Victor Zammit commentary: Can spirits influence us negatively?

I think most people reading this would agree that we can be influenced by the thoughts and feelings of the living, but what about those of the dead?

The idea that afterlife entities can influence our thinking and “win us to our harm” has been accepted in every human culture, literature, and religion. As Alan Kardec warns us, people are no different when they die, and “thus, there are very superior spirits as there are very inferior ones; very good and bad; very wise and very ignorant; there are those of levity, malevolence, liars, astute, hypocrites, polished, sharp, jokers, etc.”.

While our medical and legal systems may ridicule the idea of spirit influence, several modern psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors, and hypnotherapists have written books claiming that we can be negatively influenced by smothering relatives as well as by malevolent entities.
Some of the most influential writers on this topic are the following:
Dr. Carl Wickland: Thirty Years Among the Dead.
Dr. Edith Fiore: The Unquiet Dead.
Dr. Louise Ireland-Frey: Freeing the Captives.
Dr. William Baldwin: Spirit Releasement Therapy.
Dr. Samuel Sagan: Entity Possession.

Dr. Wilson Van Dusen, a clinical psychologist and author of The Presence of Spirits in Madness claimed that he was able to hold coherent conversations with the voices of his schizophrenic patients and that their behaviour precisely matched what Christian Mystic Emanuel Swedenborg described. Jerry Marzinsky, in his book An Amazing Journey into the Psychotic Mind (2019) comes to the same conclusion.

Given the number of reports and the fact that we are living in times of enormous emotional stress, it makes good sense that all those seeking to make spirit contact (whether it be mediumship, EVP, or automatic writing) practice “spiritual hygiene” and always use their discernment about whom to invite into their space.
See Michael Tymn’s blog post Do Earthbound Spirits Really Influence Humans?

Consciousness researcher and author Nanci Trivellato, MSc, will be giving a free Zoom webinar on “How to Prevent the Impact of Negative Spirits on Your Life” on Saturday 24th September. Read details here.

A SPIRITIST PERSPECTIVE ON SPIRIT INFLUENCE

Luis Sergio Marotta discusses possible influences of lower entities with Sheri Perl during a Zoom Global Gathering. He has found that Kardec’s teachings on the nature of spirits and how they can affect people (Spirits’ Book p. 93) are in line with his experiences of healing people in Spiritist Centres and mediumship circles in Brazil.