The spirit of counsel is a gift of the Holy Spirit that enables us to discern motives and their sources, to distinguish that which is authentically of God from that which issues from a source that is psychically based but assumes a divine authority. All life is communication, and the final assessment of the value of any one life is the depth of relationship it has effected with as many other living forms as have been in its reach of attainment. As Martin Buber says, 'All real living is meeting'. When the judgment comes after our death, we shall be tested not on what we have attained in terms of possessions, knowledge or power in this world, but on the depth of relationship we have attained with our fellow men. As St John of the Cross puts it: 'When the evening comes, we will be judged on love'. We shall have more to reflect on this sombre, yet strangely liberating theme later.
The spirit of discernment helps us to discern the spirits. We remember St John's warning (1 John 4:1-2), not to trust any and every spirit, but to test them all to see whether they are of God. The Spirit of God acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, an acknowledgment that is something more than a mere theological affirmation. It is an undertaking that we shall follow the way that He showed when He lived among us, to the end that we may attain mature humanity measured by nothing less than His full stature (Eph. 4:13). This spirit of discernment is also the spirit of discipline, the true way of the disciple, that we have to obey if the spirit of counsel is to do its work effectively through us. Only then can we be an immaculate instrument for the healing work entrusted to us by God.
It would seem from what we have already noted that the way of effective counselling is traversed more by patient, trustful silence than by assertive action and masterful interference and direction. Since the true Counsellor is always the Holy Spirit, it is not to be wondered at that our best service is given when we are most receptive to His wisdom. We deliver His word most faithfully when we are so pure and naked in intent that we colour His truth with as little of our own emotional accretions and prejudices as possible.
Yet, as we have already seen, the Spirit of God does not merely use the counsellor as a mouth-piece. On the contrary, the counsellor's life and witness are part of the spirit of counsel. In all spiritual transactions the human role is as important as that of God. He initiates the work, but it is our privilege and responsibility to execute it:
Unless the Lord build the house,
its builders will have toiled in vain.
Unless the Lord keeps watch over a city,
in vain the watchman stands on guard.
In vain you rise up early and go late to rest,
toiling for the bread you eat;
he supplies the need of those he loves.
(Ps. 127:1-2)
If we are to play our part in the world's work, and especially in its deliverance from the law of decay to the glory of transfiguration, we must be constantly open to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit who speaks not on His own authority, but tells us only what He hears (John 16:13). The message is from the Father, from Whom He proceeds and from the Son to whose glory He is the agent as well as the witness. 'He will glorify me, for everything that he makes known to you he will draw from what is mine. All that the Father has is mine, and that is why I said, "Everything that he makes known to you he will draw from what is mine".' (John 16:14-15).
The work of discernment has two faces; the ability to establish the source and authority of one's own inner guidance and counsel, and the power to assess and direct the guidance that emanates through the lives of other people. For if the guidance is aberrant, the lives of those who rely on its directing power will founder on the rocks of illusion and mischievous misdirection. If the guidance is, on the other hand, of noble quality and strict logic, it will bring all those with whom the person communicates into creative psychic fellowship with him and indeed with all life.
In our unenlightened state we believe that our mind is the source and foundation of all knowledge that issues from us and is translated into words of wisdom. This human wisdom is, in fact, an amalgam of tradition handed on to us and the prejudice that rises up from our own unconscious mind. It speaks to the condition of those who share our unenlightenment and are full of unquestioned assurance, and it serves merely to confirm past attitudes and established ways of thinking. Furthermore, apparently autonomous, or self-governing, sources of information and direction may impinge themselves on the conscious mind, so that the person is led in a new way, sometimes with dictatorial force. These autonomous sources of direction that appear to take over the personality may claim a god-like authority, and threaten the person - and those whom he may be impelled to instruct according to the message he has received - with dire consequences if the word is not obeyed. In this way the individual becomes increasingly dominated by the source of information that wells up within him and at the same time overwhelms him from beyond himself, so that his life is spent largely in appeasing a menacing, nameless power that assumes a divine role. This power takes its origin from a split-off part of the personality, or perhaps several such split-off parts, that have never been effectively acknowledged either by the person's family when he was still a child or by himself when he reached adulthood. That which remains unacknowledged, whether it resides in the individual psyche or is a shattered, divided member of the society in which it lives, will wreak its havoc on the body of which it is a rejected member, as it appropriates its measure of life that is given by the Holy Spirit. Nothing can ever be rejected, nor can anything be finally destroyed, however evil we may judge it to be. Everything in existence owes its being to the Creator of all things, Whose nature is love and Whose purpose is redemption and sanctification. Therefore nothing in creation is so small that it can be ignored or too insignificant to be acknowledged. This is the supreme law of relationships, that all things have their place in the one body. And if their place is badly tended and abhorrent to behold, it must be swept up, cleaned and made a haven of welcome by the remainder of the body of God.
Until this is achieved, the aberrant member will assert a private directive force and wreak havoc among the remainder of his brethren. The person who is the victim of this idiosyncratic source of misinformation will be driven to superstitious rituals in order to placate it. Superstition is an irrational regard for a power or force that appears to transcend the natural order and is of a potentially menacing quality. That there are such powers which are outside the natural law depends on our grasp of that law; I believe that if the human were more spiritually based he could aspire to an understanding of the psychic realm that is at present denied him. As we have already seen, the gifts of the Holy Spirit are mediated psychically, and some of them, notably those of healing and manifesting miraculous powers, far exceed anything that can be explained in terms of contemporary science. It would seem that the barriers of time and space which limit our rational view of the world can be penetrated during moments of illumination, when reality is known as the unity of all things in God. But the power of the Holy Spirit is beneficent, inspiring and of great love. Like the father having compassion on his children, so has the Lord compassion on all who fear Him, for He knows how we are made, He knows full well that we are dust (Ps. 103:13-14). By comparison, a frankly malicious psychic source that assumes power over a person's life - whether that source has its origin from within his own psyche, which is the usual condition, or whether it invades his psyche from the vast psychic realm that both transcends and embraces all individual consciousness, in this respect being akin to the collective unconscious described by Carl Jung - is dictatorial, cruel and without compassion on the one it dominates. Alternatively, it may exalt him for a time so as to delude him into thinking he is very important and his message is vital for the future of mankind. As a consequence he feels superior to other people and pities their ignorance and unadvanced state of consciousness. This alternating swing between exaltation and euphoria on the one hand and tyrannical coercion leading to insecurity and naked terror on the other is the way in which a person possessed by an alien psychic entity has his power of private judgment gradually sapped and annulled. The end is enslavement to irrational forces that demolish his power of judgment and his place in society as a responsible, caring member. He becomes increasingly isolated from the fellowship of his peers and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. He slowly descends into hell, which is most convincingly visualised as an atmosphere of total separation from all sources of relationship, while his awareness of his own dereliction remains until it assumes a terrifying intensity.
There are, however, all grades of sources acting apparently from within the personal psyche that offer inner guidance. The most perfect of these powers is the divine spark; this is the Word of God that is also the light of men (John 1:4). It is the power of Christ in each of us that illuminates the human spirit and is the hope of a glory to come (Col. 1:27). The most terrifying are the aberrant, demonic powers, which we have already considered, that lead, if unchecked, to a total disintegration of the personality. In between these two extremes of sanctity and horror there are psychic entities of an indeterminate nature that are regularly tapped during spiritualistic seances and may occasionally impinge themselves on the psyche of naturally sensitive people even if they have not meddled in occult matters. These are somewhat more difficult to assess, but in the main their spiritually indifferent nature becomes increasingly clear to the disinterested observer as their works show themselves in the lives of those who follow their direction.
It is not unusual in the experience of a spiritual counsellor to encounter a person who is suddenly impelled to take down in writing messages that purport to derive from an impressive personage now inhabiting the world of the life beyond death. These messages may give details about this future existence that we all no doubt are destined to experience after our own death. Sometimes they contain precognitive shafts of information that may be confirmed at a later date in the life of the person who is the amanuensis of the source of direction, or else in the life of one of his (or, more likely, her) associates. The moral and spiritual content of these messages may be quite unexceptionable, stressing the usual concerns of a virtuous person and extolling the practice of honesty, devotion and loyalty. But they are tediously repetitive and do not in any way inspire the person who is controlled by the source of direction to realise those qualities in his own life. Furthermore, they tend to encroach with increasing intensity on the private life of the person, so that he feels he is bound by a sacred duty to lay himself open to the messages and to be completely obedient to their author. Eventually forecasts of coming events are made that are not substantiated.
It seems probable that, at least on some occasions, the source of this indifferent information is the mind-soul complex of a person who has survived death and is inhabiting an astral realm in a purgatorial state. Such a 'discarnate entity' tends to obsess a sensitive person's mind, and may well reactivate and use split-off portions of that individual's own personality. In the realm of psychical research it is generally agreed that the 'control' operating through the medium and bringing what purport to be messages from deceased friends and relatives is a sub-personality of that medium. It may well be in contact with psychic sources beyond the limitation of the time-space realm in which we live our mortal lives.
Interesting as all this may be on the level of theoretical psychology, as a phenomenon directing the lives of people it is untrustworthy and ultimately deleterious. It consumes an increasing amount of time that could be more usefully spent in service and prayer, and it insidiously saps the will and initiative of the person, who is gradually anchored to the very demanding regime imposed by the entity. The entity is, in all probability, not so much evil as misdirected, and it needs release and redirection. The nearest scriptural parallel to this situation is described in the Acts of the Apostles where St Paul and his entourage were followed by a slave-girl who was possessed by an oracular spirit which was a source of great financial profit to her owners. The spirit shouted through her, 'These men are servants of the Supreme God, and are declaring to you a way of salvation.' The girl did this day after day, until Paul could bear it no longer. Rounding on the spirit, he said, 'I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her', and it went out there and then (Acts 16:16-18).
The interesting feature of this spirit is that it recognised Christ, inasmuch as it extolled Paul and his friends as servants of God and commended their way as one of salvation. In this respect, we come back again to St John's warning about testing the spirits to see whether they are of God. This spirit might quite possibly have affirmed that Jesus Christ had come in the flesh, but it would not have led anyone who heard its message into the way of Christ. On the contrary, by its repetitive proclamation it would more likely have alienated the casual listener from a serious commitment to the one whom it proclaimed. Jesus himself deprecated 'vain repetitions', or a constant babble of words, when one prays to God (Matt. 6:7). What is required is a needle-sharp attention to the voice of the Holy Spirit within one, and an apposite response in words, either spoken or else mentally articulated, to the message one has received. The voice of the Spirit of God within one, in this respect, is usually a silent recognition and resolve that fills one with renewed awareness and dedication; it is much less often an audible directive which one is to follow. Indeed, audible voices within one have to be tested very rigorously to see whether they are authentically of God or come from some diseased psychological state or aberrant psychic source, such as we have already considered.
A message that is authentically spiritual and directed from the Holy Spirit may also come in words; the great prophetic literature of the Old Testament is an immortal record of God's communication with man. The prophetic voice is direct, honest in that it does not flatter the listener or seek to ingratiate itself with him, succinct and morally enlightening. It comes, like the Spirit, blowing where it wills, so that no one can predict its course, let alone control it (John 3:8). The voice comes only when it is necessary for it to be heard, and it leaves the person whose burden and privilege it is to transmit it free at other times. But that person has to devote himself to prayer and following the requirements of the spiritual life. These include honesty in material matters, integrity in personal relationships, and loyalty and renunciation in the service of mankind as a whole. The key word is chastity, a willed continence and a purity and simplicity of taste in all actions, words and thoughts.
When one is the dedicated servant of the Lord, one's life is given over more fully to His service, until the life one lives is no longer one's own life but the life that Christ lives in one, to quote St Paul (Gal. 2: I9) for a third time. This means that the superficial, ego-centred life of mortal man, which we all live in our unenlightened moments, has to fall away and be replaced by a life of self-denial in service to God and His creatures. But in losing the ego-directed life we come to a knowledge of the self within that partakes of eternity, since its span is not limited by the time-space world of rational consciousness. No prophet of Israel demonstrates this truth more convincingly than Jeremiah, whose private relationship with the God he served so selflessly was often one of searing complaint and rebellion. 'Lord, I will dispute with thee, for thou art just; yes, I will plead my case before thee. Why do the wicked prosper and traitors live at ease?' (Jeremiah 12:1), and again, 'Alas, alas, my mother, that you ever gave me birth! A man doomed to strife, with the whole world against me. I have borrowed from no one, I have lent to no one, yet all men abuse me' (Jeremiah 15:10). To which God replies: 'If you will then turn back to me, I will take you back and you shall stand before me. If you choose noble utterance and reject the base, you shall be my spokesman' (verse 19). Jeremiah's prophetic work estranges him from nearly all his friends, the scribe Baruch being a notable exception, and God tells Jeremiah that all he can look forward to is service with the Most High. There are no worldly benefits in store for him, as his tragic life story unfolds up to his disappearance with the rebels into Egypt, where he was carried away by them after the fall of Jerusalem, and where presumably he died.
If one is a servant of God one grows in spiritual grace; the message ennobles the prophet and those who have the courtesy and wisdom to heed it. The message from the Holy Spirit sums up the moral climate of the age, at least in the society to which the prophet addresses himself, and it denounces hypocrisy and aberrations fearlessly and categorically. But it also shows the way towards regeneration and healing. It is seldom directed to a single person only - unless that person is a representative of the society in which the prophet works - but it speaks to the condition of all who are addressed. Furthermore, its dire predictions will be fulfilled unless the message is taken to heart and a new direction forged by the chastened wills of those who have heard. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but this fear is one of awe, reverence and burning regard that is more akin to dedication and love than to terror and dismay. This terror, based on the fear of annihilation if the voice is not obeyed, is much more typical of the malicious or morally indifferent psychic entity that possesses the sensitive person and perverts his whole life towards servile compliance and superstitious ritual. The prophet grows into the stature of a full person seen most perfectly in Jesus Himself and foreshadowed by Jeremiah. The transmitter of false prophecy emanating from a psychic source becomes distressingly ego-centred, and his personality becomes coarse and clamant, as is apparent to any disinterested observer. Unfortunately the group of disciples that trail after him remain blind to this moral and spiritual decline, while they become increasingly seduced by vain promises and heretical teachings.
The history of the various cults that are based on idiosyncratic teachings transmitted by a self-appointed leader and the occult groups that hang on the utterances of entranced mediums emphasises the vast difference of their end-product when it is compared with that of the heights reached by the authentic spiritual traditions of the world, enshrined in the great religious faiths. Mysticism and prophecy are the two authentic products of human communion with God. Mystical experience brings the individual who has known as much of the reality of God's unifying presence as it is in the human capacity to bear, into a state of Christ-like renunciation and service for his future work. Prophecy brings the divine message down to the world where it may reconcile fathers to sons and sons to fathers like Elijah, who has always to come before the Lord reveals Himself to subsequent generations lest there is a terrible cosmic destruction (Mal. 4:6).
To bring these thoughts down to the counselling situation, the spirit of discernment works best when we are silent, still and alert. The cloud of unknowing occludes all worldly wisdom, so that we may be enveloped in the divine presence that lies both within us and yet transcends all mortal concepts, while the cloud of forgetting separates us from the emotional anguish and the corruption of thought that find their origin in past prejudice. In this state of complete dedication to the Most High we can listen effectively through the spirit of discernment to what is said, while at the same time sensing the psychic emanations that issue from the person who speaks. These, even more than the rational content of his words, afford a deep measure of the person's integrity and reliability.
Spiritual discernment, though never denying the reason, moves beyond its inevitable limitations. In fact, if our rational faculty is to grow into maturity, it has to learn sufficient humility to be able to renounce its secure seat of dogmatic authority and be open to new insights. These come to us psychically from our communication with other living sources through the power of the Holy Spirit. The spirit of discernment will recognise and analyse the various 'spirits' obsessing the mind of the disturbed patient or the self-styled prophet, as the case may be. It is in this way that the intuition is developed; this is the faculty of rapid, concise and accurate assessment of a situation without prior knowledge of the pertinent facts from which a rational deduction could have been made. The succinct assessment is succeeded by positive action to heal or to remove foreign interference, as the circumstances may indicate.
The possibility of psychic invasion by foreign, hostile powers or entities was taken for granted in the time of Jesus, and is also accepted by many peoples who are dismissed out of hand by the sophisticated world as primitive, even uncivilised. On the whole, this suspicious attitude towards the possibility of invading psychic forces is soundly based, but it is accepted too dogmatically by modern psychological theory and practice. It is certainly much more convenient and plausible to attribute all mental abnormality to a breakdown in the person's own mind, usually as a result of dysfunction of his brain. But, in fact, living systems are more complex than this, and it is the rule that any disease or disturbance of human function is likely to have a number of factors involved in its causation.
One of the primary principles of scientific research is to seek always for the least complicated explanation, in order to keep things as simple as possible. This principle of simplification works by cutting away all unnecessary hypotheses using what is called Occam's razor, William of Occam being the mediaeval scholar who first enunciated the principle. This approach to truth works best in inorganic systems, but progressively less well in the more evolved living species, of which the human is the most complex, at least in our world. Admittedly in any human disease there is presumably a primary or principal cause, but to it there are added in most cases a number of precipitating or contributory factors which may, for instance, be genetic, environmental, psychological, social or psychic. This is simply a tribute to the complex nature of living forms who, far from being isolated units, thrive in close contact with their fellows, alternatively in co-operation and rivalry, in accord and destructive fury.
Those who are psychically sensitive can often detect the presence of foreign forces, or entities, in some localities. These may be, and indeed usually are, memory traces of past events that occurred in those premises; they are comparable in their way to the aroma that may persist in certain places, except that a psychic residue can persist indefinitely unlike a physical marker that wanes rapidly with the passing of time. On other occasions the entities appear to be a part of the personality of someone who once frequented the place in his physical body. Such a personality is described as earth-bound, and needs to be moved on to his further destination which God alone knows. All this is not surprisingly dismissed as superstitious nonsense by those of obtuse sensitivity, who live in an insulated, self-centred edifice but do not effect deep relationships with other people. Perhaps they are the most fortunate, for they at least remain oblivious of and impervious to a great deal of the emotional turmoil and naked evil that interpenetrate the collective psyche of our species! But this insensitivity excludes such people from the heights of many of the most important experiences in life, whether aesthetic, altruistic, heroic or mystical. To know these fully, one has to quit the little citadel of the ego, so safe and reassuring, and enter the boundless tracts of one's own psyche which is in limitless communion with the collective psyche of the human race and no doubt with much more besides this. This is the way of counsel by which the spirit of discernment develops in mastery.
That the psyche of highly sensitive people, especially those who are already psychiatrically ill with a known mental disorder and those who meddle unwisely in psychic matters, may be obsessed or even possessed by discarnate forces is again well recognised by those with special gifts of discernment. These gifted people are, in my experience, rare. In this treacherous and highly nebulous realm there are obsessional believers in spirit possession just as in the mental sciences generally there are the great majority who dismiss the possibility of possession out of hand, indeed impugning the sanity of anyone who shows any sympathy towards such a belief. The truth lies somewhere between these two extremes, with the bias heavily weighted in favour of the agnostic viewpoint. It is extremely unlikely that a mentally and emotionally healthy person would ever be invaded by an extraneous psychic source. Therefore it can be assumed that the potential victim is already seriously deranged, thereby being rendered all the more vulnerable to psychic assault. Likewise the type of person who is obsessively drawn to private psychic exploration is usually emotionally abnormal - his delight in the occult is a way of relieving his feelings of inferiority in his daily work, so that he can bask in a self-constructed fantasy world of 'gnosis' reserved for initiates into secret mysteries and arcane, man-made societies. That such secret orders may possess some psychic knowledge is conceivable, but it is seldom deep and nearly always deleterious to those in contact with it. This is because it is used selfishly for personal ends even if service to others is proclaimed. Like attracts like in the world of relationships, and the entities attracted to this debased type of usage are on the dark, sinister verge. We have already considered how such an obsessed person gradually surrenders his integrity, becoming enslaved to destructive forces, and ending up in a hell-like state of isolation.
In dealing with this situation, the person who may be psychically invaded must be investigated initially by the established psychiatric and psychotherapeutic agencies. As we have noted, such people are already mentally abnormal, and even if an infesting psychic power is involved, they still need specialised psychiatric care. The entity will not be displaced so long as the victim clings on to it. Only when he seeks help and is prepared to face his past life with its devious problems in an attitude of sober responsibility can an attempt be made to dislodge an invading force. This should be done preferably by a minister of religion using the authority implicit in his ordination, and here there must be both belief in the transcendent power of God and the authenticity of the orders under which the minister functions. Such an entity has to be commanded to quit its present unsatisfactory abode in the name of God, and directed to seek God's forgiving help so as to come to its rightful place in the life beyond death. Minor degrees of obsession can be dealt with by a psychically sensitive lay person, but it is certain that the authority of an ordained minister is essential for more dangerous work. He should, in any case, be protected by the prayers of many concerned people; religious communities can play an especially valuable part in this work of protective prayer. The same basic approach is appropriate for haunted premises. The use of consecrated water is recommended as is also the Eucharist if the circumstances are appropriate. The minister of deliverance, a more fortunate title than exorcist because it is less negative in approach to the discarnate entity, learns the way through his own experience and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
It should always be stressed that the possibility of psychic invasion does not deny the reality of personal responsibility. The invasion would not have occurred had the person not been open to it. It is for this reason that our way of life and the control we have over our thoughts and actions are most important. Promiscuity in relationships, notably sexual ones, lays the person especially open to psychic invasion; this applies also to drug abuse and alcoholic excess. People who live their lives in chastity and order are not liable to infestation by dark forces. The Holy Spirit is a spirit of order and discipline. He produces remarkable phenomena, but these serve to inspire us to a higher calling and a more selfless love of others. St Paul reminds us that the fruits of the Holy Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, fidelity, gentleness and self-control (Gal. 5:22). He may be a hard taskmaster, but the Holy Spirit always leads us into the full exercise of our humanity, a humanity to be measured by nothing less than the humanity of God the Son. The fruits of invading forces potentiate the natural corruptibility of our unredeemed lower nature - they do not so much add new perversions as unmask and emphasise the weaknesses already present. St Paul's list again cannot be improved: fornication, impurity, indecency, idolatry, sorcery, quarrels, a contentious temper, envy, fits of rage, selfish ambitions, dissensions, party intrigues, jealousies, drinking bouts and the like (Gal. 5:20). People who live squalid lives deny the high calling of a human being, and are open to the dark elemental forces of the collective unconscious that seek to bring all creation back to the primal chaos from which it was fashioned by God's great creative act.
There can be little doubt that the spirit of discernment is a high attribute of God's spirit of counsel set upon us as a mark of distinction. To bear it the life of the counsellor must be one of self-giving discipline to the Most High.