Has anyone heard of 'Spontaneous Enlightenment"?

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BenSinner

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This is something I worry about getting out of nowhere…

There is a rare thing that happens to certain people. They apparently achieve “Enlightenment” out of nowhere and unexpected. They say it’s like the feeling of being in a dream all of their life, and now they’ve suddenly “woke up”. The majority of them have some background of dabbling with New Age/Eastern spirituality and the occult, there are few where it literally just happens out of nowhere. The blogger hear tells a story on the video of someone who wasn’t spiritual at all, achieved it unexpectedly while watching TV eating a burrito.

I was wondering what could be causing this?.. since this doesn’t appear to be strictly just a New Age/Occult thing, as it has happened to people who didn’t mess with thosse

Also, is there anything like this in Christianity? Someone having a Christian experience like this out of nowhere?

Here is the link, if you are comfortable with reading it.

 
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“it has to be maintained that the coming of God to us, as Augustine observes, is understood according to its effect and not through it essence. For Augustine comments: 'They come to us (the Trinity) while we come to them. They come to our help; we come by obeying. They come by enlightening; we come by seeing. They come by filling; we come by receiving.” (Saint Bonaventure’s Commentary on the Gospel of John: Questions, Jn 14:15-24, n. 38; cf. Saint Augustine, Tractate 76, n. 4)
 
The conversion of St Paul and some of the Saints took at unexpurgated time and places sudden or came to repentance in MK 1:15 .But what your are saying of they have achieved enlightenment ,new age stuff are all satanic and against Catholic Teaching.which we all should avoid and don’t even read such perverted articles which deviates from our Faith and morals.

As the mentioned in 2 Corinthians 11: 3-4 But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by its cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ. 4 For if someone comes and proclaims another Jesus than the one we proclaimed, or if you receive a different spirit from the one you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you submit to it readily enough. 14 And no wonder! Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. 15 So it is not strange if his ministers also disguise themselves as ministers of righteousness. Their end will match their deeds.

Act 13:10 and said, “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?

1 peter 5:8-9 8 Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.

James 4:4 Adulterers! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world becomes an enemy of God. 5 Or do you suppose that it is for nothing that the scripture says, “God yearns jealously for the spirit that he has made to dwell in us”? 6 But he gives all the more grace; therefore it says,

“God opposes the proud,
but gives grace to the humble.”

7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
Testing the Spirits
1 John 4:4 Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world. 4 Little children, you are from God, and have conquered them; for the one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world. 5 They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. 6 We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error.

We are already in the Holy Week,lets not get diverted,into false teachings and erroneous and perverse worldly enlightenment,which cause shipwreck of our Faith but rather cling on to it and with wisdom and discernment rejects such things.
 
Why would you worry about it? This is God’s universe, God at work wishing us with the Holy Spirit. Trust in the Lord.
 
Shakuhachi said:
Why would you worry about it?
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A few reasons.
  1. It’s something that can happen out of nowhere at any time, and could completely change the way you look/see reality. It’s not something you seek or bring on yourself.
  2. If this experience is a delusion, than there is a chance that I can go to hell for believing in the delusion instead of the Christian message.
  3. This could possibly be a demonic experience, and it can happen to me at any time out of nowhere.
  4. From the sounds of it, it sounds like one can’t escape or get out of this state. So real, delusion, or demonic, we are stuck with it.
 
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If it’s something bad, we can get out of it. God is Almighty. Be not afraid.
 
Have you ever had a spiritual awakening or conversion experience?
 
LOL I wanna know what was in that burrito!

But seriously, sometimes deep insights can just come to us, and some people have rapid conversion experiences.

But Enlightenment (as an Eastern spiritual phenomenon) I believe comes as a result of study and certain types of meditation practices. I think it’s more cerebral than action.
It’s not a Christian concept
 
Shakuhachi said:
Have you ever had a spiritual awakening or conversion experience?
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I have. I was sitting at a red light in traffic. I had been having a bad time for the past three months, experiencing a lot of loss in my life. The only thought I really had during the time is that, although I didn’t feel ready to die, if I didn’t wake up tomorrow morning I could be OK with that. Not suicidal by any means. Just weary from the traumas life was dealing me in that window of time.

All of a sudden, like a switch was flipped, I came into an enormous sense of clarity about why we are here and why suffering is sometimes a part of life. I won’t go into the actual revelation (for lack of a better word) but it was such a comfort in the moment, and years later it still is. So many questions were answered in that millisecond.

To this day, I don’t know how to explain it.
 
Between this and your other thread, I’m a bit curious why you spend time worrying about these New Age things zapping you out of the blue, instead of worrying about whether you are living Christ’s commandments to the fullest you can?

If one truly has faith in God, one does not have to fear getting zapped by strange concepts or occult stuff or demons.
 
When I read about devout Catholics having these experiences. , that’s when I hit the panic button. As mentioned in the other thread. Praying to God and being in a state of grace is supposed to protect us. When one still suffers a demonic delusion still with that, it’s kind of a cause for uncertainty
 
You don’t know these people personally - you’re reading stuff about them, so you have no idea if they are “devout”.
They don’t sound terribly devout if they are putting so much weight on non-Jesus stuff.
If they actually are devout and stuff like this happens to them, frankly I, like the Church, would first suspect some sort of mental health issue and seek to eliminate that before rushing to the conclusion of demonic oppression.

One doesn’t generally get demonic oppression from just reading or thinking about a couple of Eastern religious concepts. I read extensively about Eastern religion in my youth, though I didn’t ever have much desire to practice it because it seemed boring and I was happy with being a Roman Catholic. I’m familiar with the buzzwords and concepts. Yet I’ve never had the slightest fear that some Eastern religious concept would come winging out of the blue and infest me like the Amityville Horror.
 
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