3. TIL Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture. In the U.S.A., voices are ha...

TIL Hallucinatory 'voices' shaped by local culture. In the U.S.A., voices are harsh and threatening while those heard by schizophrenics in Africa and India tend to be more benign and playful.

I think it is much more likely this rather than anything to do with Jesus.

Then why are there lots of people who report that they can end these events by calling on the name of Jesus?

That's not the best way to open up a debate, but I'm ended up really investigating this stuff heavily a few years back - and regretting it.

I had been, at that time, asking lots of people about their experiences with sleep paralysis for a few months. This was most certainly not anything like a rigorous study. I was just looking for patterns, and asking, of course, if they had been able to end sleep paralysis by any means - two people out of the 30 or so I asked remarked that praying to Jesus did actually stop it. I have, since then, heard more and more such reports, of the same, along with many accounts that people tended to get particularly bad sleep paralysis when they began to investigate converting to Christianity - which is a strange coincidence, I suspect.

I also noted that multiple people told me they saw "hooded figures", and even brief googling here will indicate that this is a very common thing for people to report in sleep paralysis. (Why were those people, across the world, telling me they were seeing similar things, when they don't even communicate with each other?)

After I had been investigating this for a few months, I ended up seeing a shadow person in my kitchen while going down for a midnight snack. It was not a good time. It happened so suddenly that I was surprised by it, and I actually fell to the floor, as it was so shocking.

I am a Christian, and frankly, I do not suppose then, if you would be surprised to hear that my position on this matter is that these beings are demonic. That is, they are biblical demons, and this phenomena is essentially paranormal. Allow me to give an example:

It is known to you, I am sure, that many people report seeing "alien greys" in the sleep paralysis experience. Well, the infamous occultist Aleister Crowley claimed to had summoned a spiritual being he called LAM which bears an uncanny resemblance to the modern grey archetype. Frankly, much of the sleep paralysis experience - and very *specifically the shadow person / "alien abduction" reports - seems to be tied to the paranormal and specifically the occult. People also report seeing similar beings on Serotonergic hallucinogenic like DMT (see "machine elves"), but even in that case these exact same substances are used by various cultures as Entheogens: literally, drugs used to make contact with spirits, which is known as "pharmika" in the new testament, translated "sorcerery".

Furthermore, have you actually looked at the experiments that people did to "prove" the current scientific model of sleep paralysis? They noted activity in the amygdala while the person reported the subjective experiences of sleep paralysis - On the basis of this correlation, scientists concluded the amygdala causes the sleep paralysis. But if the amygdala is the fear center of the brain, and you have a terrifying subjective experience occurring to the individual, why, precisely, could the causality here not be going the opposite way? That is, the amygdala is activating because the individual is experiencing a frightening experience which is actually occurring to them? the problem with the latter explanation is, by necessity, it would require a serious examination of spirits, and materialistic science wants nothing of this. link.

I have said enough. The point is this; Jesus Christ is real, he is Lord, and he can deliver people from sins. He was crucified for our sins, buried, and raised on the third day, and whomever shall call on the name of the lord shall be saved. Repent, and be saved.

I sincerely think this whole sleep paralysis thing is some sort of smokescreen the devil is throwing up to try to either distract, or intimidate, people away from faith in Jesus. At a minimum, the current scientific explanations that want to sweep this under the rug as some species of "bad dream" fail to either provide meaningful help, or to explain the phenomena.

That is my position.

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