Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 9, 2008
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Journal of Unification Studies Vol. 9, 2008 |
Dr. Shakuntala Modi, who developed her own depossession techniques, gives the following description of one of her clinical sessions with a hypnotized patient named Dave:
As Dave looked, he was surprised to see that he had many layers of these spirits still left in different parts of his body. He described these layers as thin layers of a pastry. He indicated having twelve layers in his brain, fifteen layers in his eyes, fifteen layers in his shoulders, four layers in his lower back and twenty-nine layers in his abdominal area. We requested angels of the Light to remove entities from each and every layer of his body. He described how the angels, very patiently and systematically, released the entities from each layer and helped them to the Light. Then the angels cleansed and healed those areas and filled and shielded them with the Light.[1]
It is noteworthy that this description of attached spirits is remarkably similar to accounts by Unification shamanic healer Dae Mo Nim. It also matches the descriptions of Dr. William Baldwin (1939-2004), whose Spirit Releasement Therapy to remove earthbound spirits has striking similarities to the work of Dae Mo Nim. This paper will examine both similarities and differences between Baldwin’s therapies and Dae Mo Nim’s shamanistic healing.
Dr. William Baldwin, together with his wife Judith, developed their clinical depossession techniques, which he later termed Spirit Releasement Therapy (SRT), quite independently of Dae Mo Nim. For numerous reasons, it is safe to suggest that Baldwin and Dae Mo Nim had no knowledge of each other’s efforts. Yet, they arrived at stunningly similar understandings of the nature of attached, i.e., possessing, earthbound spirits, as well as of how their liberation can be effected.
While it is true that other notable writers/practitioners have addressed certain realities of earthbound spirits -- e.g., Emanuel Swedenborg in The Universal Human,[2] Carl Wickland in Thirty Years Among the Dead[3] and, more recently, Edith Fiore in The Unquiet Dead,[4] etc., none clearly grasped the fundamental truth discovered by Baldwin and Dae Mo Nim: that these emotionally bewildered spirits do not just float about in some featureless void after death but almost always attach themselves to people on earth. Stated more broadly, literally millions and millions of deceased human beings have opted, as spirits, and for many different reasons, to attach themselves to the physical bodies of people on earth. Needless to say, this is an extremely unnatural, distorted state of affairs, especially when one considers that the experience of “death” should rightfully carry a person into the next higher dimension of life.
Though Baldwin began his professional career as a dentist, he earned a doctorate in psychology in 1988 with a dissertation entitled “Diagnosis and Treatment of the Spirit Possession Syndrome.” After 10 years of using hypnotherapy (inspired by Wickland’s methods) in several thousand therapy sessions, in 1993 he produced his first book, Spirit Releasement Therapy: A Technique Manual.[5] This book covers the full range of the therapies developed by Baldwin, consisting of (1) Past-Life Therapy (PLT), (2) Spirit Releasement Therapy (SRT), and (3) Recovery of Soul Fragmentation (RSF). Baldwin notes that these three modalities, PLT, SRT, and RSF, taken together, constitute the “Baldwin Method of regression therapy.”[6] In clinical practice, these three types of therapy are interwoven according to the differential diagnosis that emerges from questioning the hypnotized patient. Still, it is possible to discuss each of these three modalities separately. For the purposes of this paper, the focus of the discussion will be upon SRT, though also including brief summaries of PLT and RSF.
It needs to be explained here that these three therapies are carried out based only upon what the patient is describing while hypnotized.[7] The therapist uses the information to determine how these three therapies can be employed to liberate interfering past-life personalities, attached earthbound spirits, and/or patient soul fragments that have been lost or otherwise wrongfully appropriated by others.
In Past-Life Therapy, the patient may simply indicate that she is re-experiencing and remembering excruciatingly painful details of some traumatic event in a previous life or, it may turn out, after questioning an attached earthbound spirit (EB) who is then able to speak through the patient, that these are details of a previous life of the EB.[8] What patients explain often seems to confirm the reality of reincarnation. Both Baldwin and Modi, however, aver that they do not know whether reincarnation is an actual phenomenon, and that the only thing that is important for them is whether the information coming through the patient can lead to healing the patient.
The therapy involved in RSF takes its cue from the shamanic healing process of soul retrieval. To the shaman, illness indicates that the soul of a person has vacated his body and that the shaman has to journey into the spirit world to retrieve this soul and return it to the sick person, thereby healing him. RSF is based on the straight-forward understanding that there are many traumatic situations in human life which can cause the delicate soul/mind of a human being to fragment or shatter, some of the most severe of these situations being the experiences of rape, incest and all other forms of sexual abuse, death by explosion or violent accidents, torture, amputation, beatings, etc.[9] Modi offers this general characterization of fragmentation:
Under hypnosis patients claim that their souls are fragmented due to some emotional, mental, and physical trauma. They often report that their souls are not complete or whole and use such terms as broken, divided, split, fractured, or fragmented, to indicate that parts or pieces of their souls are missing.[10]
Baldwin notes that people commonly express their soul fragmentation through phrases like “falling apart,” “out to lunch,” broken-hearted,” “I feel empty inside,” “something is missing,” “I need to pull myself together,” etc. The formal psychiatric term describing the condition of a personality that has split or shattered is “dissociation.” Baldwin points out that “splitting or fragmenting and leaving seems to be part of the coping mechanism of dissociation.”[11] Soul fragmentation presents some of its worst consequences in the cases of childhood sexual abuse, where the child’s personality copes by splitting off a part of itself that can retreat from the abuse, but usually does not return and otherwise abandons the person who then grows up shattered.
This condition is termed “dissociative identity disorder” (DID), formerly “multiple personality disorder” (MPD). Between 95% and 100% of diagnosed multiple personality cases have a history of childhood incest, torture, or other abuse.[12]
Baldwin identifies six distinct categories of soul fragmentation, recognizing that some soul fragments stay in the body and others leave the body. One category is “separation fragmentation.” After noting the passage in Ecclesiastes 12:6 that describes the “silver cord” -- generally understood to connect the human spirit to the human body -- Baldwin offers this description of RSF:
The soul is connected to the physical body by the silver cord. In the condition of fragmentation, each fragment maintains a connection with the core consciousness by a silver thread, a fiber of the silver cord. In separation fragmentation, a fragment leaves the body/mind, maintaining the silver thread connection, and it is this link that makes the recovery possible.[13]
Baldwin explains that about 50% of hypnotized patients can see these silver threads when asked by the therapist to view where they go and what soul fragments they are linked to. Modi adds that it is also possible to request angels to inspect the patient’s soul and trace threads to find missing soul parts.[14] Once the soul parts can be located, cleansed in the Light, and returned to the patient, many maladies can be cured and patients will report that they feel more whole, clear-sighted, and better able to cope with everyday problems.[15]
In SRT, the therapist asks the hypnotized patient to look inside himself and describe what he sees. Very often the patient then explains that he sees other people inside of himself, sometimes many other people -- sometimes hundreds of other people. In pursuing the details, the therapist discovers that all these people are actually earthbound spirits that are parasitically lodged in different parts of the patient’s body. Perhaps the most efficient way to explicate the full scope and implications of the phenomenon of attachment is to do so in the context of answering the following five questions:
Many psychic mediums and shamans explain that spirit persons generally become earthbound due to feeling shocked after a sudden traumatic death, because of false religious beliefs about the afterlife, or due to intense emotions of anger, fear, love, resentment, jealousy, guilt, remorse, etc. All of these are preoccupations which psychologically fixate a spirit person. As Baldwin notes, the earthbound spirit is frozen in the traumatic event or state of mind. This is because, to an overwhelming extent, the EB now indwells a place where time does not really exist and does not really pass. “It is a freeze frame, stop-action position.”[16] If a person dies, for instance, in the heat of hatred, then that state of mind continues after death, essentially unrelieved, and acts like a ball-and-chain to keep the spirit earthbound.
Once earthbound or, that is, unable to make a correct and rightful transition into the Light, the vast majority of EBs seek out attachment to someone on earth. Baldwin and Modi offer the following useful list of reasons why EBs are motivated to attach themselves.[17]
1. Newly deceased spirits retain their appetite for certain drugs and try to satisfy their addictions via attachment to users.
2. EBs become attached via the influence of other previously attached EBs (the phenomenon of “nesting” -- to be explained shortly).
3. EBs may be drawn to attach via benevolent, self-serving or malevolent motivations or, seemingly, some attachments may be completely random.
4. An EB attaches because it has unfinished business with the host, or others.
5. EBs attach because they are magnetically drawn to the host’s strong emotions, e.g., anger, grief, repressed negativity, etc.
6. EBs attach because the host’s stress has made the host susceptible, or because host has made itself susceptible through alcohol and drugs.
7. EBs attach because the host has become vulnerable through surgery, blood transfusions, organ transplant, accident trauma, falls, etc.
8. EBs may attach during sexual intercourse, and especially through the trauma of sexual abuse, rape, incest, etc.[18]
9. An EB of a terminated pregnancy can attach to a newborn baby who would otherwise have been the brother or sister of the EB.
10. EBs can attach during funerals if welcomed by a grieving person.
11. EBs often attach to sympathetic people in hospitals and nursing homes.
On one hand, Baldwin explains that “an attached entity seems to lodge itself at the level of the subconscious mind,”[19] which is why patients under hypnosis have the ability to access its presence. On the other hand, Baldwin explains from patient descriptions that EBs can attach to the energy centers in a patient’s body, or to “any surface of the patient’s body, any interior space, and any organ in the body.”[20] Though Baldwin offers no further clarification here, it seems reasonable to suggest that what Baldwin means is what Swedenborg explains -- that EBs attach to that part of the patient’s spirit body that corresponds to a particular physical organ or anatomical aspect.[21]
In addition, hypnotized patients have often described that EBs are apparently squeezed into tiny balls and packed together in layers in their bodies.[22] Baldwin and Modi both comment on the layering of the attached EBs in patients’ bodies. Baldwin notes:
There is a sort of “layering” of attachments. Some clients seem to carry hundreds of these attached entities. A few have been burdened with thousands.[23]
Therapists have also become aware that the layering phenomenon manifests through and has deeper roots in a “nesting” phenomenon, which may span numerous lifetimes. Baldwin explains:
This indicates… a nested entity, an entity within an entity. This happens when a person with an attached entity dies. The first attached entity remains within. If that newly deceased soul attaches to someone else, it still has the first attached “entity” within itself. If that someone else dies with the nested entities, and attaches to still another person, there is a 3-layered nesting of entities.[24]
This nesting of entities is often discovered to constitute a chain of EBs, as well as “dark force entities” (DFEs) -- demonic beings, to be explained shortly -- that compounds across lifetimes. The number of nested entities sometimes numbers into the hundreds. Moreover, as such nesting progressively compounds itself, it becomes less and less probable that the host’s spirit will itself be able to move into the Light at the time of the host’s death. This is a devastating consequence of nesting, especially since the host is generally never aware of any attached entities.
Attached EBs can cause painful suffering for their host, yet in most cases, the EBs do not sense or understand that they are having this effect on their host. The most common liability of attached EBs is that they drain energy from the host, which manifests both as physical fatigue and as the clouding of the host’s thought.
More importantly, however, Baldwin and Modi both found that, if an attached EB had certain physical problems or chronic health maladies during his/her life on earth, then these same problems accrued to the host. For instance, if the possessing entity died of stomach cancer or a gunshot wound to the stomach, the host would often be experiencing the physical consequences, e.g., chronic abdominal pain, nausea, ulcers, gastritis, or irritable bowel syndrome. If the attached EB died of hanging or choking, the host was found experiencing chronic difficulty in swallowing, or was subject to throat infections, laryngitis, headaches, etc. If the attached EB died of old age, the host might experience memory problems or symptoms of weakness and tiredness that are naturally a part of old age.[25] Patients’ maladies that were discovered to be symptoms caused by possessing EBs and which were alleviated through Spirit Releasement Therapy include: migraine headaches, dizziness, convulsions, ringing in the ears, back pain, neck pain, chest pain, nausea, colitis, obesity, hot flashes, chronic fatigue, asthma, and allergies.[26]
From the 6,000 therapy sessions Baldwin conducted before he died in 2004, he identified three major categories of possessing entities: (1) Earthbound spirits (EBs), (2) Dark Force Entities (DFEs), and (3) Extraterrestrials (ETs). We have already mentioned EBs. DFEs are demonic spirits that have never experienced their own physical embodiment. Though Baldwin and Modi claim that they do not know if these DFEs have actual existence, they record that their patients consistently identify these demonic spirits as fallen angels who originally followed Lucifer when he was cast out of heaven. Third, ETs are not the spirits of extraterrestrials, but are simply extraterrestrials in their natural, nonphysical state. These are otherworldly beings, nonhuman and nondemonic, who are very intelligent, often claiming to be from “far away” and visiting earth on some kind of scientific mission (usually to observe some aspect of human behavior). Because, like the DFEs, ETs can speak through the hypnotized patient, the therapist is able to carry on discussions with them, eventually persuading them to discontinue their intrusive activities and then to depart from their host. What Baldwin has to say about ETs is quite intriguing, even perhaps yielding new insight into the highly strange UFO abduction phenomenon, but we will have to forego his descriptions here in favor of focusing more relevantly on demonic spirits.[27]
First of all, Baldwin and Modi are completely united in the recognition that all of the following information about demons and Lucifer is consistently given by thousands of their hypnotized patients, regardless of patients’ personal backgrounds, cultures, or religions. Both these therapists explain that they do not know if these demons are real or not; the only thing that really matters to them is that “by removing these so-called demons from… patients, their emotional and physical symptoms are improved or cured completely.”[28]
Patients in therapy describe the DFEs as hostile, aggressive, arrogant, angry and hateful beings, often swearing profusely.[29] These demons manifest to the patient in colors of black and red, in all different sizes from a dot to giant-sized creatures, and in many different forms: often as an indefinite grey blob, but also in the forms of snakes, spiders, scorpions, vultures, wolves, and monsters with red eyes and sharp teeth.[30] DFEs will generally talk to the therapist through the patient and indicate that they are under Satan’s control, who has ordered them to cause as much pain and suffering as possible for the patient. When the therapist asks a demon the name of his master, DFEs identify him by names such as Lucifer, Satan, Father, Lord, the Devil, the One, the Dark One, the One Who Knows, the Powerful One, the Dark Angel, etc.[31] Baldwin and Modi have both noticed that DFEs’ missions always emphasize utilizing fear, lust, greed, power, confusion, etc. to “interfere with any and every form of love.”[32]
Demons claim they have been specifically assigned missions to encourage drug and alcohol abuse by people on earth, to project anger, hate, paranoia and arrogance, to facilitate depression and insomnia, and to exacerbate obsessions, phobias, sexual problems, eating disorders, and to otherwise promote as much mental illness as possible. By creating and using many different kinds of spiritual devices, e.g., spiritual screws and rods to somehow throw a human joint off by a fraction, or to put pressure on a nerve, demons can cause ongoing misery for human beings.[33] Modi expands on this:
By pressing and scratching different organs and parts of the body, demons claim to cause physical problems such as pain, numbness, cancer, tumors, and other diseases.[34]
The worst possible way for a demon to fail in his mission is to be discovered, or clearly identified as a demon.[35] Demons indicate that failure means severe punishment by Satan, much as C.S. Lewis posed in The Screwtape Letters.[36]
Transformed demons -- those who were finally liberated via SRT to return the Light -- have explained that DFEs are organized in a hierarchy of authority. Baldwin ably summarizes his patients’ characterizations in this regard:
There is a command hierarchy of DFEs of many levels and strengths spread across the fabric of time, space, and dimension. All claim allegiance to the Lucifer energy.[37]
In addition, transformed demons have detailed that such hierarchy is not only instrumental in providing demonic training, but instrumental as well in later persuading lesser ranks of demons to return to the Light:
These demons sometimes claim to be organized by ranks and are assigned duties on the basis of their abilities and power. Some large demons claim to train and command other demons; after their transformation they are willing to call all of them, numbering sometimes in millions, from all over the earth and other planets, so they can also transform into the Light and go to heaven, too.[38]
Spirit Releasement Therapy is Baldwin’s healing therapy not only for the possessed host as the primary patient, but also for EBs (and DFEs and ETs) as secondary patients.[39] Baldwin details the six fundamental stages of SRT as follows.[40]
1. Discovery: The therapist has to flush out the EB by asking questions that can summon the EB to answer -- e.g., “If that pain in your stomach could speak, what would it say?”
2. Identification: This is critical inasmuch as each type of attachment requires a different releasement method. This is the stage of making a differential diagnosis. How are the different attaching entities recognized? EBs are most common and usually directly identify themselves, unless the EB has been dead for 400-500 years, in which case it may have forgotten its name. (Dr. Wickland in Thirty Years Among the Dead also mentions encountering a number of these forgetful EBs.) Whereas DFEs are markedly hostile and deceptive, ETs present themselves in a condescending and businesslike manner. A past-life character will claim itself as definitely part of the host. Finally, if a voice identifies itself as a young part of the host, i.e., as a mind/soul fragment, then RSF healing focuses upon the inner child.
3. Dialogue: The therapist must find out why and under what circumstances the EB attached to the patient. In this process, the attached entity must have the chance to express its complaint or resentment, or other motivation for attachment, and then, through the therapist’s guidance, it must have the opportunity to realize how and why its attachment has been detrimental for itself and its host.
4. Release: At this stage, the EB has agreed to leave the host’s body and the therapist arranges the release of the EB into the Light, calling upon the assistance of angels. The EB, who usually senses being welcomed into the Light by family and friends, makes this final transition, leaving the host for good.
5. Sealing Light Meditation: The patient is guided daily into visualization of the Light at the center of his being, which expands to fill his body and into a bubble encompassing his body at a two-foot distance.
6. Ongoing Therapy: Therapy is ongoing for some period because (a) it is important to heal the patient’s emotional vulnerability that first allowed the spirit attachment, and (b) continuing therapy is often necessary to deal with additional layers of attached entities. Baldwin and Modi both recognize that it is quite possible for new EBs to enter a patient even after the initial clearing and cleaning of the patient’s body.
At this point, let us move into the discussion of Unificationist healer Dae Mo Nim and to explain how she developed her depossession techniques.
In the mid-1980s, Rev. Sun Myung Moon recognized a need to address the debilitating phenomenon of attached earthbound spirits on the population of the world, especially beginning with the members of the Unification Church. For this purpose he chose Soon Ae Hong, the mother of his wife Hak Ja Han Moon. Soon Ae Hong was an extraordinarily devout person in her own right, who had dedicated her life to serving God and had demonstrated her profound dedication to furthering God’s providence.[41] She gratefully accepted the mission of separating earthbound spirits from members’ bodies and, in 1989, at 75 years old, she passed naturally into the spirit world, greatly anticipating carrying out her new mission. It was at this point of passing that Rev. Moon providentially anointed her with a new name, Dae (Great) Mo (Mother) (in everyday Korean usage, Dae Mo Nim).[42]
For three years, Dae Mo Nim explored, as a spirit person, the vast dimensions of the spirit world, with critical attention to the nature and structure of the lower spirit world. However, in order that her work could properly impact the physical world, Dae Mo Nim had to choose someone on earth who could effectively channel her.[43] In 1992, she appointed another devout member, Elder Hyo Nam Kim, to be her channel. From 1992 to 1994 these two women worked together intensively and established a deep union of heart, which became the spiritual foundation for launching the Chung Pyung Spiritual Training Center (January 1995) to carry out the providence of the separation of earthbound spirits.[44] Also, because of their remarkable unity of heart, Elder Hyo Nam Kim henceforth also became known as Dae Mo Nim.
The team of Dae Mo Nim and Hyo Nam Kim work as one person, who functions effectively as a kind of shaman. Dae Mo Nim can travel about the spiritual world at will, and Hyo Nam Kim functions clairvoyantly and clairaudiently in her everyday life. As a result, she can directly observe the reality of earthbound spirits who are attached to the bodies of people living on earth. She offers this description:
There are many spirits inside the body of our brothers and sisters. These spirits are connected to their ancestors and carry many grudges, so they try to harm members whenever there is a chance. These spirits are piled up inside the bodies like ant eggs or sands… We see around us many young people die from sickness and get into accidents of various sorts, and most of these accidents are caused by spiteful spirits. Hence, all people, not to mention our members, should come to Chung Pyung and become reshaped into God’s desired heavenly people through workshops and separation of spirits.[45]
Dae Mo Nim has at various times further characterized these attached earthbound spirits as parasitic, resentful, and often very powerful. These spirits can attach themselves to our flesh, blood, bones, bone marrow, and even to our cells.[46] She has explained that, via spiritual sight, an adulterous or sexually corrupt person appears to have many spirits attached to his/her sexual organ. She similarly notes her vision of garrulousness:
When I see talkative members, they have many spirits attached to their mouth as if they were carrying balloons on their mouth.[47]
The depossession process carried out in the Chung Pyung workshops employs a distinct methodology which includes intensive singing and clapping, fervent prayer, and the practice of an-su -- the vigorous hitting of one’s own body as well as the body of the person sitting directly in front of one. Singing, clapping, prayer and an-su are alternated for various periods of time during the span of an hour or more in a single sitting. Dae Mo Nim has explained that, while this program is exhausting, it is necessary “because inside our body spirits are piled up to the full, and they struggle hard not to be shaken off their places.”[48] At the same time, Dae Mo Nim can dispatch angels into the bodies of participants in order to facilitate removal of the attached spirits.
Once extracted, these earthbound spirits are sent to their own unique workshop in the spiritual world, where they can repent for their wrongdoings and generally become cleansed, educated, and resurrected. This educational workshop is conducted by Heung Jin Nim, Rev. Moon’s teenage son who was killed in a car accident in Tarrytown, NY in 1984. Part of Heung Jin Nim’s mission in the spiritual world has been to work together with Dae Mo Nim to carry out the education of millions of dark spirits, who are then, step-by-step, rehabilitated into very bright, “absolutely good spirits.” At a certain point, these restored spirits become eligible to return to earth and participate in Dae Mo Nim’s ongoing depossession providence.
A very important aspect of this foregoing liberation process was implemented by Rev. Moon in 1999. Rev. Moon providentially mandated that all Unification Church members should offer Ancestors Liberation Ceremonies for 120 generations (currently, this figure has increased to 210 generations), allowing these ancestors to become purified and resurrected for the purpose of then being able to spiritually support their descendants on earth. These liberated ancestors are then specifically assigned by Dae Mo Nim to assist in removing attached spirits from their descendants’ bodies.
The first step in carrying out the liberation of ancestors was for Dae Mo Nim to locate all those ancestors in the spirit world. This was a daunting task, requiring her to search both outside and inside a descendant’s body:
It is not easy to find ancestors who are in the spirit world and who are wandering as ghosts. The best way brothers and sisters can understand what it means to find a ghost is that I have to wander about the skies to find them. It is also very difficult to find ancestors who are inside people’s bodies. Our hands are thin in depth. It is no more than a few centimeters. But when I go inside someone’s hands to find an ancestor, it is like going into the ocean. Since there are all these spirits and sins inside our bodies, is it easy for me to go inside someone’s body? It is difficult.[49]
Once ancestors had been located and liberated, the major new development in Dae Mo Nim’s depossession protocols was that the restored ancestors replaced the angels dealing with the attached earthbound spirits inhabiting descendants’ bodies.[50]
Both SRT and Dae Mo Nim’s depossession protocols begin with recognizing that attached earthbound spirits are often more numerous than anyone could have imagined previously. Dae Mo Nim, for instance, gives this description:
You are unable to see your own body, but if your spiritual eyes are opened to see your body, you will be able to see a myriad of spirits in unimaginable numbers piled up like sands. Hence, when you sing the holy song Grace of the Holy Garden in the clapping session, I see angels being mobilized to separate the spirits from your bodies just as dredges are scooping out sands from the river bank.[51]
Modi mentions in parallel:
One patient, as he looked inside himself, described seeing hundreds of human spirits. It looked like a “beehive” to him.[52]
In addition, both Baldwin and Dae Mo Nim specifically acknowledge that EBs attach to all anatomical parts of a human body.[53] EBs are often discovered in a layered or “nested” condition in these anatomical parts,[54] and thereby either deliberately (out of resentment) or unintentionally cause various kinds of mental and physical illness for the host person.[55] Further, both Modi and Dae Mo Nim specifically emphasize that EBs attach easily and often in high numbers through the host’s activity of drinking alcohol.[56]
Another similarity is that SRT and Dae Mo Nim’s depossession method are both carried out through the critical assistance of angels, who are summoned to do the work of removing the attached earthbound spirits. In SRT, the therapist explains to the earthbound spirit its deleterious influence upon the host as the reason why the EB must leave the host, and then summons angels to further persuade and escort the EB. Similarly, in of Dae Mo Nim’s healing approach, the angels often have to persuade, cajole, and encourage resentful EBs who otherwise insist on remaining riveted to the host.[57]
Finally, both of these methodologies for liberating the host treat EBs as secondary patients who also require healing and restoration. In both, angels guide the EBs to move out of the host’s body (i.e., to detach themselves) and then to move out of their earthbound state by fully transitioning into the spirit world and into some higher state of being -- in SRT, this is the “Light,” and via Dae Mo Nim’s method, this is Heung Jin Nim’s workshop where the dark earthbound spirits can be rehabilitated into spirits of light and goodness.
While the above similarities are quite remarkable in themselves, examining the differences between these two methodologies also yields critical insights.
1. Whereas Baldwin and Modi cannot see the attached EBs or angels and only know about these spirits through their hypnotized patients, Dae Mo Nim can see both EBs and angels clairvoyantly, and thereby exercise more direct, hands-on guidance.
2. Whereas SRT is concerned to differentiate three classes of attaching entities: earthbound spirits, demonic spirits, and extraterrestrials, Dae Mo Nim generally recognizes only one type of attached entity: earthbound spirits, who are deceased human beings who have become earthbound through emotional distraction, disorientation, and negativity.
3. Whereas Baldwin worked with only one individual patient at a time, with the primary goal of healing this specific patient of specific debilitating maladies, Dae Mo Nim in the Chung Pyung workshops essentially works with hundreds or thousands of participants at once, via her prayer and through exercising various forms of dominion over the reality of the spirit world. In doing this, her goal is not only to remove the attached EBs, but it is especially to facilitate the liberation of the participants, so that they will feel stronger and freer to fulfill the work of God’s providence in the present age.
4. Whereas Baldwin does not require any cooperation from a patient other than a willingness to be hypnotized, Dae Mo Nim requires that workshop participants be committed to intensive singing, clapping, an-su, and prayer, as well as the public reading of and collective listening to the Divine Principle (the main Unification theological text), as spiritual conditions which unsettle EBs lodged in their bodies. Then, as EBs become shaken up, this makes it easier for angels to access them and to eventually transfer them out of the host’s body.
5. Whereas both Baldwin and Dae Mo Nim utilize the assistance of emancipatory angels to accomplish depossession, Dae Mo Nim has been able to call upon the additional support of purified and spiritually resurrected ancestors of the membership of the Unification Movement. These ancestors have been assigned by Dae Mo Nim to largely take over the angels’ depossession responsibilities.
The phenomenon of attached earthbound spirits, as revealed through the work of Baldwin and Dae Mo Nim, is deeply disturbing. It underscores to us the undeniably confused and degraded condition of most of the human race, and it reveals the unsettling fact that the transition from this world into the next is neither automatic nor unproblematic. Why should the universe be set up in such a way that people who die and pass out of their physical bodies end up not making a proper transition into the spirit world, but instead attach themselves to the bodies of other people who are alive on earth? Why would this happen? Why does this make sense?
EBs are, in their fear and emotional disorientation, apparently looking for an environment where they can feel at home, or that seems familiar to them. They do not grasp that they are meant to fully transition into the spirit world, and often simply gravitate to a place that seems like an oasis, a place to take refuge and rest, a place to live instead of continuing to wander in darkness -- and thus they attach themselves to the bodies of people on earth. In addition to these lost souls, Dae Mo Nim notes that Satan has consigned many of them to this fate.[58] For the vast majority of EBs, attachment is permanent; they cannot simply choose to leave or even move. It is a pitiful, fearful predicament often experienced by EBs as imprisonment.[59]
An important realization here is that attached earthbound spirits are not just “EBs,” or “entities,” or “evil spirits,” or “an infestation,” but are, rather, human beings, who must be understood as sons and daughters of God and who need to be addressed compassionately. Though there is a tendency to think of debilitated, attached EBs as parasitic and thereby as less than human, we must be careful not to relegate them to merely clinical references. In particular, Baldwin reminds us that the EBs, DFEs and ETs are all originally created by God, and are all destined to be healed and restored to their original relationship with God.
Both Baldwin and Modi, through their depossession practices, have discovered that somewhere between 80% and 90% of their clients’ debilitating symptoms were caused by possessing human and demon entities, and that removing these attached spirits for the most part permanently removed their patients’ symptoms.[60] Furthermore, in 1991, Baldwin publicly declared that “spirit attachment is almost universal in the human population” and, for this reason, mental health professionals and clergy should be “trained to use the appropriate techniques to relieve this affliction.”[61] As if to answer this call, Dae Mo Nim has appeared in our time as a providential healer, whose depossession techniques serve humanity as a whole:
There is another enormous pollution yet unknown to humanity, and this is the spiritual pollution. Few people know that the invisible spiritual pollution is more dangerous than the visible pollution. The establishment of the Chung Pyung Spiritual Training Center, however, has opened a way of overcoming the spiritual pollution. The Chung Pyung Spiritual Training Center is a place of recycling evil spirits into absolutely good spirits. It creates a miracle of giving rebirth to the spiritual selves degraded like useless garbage and transforming them into God’s children with cosmic value.[62]
[1] Shakuntala Modi, Remarkable Healings: A Psychiatrist Discovers Unsuspected Roots of Mental and Physical Illness (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 1997), p. 198.
[2] Emanuel Swedenborg, The Universal Human, §§5712-5715, in George F. Dole, ed. and trans., Emanuel Swedenborg: The Universal Human and Soul-Body Interaction, The Classics of Western Spirituality Series (New York: Paulist Press, 1984), pp. 214-216.
[3] Carl Wickland, Thirty Years Among the Dead (National Psychological Institute, 1924). This is the definitive, classic work laying the foundations for all future investigations into the nature of earthbound spirits.
[4] Edith Fiore, The Unquiet Dead: A Psychologist Treats Spirit Possession (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).
[5] William J. Baldwin, Spirit Releasement Therapy: A Technique Manual, 2nd ed. (Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books, 1993).
[6] William J. Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls: Releasing Unwanted Spirits from Your Energy Body (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads Publishing, 2003), p. xi.
[7] Baldwin refers to the host person as “client,” and Modi refers to the host as “patient.” In this paper, I have chosen to refer to the host as either the “host” or the “patient.”
[8] Ibid., p. 174.
[9] Ibid., p. 46. Baldwin and Modi discovered that even minor traumas, such as breaking up with one’s boyfriend or losing one’s job, could result in soul fragmentation.
[10] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 368.
[11] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 46.
[12] Ibid., p. 52.
[13] Ibid., p. 59.
[14] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 400.
[15] Ibid., p. 409.
[16] Baldwin, Spirit Releasement Therapy, p. 297.
[17] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, pp. 27-38.
[18] Ibid., p. 14. Baldwin explains, “The openness and surrender during sexual intercourse can allow the exchange of attached entities between two people. Sexual abuse such as rape, incest, molestation of any sort creates vulnerability to spirit invasion. Violence during sexual abuse increases the likelihood of intrusion by an opportunistic spirit.”
[19] Ibid., p. 28.
[20] Ibid., p. 8.
[21] Kerry Pobanz, The Spirit-Person and the Spirit-World: An Other dimensional Primer (New York: HSA Publications, 2001), p. 208.
[22] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 195.
[23] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 36.
[24] Ibid., p. 13. Dae Mo Nim likewise explains that this nesting phenomenon is a key to understanding hereditary diseases: “Without expelling the spirits from our bodies, we will be unable to enter the spiritual world properly after death. Also, when someone dies, the spirits that used to inhabit his body move over to the body of the dead person’s descendants and continue their malicious undertaking, and this is the source of hereditary diseases” (Editorial Committee on Dae Mo Nim’s Words, The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families [Seoul, Korea: Sunghwa Publishing, 2000], p. 71).
[25] Modi, Remarkable Healings, pp. 259-260.
[26] Ibid., p. 261.
[27] For those interested in trying to fathom the UFO abduction phenomenon, Baldwin offers relevant and usefully clarifying speculations in CE-VI: Close Encounters of the Possession Kind (Terra Alta, WV: Headline Books, 1999, 2001).
[28] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 362. Similarly, on p. 283, Modi explains that she doesn’t know if the EBs described by her patients are real or not, and that the only thing that is important to her is that spirit releasement therapy profoundly relieves the suffering of her patients.
[29] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 75.
[30] Ibid., p. 76; Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 297.
[31] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 76.
[32] Ibid.
[33] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 345.
[34] Ibid., p. 322.
[35] Ibid., pp. 302, 323-324.
[36] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), p. 5.
[37] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 76.
[38] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 358.
[39] Ibid., p. 361.
[40] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, pp. 27-38.
[41] The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, pp. 46-52.
[42] Ibid., p. 53.
[43] Ibid., p. 56.
[44] Ibid., pp. 56-57.
[45] Ibid., p. 28.
[46] Ibid., pp. 79, 105.
[47] Ibid., p. 182.
[48] Ibid., p. 72.
[49] Dae Mo Nim, speech given 1/11/03, at: eng.chungpyung.org/, then go to: eng.chungpyung.org/speech/speech/view.asp?page=7andidx=547andbbs_id=0ands_item=ands_word=.
[50] Dae Mo Nim, speech given 7/7/02, at: eng.chungpyung.org/, then go to: eng.chungpyung.org/speech/speech/view.asp?page=9andidx=439andbbs_id=0ands_item=ands_word=.
[51] The Chung Pyung Providence, p. 39.
[52] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 196.
[53] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, p. 8; The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, p. 79.
[54] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, pp. 13-14, 39, 172; Modi, Remarkable Healings, pp. 195-198, 295; The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, p. 71; Dae Mo Nim, speech given 7/8/07, at: eng.chungpyung.org/, then go to: eng.chungpyung.org/speech/speech/view.asp?page=2andidx=936andbbs_id=0ands_item=ands_word=.
[55] Baldwin, Healing Lost Souls, pp. 174-195; Modi, Remarkable Healings, pp. 259-270; The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, pp. 70, 198-199.
[56] Modi, Remarkable Healings, pp. 338, 602; The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, pp. 167-168.
[57] The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, p. 69; Dae Mo Nim, speech given 7/3/98, at: eng.chungpyung.org/, then go to: eng.chungpyung.org/speech/speech/view.asp?page=9andidx=360andbbs_id=0ands_item=ands_word=.
[58] Dae Mo Nim, speech given 7/8/07, at: eng.chungpyung.org/, then go to: eng.chungpyung.org/speech/speech/view.asp?page=2andidx=936andbbs_id=0ands_item=ands_word=. Dae Mo Nim says in this regard: “Satan repeats a process of inserting evil spirits into the body and hardens it like cement until there are several layers of evil spirits covering the body. Under this condition the angels and Absolute Good Spirits are unable to go into the body. However, the key factor of breaking through this layer is clapping. Through intense clapping a crack is made and through that the angels and Absolute Good Spirits are able to get into the body.”
[59] Wickland, Baldwin, Modi and many others have described this reality. See also Hans Holzer, Psychic: True Paranormal Experiences (New York: Smith-Mark Publishers, 1999), pp. 203-204.
[60] Modi, Remarkable Healings, p. 283. Edith Fiore (The Unquiet Dead, p. 173) notes the example of the Japanese exorcist cult Mahikari, which affirms that more than 80 percent of all human illnesses, physical and emotional, are due to the influence of possessing spirits.
[61] Baldwin, Spirit Releasement Therapy, p. xix.
[62] The Chung Pyung Providence and the Way of Blessed Families, pp. 78-79.