He accepted Jesus as a child, drifted into New Age astral projection

By Ben Lahood –

All the astral projection stopped when Mike – strangely – grabbed a seemingly kind old man by the lapels and demanded he confess Christ as the Son of God. Instead, the man hissed at him in a hideous manner.

“I realized the Bible was true,” Mike says on his YouTube channel, Shofar War Lamb. “First John says every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. That’s the day I really started to walk with Jesus.”

Today, Mike has completely quit New Age. But for many years he wavered between Jesus and astral projection, a phenomenon in which people leave their body during sleep and fly around in the spirit realm and interact with people.

When he was a kid, a relative gave him a book about Jesus, and he accepted the Lord.

But as the years passed, he forgot about Jesus and got into marijuana, mushrooms, and ecstasy with his neighborhood buddies in Illinois. Riding BMX bikes around, they searched for hallucinogenic mushrooms in the wild.

They found one, and Mike, then 16, decided to consume it even though he realized it wasn’t hallucinogenic and he didn’t worry that it might be poisonous. It was.

“All of a sudden from my stomach I feel these shocks. The shocks went down my legs and down my arms. I could feel the poison coursing through my veins with every beat of my heart,” Mike says. “Eventually it subsided. But it scared me.”

Despite the danger, Mike consumed it anyhow to impress his friends. “Being the young punk that I was, I wanted bragging rights,” he says. “How stupid is that?”

The next day, he felt much better. While smoking blunts the next day, one buddy, induced by the drug, was talking gibberish, mostly “rambling stupid nonsense,” Mike remembers. But one thing the friend uttered hit like a thunderbolt:

“What happens when you die?”

The question echoed over and over through his mind. “I could not stop thinking about it. I entered a thought loop.”

Like many of his generation, he looked it up on Google. The search engine led him to a Near Death Experience website. The hodgepodge of testimonials ranged from Christian to Islamic and Buddhist.

“They had people who had died and had seen the light,” Mike summarizes. “Some said they talked to God, some to Buddha. Some people saw Jesus, some people saw Allah. The message that was clear was that God was love.

“What I read was made-up garbage from witches trying to usher in the New Age,” he adds.

But at the time, the eclectic approach appealed to him. Forgetting that he had committed his life to Jesus as a child and that he had cried out to Jesus when he consumed the mushroom, Mike adopted the New Age idea that Jesus was merely one of many “ascended masters.”

On the NDE website, he met in a chatroom “Amused Maya,” who provided an explanation for his sleep paralysis: “You have an advanced soul. You have the ability to astral project.”

“The next time that happens, stay calm, don’t freak out, and you will float out of your body,” Maya told him, “You can float through walls, travel other dimensions, talk to spirits.”

Honestly, Mike thought she was nuts but decided to find out if it was true for himself.

Sure enough, the next time he experienced sleep paralysis, he floated out of his body and began to fly around at will.

That’s how it started. For the next months and years, Mike was astral projecting, which he now classifies as “evil veiled in a cloak.”

“I did float through walls,” he says. “I did talk to spirits. I had sex with demons. I didn’t know they were demons at the time. I tried to do it every night, but it didn’t happen every night.”

Mike was getting deeper into darkness thinking it was the light. He liked to talk to spirits to glean wisdom and come back and share with other New Agers. He met a girl in the chatroom who lied about her age. He was 18 from Illinois; she was 13 from Kansas, but he didn’t find out her true age until later, he says.

Mike astral projected into her house and later freaked her out by describing it to her.

For her part, the girl had a psychic ability to “read” people’s character. She warned Mike that Maya was a witch capable of murder.

At first Mike didn’t believe her because Maya appeared to be very kindhearted and generous.

But a dream in which Maya mocked Mike for his humble 1992 Dodge Duster seemed to confirm the warning, so Mike cut her off.

“God showed me she was evil,” he says. “What would have happened if I would have gone to California to be with her? I might not even be here. I might have been turned into an evil priest leading millions astray.”

Then the astral projections turned demonic. He had been told he would never feel pain; he started feeling pain. He had been told never to fear; he struggled to not be afraid.

“They were always dark. It was always something demonic every time,” Mike says. “These shadow beings would literally jump into me.”

As a New Ager, he didn’t believe in curses, but the suspicion crept over him that he was under some sort of curse. Again, he turned to Google.

If the NDE website had led him astray, the search about “how to break curses” did not. “There’s like 100 pages of search entries that say the blood of Jesus breaks every curse,” he remembers. “So I clicked on a link and it said just call on the name of Jesus and he will come to you.”

During a subsequent astral projection when Mike felt an evil presence crushing him, he cried out to Jesus.

“A wind came rushing in like it was a powerful man,” Mike relates. “The evil that was crushing me got whipped off of me. I was left feeling nothing but peace. It was a peace I’d never felt before. I was dumbfounded.”

Still, Mike didn’t come exclusively to Jesus but kept the Lord as part of his smorgasbord of religious beliefs. After all, New Agers bear some similarity to Hindus, who pick and choose from any and all deities they wish.

In fact, Mike was running both systems at the same time.

“Every time I heard about Jesus dying for me, I started crying. I knew that none of the ‘ascended masters’ loved me like Jesus did,” he explains. “But I wasn’t delivered yet.”

At that time, a friend, Eric, got released from jail and they began talking, renewing their friendship. Eric had become a Christian in jail and began to challenge Mike to stop playing with New Age.

“He started discipling me and pointing out sound doctrine, that this was wrong, that this was evil, that this was a deception,” Mike says.

The turning point came on his next astral projection. An elderly man in a wheelchair invited Mike over to tell him something. Mike flew over. But the Holy Spirit, he says, took over the interview because while the man appeared friendly, Mike confronted him harshly.

In his vision, Mike grabbed him about the lapels and demanded: “Tell me Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

“He went from the seemingly nice old kind guy to a really wrinkly, pruned out face with eyes that turned milk white and hair that looked like little spouts of spider legs,” Mike narrates. “He was hissing at me, and his teeth were rotten.”

Suddenly, Mike flashed back to his bed. He remembered 1 John 4:3: Every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.

From that point on, Mike made a break with New Age and began walking with Jesus. Every time, the devil tries to take him on an astral projection, he employs spiritual warfare to combat the devil.

Today Mike is married and lives in Wisconsin.

“That pretty much made me realize Jesus is Lord,” he says. “Jesus Christ is a fisher of men. He reeled me in; he had me on the line. I didn’t even know I was hooked. He got me even before I knew it.

If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here

About the writer of this article: Ben Lahood studies at Lighthouse Christian Academy in Los Angeles.