Downloads & The Demonic

And: St. Anatole Vs. The Antichrist; Internews Fraud; Anglo-Saxon Wyrd-ness

From Grok, an AI program. I know, I know…

A happy Sunday to you all. I will be busy tomorrow morning, and might not have time to get a newsletter out. I will definitely be preoccupied on Tuesday morning, so if I an get a newsletter out that day, it will be quite late. You know how I hate to miss my obligations to you subscribers, who do so much for me, so I’m sending this one out today in case I am not able to produce on Monday or Tuesday.

Here is a passage from a new book, Freedom From Darkness, by Teresa Yanaros, a former occultist who became Catholic. Yanaros used to be a tarot card reader, and was involved with various other occult endeavors. The stuff really works, she says — but it’s demonic, and will steal your soul. She explains it all in her book, and how to escape it.

This bit knocked me flat, for a reason that I’ll explain below:

Downloads from discarnate intelligences. Where have I heard that before? Here’s material from religion scholar Diana Pasulka’s recent book Encounters: Experiences With Non-Human Intelligences. In her earlier book, American Cosmic, which is an excellent place to start learning about the state of the UFO phenomenon today (though things have rapidly accelerated since it was published in 2017), Pasulka introduces readers to a senior space scientist she calls “Tyler D.,” to protect his identity. He has subsequently been outed elsewhere as Tim Taylor, who is both a space scientist and a biomedical executive. In American Cosmic, “Tyler D.” explains that he “downloads” information from these non-human intelligences by placing himself in a receptive, meditative state. He says they have given him lots of technological information, and that some of his life-changing biomedical patents came from information downloaded from them. “I don’t know why it works,” he tells Pasulka. “It’s more important to me that it works. … I just use the process because it works.”

In her later book, Pasulka introduces readers to “Simone,” a venture capitalist and AI executive, who also “downloads.” She was later identified elsewhere as Simone Plante. From Encounters:

More:

A bit more from Encounters:

Simone reached out to me because she had read about Tyler D. and his experience of “the download.” She knew about the process firsthand and wanted to provide more information about it. She wanted to know more about it from me, as I had met more than a few people who engaged in it and they had all created revolutionary and viable technologies.

Pasulka reminds the reader that Tyler D. isn’t sure what these beings are sending him information in his downloads, but he judges that they are benevolent:

Ah, there you have it. Note not “will also become” but have also become.

Let’s go back to these passages from my book Living In Wonder, from conversations I had with a university scholar I call “Jonah,” who was deeply into the occult as a worshiper, until he fled and became a Christian:

[Jonah] explained that the currents of thought that have scoured and flushed away all sense of meaning from existence (“all the nihilism, the scientism, and relativism”) are not ends in themselves but the means with which demonic entities wish to clear the ground to prepare people for what Jonah calls “the religion of Antichrist.”

“Once they feel that vacuum of meaninglessness,” he said, “once they encounter that starvation for spiritual realities that truly exist, the enemy forces are ten miles ahead of us, in having this infrastructure prepared to pull people into things that seem benign but will eventually be revealed as gateways to hell itself.”

We need to talk, he said, because people today aren’t wrong to seek enchantment—but if they do it outside a clearly and uniquely Christian path, they will inevitably be drawn into the demonic. Neutrality in this conflict is not possible. “Maybe it’s my role to be biased in that way,” he said, “because of how badly I was burned.”

Burned he certainly was by his search for strong light. What makes Jonah typical is his early seeking in the occult, looking for something more exciting than the bland suburban evangelicalism in which he was raised. What makes him extraordinary is that he ended up as a ritual worshiper of demons and has confessed now to having been possessed, both willingly and unwillingly, on many occasions. Plus, he was not only an occult practitioner but a scholar of occultism and esotericism. He agreed to share his story with me if I masked some details to protect his identity.

More:

I asked Jonah to recall key turning points in which he made fateful decisions that led him down the dark path. He said in retrospect that it was “just being continually seduced by ideologies that felt like the completely natural conclusion of the last one.”

He considers his normie American evangelical upbringing to have been “deeply tragic, considering how unequipped the authority figures in my life were to shield me from the increasingly demonic spiritual and intellectual paths to which I became enslaved.

“Plenty of these authority figures recognized the reality of the demonic but they brought a knife to a gun fight in their attempt to stave off such influences,” he says. “Some had simply no answers, or wholly unsatisfying ones, for my myriad youthful theological curiosities. Theology as presented within the evangelical world all seemed so arbitrary. Mostly, it was emotional experiences of worship that were cast as the foundation of the faith. So, when those dried up for me, my conservative faith seemed untenable.”

The unbounded search for secret knowledge helped lead him into the occult:

For a couple of years, Jonah thought he was being initiated into special knowledge, into gnosis, with a group of elect who had been chosen by the gods as their acolytes to enlighten humanity. Those early experiences of visions were genuinely beautiful and truly meaningful. If they had not been, Jonah would not have been seduced into slavery.

“Behind this idea of morally neutral, psychedelic enchantment was the most satanic evil possible,” he now says. “I have no excuse for it, but I have to say that I had been primed by these ideologies over the years to explain away all this to my family and friends as it’s just nature, it’s beauty, it’s tolerance, it’s all these things—and then I get to the point where I’m literally seeing red dragons, I am feeling demonic loathing for humanity, and I am being possessed.

“I went along with it, because I thought I had no other choice at that point. I had been seeing hell itself all along, but I’d convinced myself, through my sophisticated pagan ideology, that it was something else. But finally I couldn’t deny it.”

These weren’t ancient gods at all, he finally understood, but demons. He began to suspect that there was something wrong with all of this and at last confronted the numerous contradictions in his occult worldview. Once Jonah grasped that he was being manipulated by the entities with whom he was communicating, and that these were beings that wanted to destroy humanity, he wanted out.

I couldn’t use all the material Jonah gave me in the book. I just re-read the transcripts of our interviews. This Jonah quote jumped out; it ties to the “download”:

Occult influences in particular prey upon curiosity through the idea of esoteric secrecy. No matter how popular a given cultural product may be, it can still incept the idea that its viewer/listener/reader is gaining access to a privileged secret, to spiritual truths that have been hidden from them. This is the question of the serpent to Eve — “Has God indeed said, ‘You shall not eat of every tree of the garden’?” That is, are you sure that the limit placed upon you is valid? The demonic manipulates us through our disobedience and our pride, it makes us mistrust the wisdom of the rules that we are correctly subject to, it causes us to fail to realize that the fullness of life is within the limits which God has placed upon His creation.

More from the interviews (this is also not in Living In Wonder):

So many spiritual experiences seemed to be about individuals feeling unmediated oneness with the divine. And if all the spiritualities of the world were finally coming together to blend with each other (and also blend with cutting edge science and psychology) to manifest as the true religion of humanity, why should we not suspect that humanity was on the cusp of some great evolutionary leap?

More dangerous still was when I began to encounter and accept ideas that suggested that such romantic superhumanism was itself only a rudimentary way of expressing darker realities that humans are not meant to comprehend. Maybe instead of nature spirits, psychedelic entities, UFOs, and technological intelligences being part of the augmentation of the human, here to guide humanity into our divine destiny, perhaps humanity is meant to be dissolved into these non-human phenomena entirely. Maybe to be divinized is to be disintegrated. Of course, such madness is the perfect justification for demonic assaults upon the human, but in light of all that came before, I bought into the lies. Once again, this just seemed to be saying the quiet part aloud.

So, look: A friend asked me over the weekend what I think the connection between AI and UFOs is. The answer is in what you read in this post: that all of this stuff is coming at us fast in an attempt to merge humanity with what Paul Kingsnorth calls The Machine, and to dissolve our humanity into technology, as a way of abolishing man. When I told my friend that, she, an architect, said that you would scarcely believe how rapidly AI is taking over her discipline. Architects and drafters are throwing themselves into it, enthusiastically becoming dependent on it.

We all are, or will be. I think we Christians are being fools if we don’t want to think about this stuff because it’s frightening. Yeah, it is frightening — but what’s the alternative? The quickening is happening on the UFO disclosure front. Little is making its way into mainstream media, but if you follow the narrative, it’s accelerating.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I believe that humanity is going to be told by the US government that We Are Not Alone In The Cosmos. These “aliens,” we will be told, are showing themselves now out of concern for humanity’s well being. They will perform signs and wonders, and offer us a plan of some kind to guarantee peace and safety. A shocking number of people, even Christians, will accept this as a valid and authoritative new revelation. The triumph of the therapeutic in the 20th century, in which the masses disconnected from a fixed transcendent standard of moral truth, instead choosing to rationalize “what works” for them, to ease their anxieties, has severely damaged our ability to discern truth from lies, and to recognize beings presenting themselves as angels of light as something else. Those who don’t go along will be marginalized and despised as far-right lunatics standing in the way of peace, technological progress, and enlightenment.

The dark material about the occult and technology are only two chapters in Living In Wonder, which is mostly about how to recover a Christian sense of enchantment. But you can’t have godly enchantment without raising the possibility of its dark, counterfeit version. We had better pay attention. We may not be interested in UFOs, AI, and that world, but it is very much interested in us.