Category: Religion & Spirituality

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Shocking footage: Teen possessed through phone app

You’ve heard stories about bad things happening through a Ouija board, but a phone app should be safe enough, right? See what you think after watching this disturbing footage of a teenager from Peru who appeared to be possessed after playing with a Ouija game on her telephone. You can see the full story in this news article.

Connecting with entities through these portals is serious business and should not be done lightly. If you plan to play with a Ouija board here are some things that you must do to be safe.

  1. Never do this alone. Make sure someone is around to keep an eye on you. If something goes wrong you want someone there who can notice and help.
  2. Create a protected spiritual space. You might say a prayer and sing a hymn before you begin. You might cast a circle. Do something from your own spiritual practice to call protection to you and ward off darker entities.
  3. Don’t just ask for anyone. This is the spiritual equivalent of  walking out in the street and yelling “Anyone want to come home with me?” Aleister Crowly recommended calling upon specific people and entities. This is a good plan.
  4. If something feels wrong, stop. End the session immediately.
  5. Record your session. It’s good to have a record, but it’s also a way to detect if something odd happened that has been removed from your memory.

If you follow these guidelines you can have an interesting connection with the spirit world. Of course, even these steps don’t guarantee your safety. There is a risk any time that you open this door. Learning what is out there and how to ground and protect yourself are critical.

Of course, sometimes people get hold of Ouija boards and realize that it’s not right for them. If you have a board that you need removed I provide this as a free service to people in the Austin, Texas areas. I will take the board away and see that it is properly handled. I will also perform a sage cleansing of your home to help dispel any lingering negative energy. If you need this service, please contact me directly.

This is the time of year when the veil between worlds is thin, so it’s a great time to reach out. Be smart. Be safe. Have a great Halloween (or Samhain if you will). Take time visit us at the Museum for some extra-spooky fun.

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Some parts may not be included

If it’s never happened to you, it’s difficult to understand the tragedy of losing a loved one, especially in a death that requires an autopsy. The tension is terrible as you wait for the body to be returned from the authorities so that you can begin the process of burial or cremation. What if you discovered that parts of your loved one were missing? confiscated by the authorities?

This actually happened to the family of Brian Shipley of Staten Island who died in a 2005 car crash. Years after he was buried, a highschool classmate was doing a tour of the medical examiner’s office and found his friend’s brain preserved and proudly displayed in a jar. The family had no idea about this.

The Shipleys sued, as their beliefs require that the body be buried as a whole. The case has finally made it through the court. According to an article in the New York Daily News, the court decided it is legal for a medical examiner to keep body parts from an autopsy for their own use and that they don’t even have to tell the family.

Is it reasonable for a medical examiner to be able to keep a few souvenirs of their work? What do we say to people whose beliefs require a full accounting of the remains? Should people be compensated in some way when the state keeps a piece or two?

Personally, your author finds this pretty outrageous.

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Do you take this corpse…

By greyloch from Washington, DC, area, U.S.A. (The Corpse Bride) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons
In Tim Burton’s film, Corpse Bride, Victor Van Dort finds himself unwittingly married to a woman who has been dead for years. Weird fantasy stuff, eh? Not necessarily. The practice of marrying the dead is quite real and more common than you might think.

Called posthumous marriage, the practice of marrying the deceased is legal in France, with similar customs in India, Sudan and China. In France, the custom dates back to World War I, where a few women were married by proxy to soldiers who had died a few weeks earlier. The living party must be able to demonstrate that there was clear intention for the couple to be married. The Guardian reports a posthumous wedding in France as late as 2009.

It’s not just women. The Daily Mail reports the wedding of Thai TV producer, Chadil Deffy, who married his girlfriend, killed in a car accident.

These stories are touching and heart-wrenching all at once. Such a ceremony could provide closure to someone who has been left behind, completing an important part of life that would otherwise have been left unfinished. Of course, it might go deeper. In my travels I had a fascinating conversation with a widow who told me she was still in regular contact with her husband’s spirit who stayed around her house and continued to participate in her life.

Posthumous marriage is not recognized in the United States, though there are cases where people have tried it anyway. Kirsten Smolensky examines Rights of the Dead in the Hofstra Law Review.

Have you been to a strange wedding? Share it with us.

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Hubble Captures a Smiley Face in Space

The Hubble has been exploring new galaxies and capturing the wonders of the unknown, but recently, it seemed to catch a smile, made out of distant galaxies.

news-smiling-hubble1

Each feature that make up the parts of the face, are individual galaxies, pulling themselves together into a ring like formation.

“In this special case of gravitational lensing, a ring – known as an Einstein Ring – is produced from this bending of light, a consequence of the exact and symmetrical alignment of the source, lens and observer and resulting in the ring-like structure we see here,” NASA wrote on its website.

There’s a metaphor in here somewhere…

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Meet the Woman Who Has Had More Than One Thousand Near Death Out of Body Experiences!

Beverly Gilmour of Lancashire claims to have had over one thousand out of body experiences that have all almost led her to her death.

out-of-body

Beverly claims it all started back in 1987, and since then, has had three experiences a month, like clockwork.

“I have an out of body experience and my heart stops.” Claims Ms Gilmour. “Most people who go through an NDE – a near death experience – have them on the operating table or in a moment of trauma like a car accident. Most only have one such experience in a lifetime. But I have been having three a month since 1987. I was terrified at first and a friend suggested it was near death experience.”

She is registered as disabled, and is watched over by her two sons.

The real question is, do the experiences get boring when they happen that excessively?

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Healer Licks Eyeballs to Cure Patients

There’s no shortage of ‘miracle healers’ out there. None are given much credence by the scientific community. As the American Cancer Society has stated, “available scientific evidence does not support claims that faith healing can actually cure physical ailments.” But that doesn’t stop folks who have been seeking miraculous cures from the blessed for centuries upon centuries. Generally speaking it’s referred to as ‘the laying on of hands’. But one woman in Bosnia lays on her tongue. On eyeballs.

eyeball-licking

Hava Cebic lives in a small village in northern Bosnia, is 77 years old, and folks come far and wide to have her lick their eyes. She claims she can cure about anything with her ‘golden tongue’, that she hopes will be preserved after her death (which probably isn’t that far away; she’s 77) to keep helping people.

When Hava was a little girl, she discovered she had the power to help when her brother complained of dry eyes, and jokingly she held them down and licked them. When he claimed he could see better after that, she knew she had a strange gift. Trying it with others (that would have been an interesting conversation to be a fly on the wall for) she found that her lick could cure allergies, dry and tired eyes, conjunctivitis, ocular hypertension and could even relieve the effects of other more serious eye conditions.

“Now, whenever anyone has something stuck in their eye or whatever, they come to me,” said Hava. “They come from different towns and villages and in a minute or two, their problem is solved. But I always make sure I wash my tongue in alcohol before or after an eye lick.”

Hava never asks for anything for her help but people give sizable donations anyway. But I gotta ask: if the cure is the tongue, why does it specifically only seem to work with eyes? Did she try licking other body parts? I’m not trying to be risque or anything, but seriously, even though the scientific method is clearly not involved in this situation, a little trial and error seems like it would have been called for. Still, it’s all kind yuck. I’d have some about of trepidation letting a 77 year old woman lick me anywhere much less my eyeballs. Just not my kind of kink.

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Exorcist Claims Demon is Texting him Hate Messages

satan-is-in-a-cell-phone

“You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.”– Winston Churchill

In that case, this priest from Poland must have really been doing good work because according to him, he’s made the mother of all enemies. Unfortunately, this antagonist has his phone number.

Father Marian Rajchel performed an exorcism in his town of Jaroslaw on a young girl, you know the way you do. Mondays…damn. But this one had some unusual repercussions according to the elderly priest. He believes his efforts must have failed because he’s started getting taunting TEXT MESSAGES (!) from the demon in question on his phone.

“She will not come out of this hell. She’s mine. Anyone who prays for her will die.” said one. The priest, shaken but undeterred, continued to pray and even answered with a message. For all the good it did…

“Shut up, preacher. You cannot save yourself. Idiot. You pathetic old preacher,” was the response.

I’m not entirely dismissing the possibilities of ‘possession’ as it were, but let’s remember, this is a teenage girl from a small town, probably acting out. I’m thinking that her religious parents, unsure of what to do, and as many have before them, blamed the devil. I suspect the girl in question, probably rather displeased with being giving the Linda Blair treatment, is probably messing with the wizened priest with the technology that teenagers know best: their cell phones. Seems like an Occam’s Razor situation to me if there ever was one.

 

 

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Dead Grandmother Sends “Selfie” from Hell

GhostSelfie_01

This is the picture that Gina Mihai of Romania received on her cell phone that she believes was sent by her dead grandmother. “When I switched the phone on I was horrified to see my dead grandmother’s face. She had what looked like a snake around her neck, and the whole image looked as if it had been taken through a hole, like it was shot through a tear in the fabric that separates the living from the dead. I took it to a fortune teller who told me that my grandmother was sending me a message from the other side, the snake around her neck was a symbol of the fact that she was being punished in the other life for some sin. By contacting us she was telling us that if we were to pray for her, we would still be able to save her soul.”

In Romania once a year there is a feast called “The Service of Alms” where Romanians give food to their ancestors in the graveyard. Gina apparently hadn’t made the effort since her grandmother died 3 years previously and received the photo while she was making doughnuts. Since then, she’s been bringing doughnuts every day out to grammie’s grave to placate her afterlife tormenters. A relative said, “The village priest told me that we need to do 40 Days of Alms to make up for those that we missed and we are doing it now. We want to help her soul to be saved.”

Hmm, I wonder if there’s an instagram filter for hell? Someone might want to get on that. My first step would have been to check to see if I had a trade-in available with my phone contract. Either way, free ghost doughnuts! It seems win-win to me.

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Millionaire Guru Kept Frozen by Followers Who Argue: Dead or Asleep?

Shri-Ashutosh-Maharaj

Although doctors in India say that wealthy guru Shri Ashutosh Maharaj is definitely dead after a heart attack, his followers aren’t so sure. They say he may be ‘clinically dead’, but they believe he is spiritually alive and in deep meditation. Some of his followers were quoted as saying, “This is nothing unusual. Medical science does not understand things like yogic science.” and “He is not dead. His holiness will return to life as soon as he feels it is right. We will preserve his body until then.”

And sure enough, the head of the Divine Light Awakening Mission, who is worth 100 million pounds, has been put in a freezer by his followers, who say it won’t harm him since he was used to meditating in the deep cold of the Himalayas. But relatives of the guru claim the followers are just trying to keep control of his money. A court has been asked to investigate for the family who want his body released for cremation.

In his follower’s defense, there have been examples of holy men in recent history who could slow down their body functions to an incredible level through concentration. However, I can’t find any case where anyone could actually stop their heart, at least to the level where modern doctors couldn’t detect life. I wonder how long it will take for the oversized freezer’s electric bills to run through the guru’s fortune?

 

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SENATOR HAS ANGELIC VISITATION FOLLOWING STROKE

Senator Mark Kirk claims he was visited by angels while in the hospital.
Senator Mark Kirk claims he was visited by angels while in the hospital.

Each year, millions of people worldwide report what has commonly become known as Near-Death Experiences, or NDEs. Add Illinois Senator Mark Kirk to that growing list of people who claim to have had an otherworldly experience with what they can only describe as angels.

For Mark Kirk, there was no white light, no tunnel.

What Illinois’ junior U.S. senator experienced was three angels standing at the foot of his bed.

“You want to come with us?” Kirk was asked.

“No,” he told them. “I’ll hold off.”

The Highland Park Republican, who plans to return to the Senate when Congress convenes Thursday, recounted the story in his first in-depth interview since he suffered a massive stroke nearly a year ago.

Awakening from what he says might have been a dream, a side effect of medication or a near-death experience, Kirk found himself lying in a hospital bed in Northwestern Memorial Hospital’s Intensive Care Unit, hooked up to monitors and tubes.

He had no way of immediately knowing what had transpired in the days after he suffered an ischemic stroke on Jan. 21, 2012; that doctors had put him in a coma and performed several surgeries, temporarily removing a 4-by-8 inch portion of skull to allow his brain to swell and heal.

What Kirk did know was how close he had been to death.

“A thing goes off in your head that this is the end,” he remembered.

Kirk’s life and outlook would be dramatically changed, the stroke serving as a defining moment that he said deepened his faith and altered his sense of purpose.

Sitting at the dining room table of his suburban townhouse, his left arm slack, Kirk gestures emphatically with his right hand as he says the experience made him resolve “to never, ever give up.”

He is determined “to just keep going, even when things feel like we’re at the end here. Which is what the ICU was like for me.”

What do you think?  Did Senator Kirk actually have a visitation by three angels as he lay semi-concious in his hospital bed? Or could this have been merely a hallucination created by his brain due to the drugs he was being administered? Or perhaps it was a combination of both?  Maybe our brain isn’t a transmitter, but rather a receiver, and when certain factors affect our brain function, we are actually able to perceive things that normally we would not?

Have you ever had a Near Death Experience of your own? If so, please feel free to share your experience here.

READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE:   Senator Kirk speaks for the first time about his stroke