of **you** knows these thoughts are not your own. Watch yourself when your internal monologue begins to speak of “We”)
You walk back upstairs.
But… what if… when you tried the lock, just before you let go of it, you tripped it over to be slightly unlocked.
I didn’t do that.
Yeah but… how can you be sure. You know… unless you check.
Spirits are patterns of existence. And that negative pattern of existence is being incarnated in you in that moment. It’s feeding on you. You are giving it a body. Like the man in pointland, you are fooled into believing that the words of this entity of higher dimensionality than yourself (angels/spirits/etc reside in a higher order of dimensions) is you. And you are so fooled because you can’t tell where else the words would be coming from.
But they aren’t you.
They aren’t you and here’s how you know.
You know because ***the instant*** you begin to suspect or suggest that perhaps the whisper is something else. Someone else. It panics. It is on the verge of being found out! Instantly innumerable justifications for what it’s telling you arise.
“That’s crazy!”
“What are you, a kook? You don’t believe in that nonsense.”
“No. No. You’re just coping. You really are a loser who deserves to be depressed. Look, I can show you empirically, consider all these things you suck at.”
“But you’re right to be anxious. I’m rational. What if **bad thing** happens. If you stop worrying, it might! Listen to me!”
“You have every right to be angry. If anything you should be more angry! Remember what they did to you!?”
And so on.
The parasite is fighting to not be pulled from its host. The Wetiko’s entire strategy is blending into the host’s identity. That’s how you can tell that we are currently suffering a societal wide pandemic of Wetiko, of demons. That’s what identify politics is, demonic possession writ large.
“I am a victim.”
“I am a racist.”
“I am a homosexual.”
“I am neuro-atypical.”
No you aren’t.
You are a child of God.
That’s your primary identity. That’s the one identity the demons fear you reclaiming. They want you to identify with them, or with anything else, because when you don’t know who you are you are easily fed upon. So you had a gay experience one time, or even hundreds of times. So? That doesn’t define you. That’s not what you are. Or maybe you were someone’s victim once. Okay. That sucks but that’s not you. Perhaps you felt uneasy around a black person one time. That’s just a feeling that came and went. It’s not an identity. You are not your passions and you are not your sins and you are not your maladies.
Rather, you are worth every star in the sky.
Call them out. Call out the Wetiko. The whisperers. The demons. Do not listen to their lies. The wormtongue is not you.
Those aren’t your thoughts.
The counterfeit spirits are not you.
You are free.
I feel this may be a more helpful way to deal with "negative" thoughts than traditional psychology. (Which is why the idea of demons has been around longer?) The problem with modern mental health ideology is that it all boils down to your own fault, right? Your brain chemicals are broken. Your cognitive behavior needs fixing. Your parents were deficient and your inner child is permanency effed up. If you're still depressed you didn't do your therapy right. You need to ask everyone to accommodate your improper thoughts.
That said, how do you get the demons to go away?