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Jan. 16, 2017 - Praying Medic

23:39

070 Engaging God Through Our Imagination

In this episode, I discuss how we engage God and the supernatural realm through our imagination. Resources The Veil by Blake Healy Seeing in the Spirit Made Simple

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	- Hi, I'd like to welcome you to our show.
	I'm your host, Prang Medic.
	We're talking about life as a child of God and all things related to His Kingdom.
	Thanks for joining us.
	If you're a new listener to the show, you can find articles and books and other resources on my website www.prangmedic.com.
	Now let's jump into this week's show.
	Hey folks, this is Praying Medic.
	How are you doing?
	Today I'd like to talk to you about a subject that is of growing interest to a lot of people.
	The subject is seeing in the Spirit and traveling in the Spirit and how we do it.
	Every week I receive at least 10 or 12 questions from people who are trying to see in the Spirit, trying to travel in the Spirit, trying to go into the courtrooms of Heaven, and they have difficulty experiencing and seeing what is going on when they do this.
	So, they write to me and say, hey, Pragmatic, I'm not having any luck with this.
	It just isn't happening.
	What am I doing wrong?
	What am I looking for?
	So, I'd like to explain a little bit today about the process involved with that.
	As most of you know, I was an atheist until I was 38 years old.
	And even at that point, I had not had a dream for 25 years.
	I did not see visions.
	I didn't really see anything in the spiritual world.
	I've never been what some people would call a seer.
	It wasn't until 2007 or 2008 when I started to become interested in seeing visions and seeing in the Spirit.
	And it was actually the time when the Holy Spirit began to give me visions in the middle of the night.
	I had a lot of night visions.
	Night visions are an interesting phenomenon.
	Night visions are something like dreams, but night visions happen when you're awake.
	It's almost like having a dream while you're awake and you see these images in your mind.
	Night visions are generally revelation that the Lord gives you sovereignly.
	But you can also see in the spiritual world without the Holy Spirit being directly involved.
	You can do it of your own volition.
	It's actually very simple.
	Although it does take time and practice for some people to develop their spiritual vision.
	In the same way that a normal human, when they're born, has physical eyes that are able to see, the same way we have the sense of smell, the sense of touch, the sense of taste, all of these physical senses that we have, we have a corresponding spiritual sense that goes with it.
	So, you can smell things in the spiritual world.
	You can see things in the spiritual world.
	You can taste things in the spiritual world.
	You can sense feelings and emotions in the spiritual world.
	All the same senses that we have with our physical body, our spiritual body has the same senses.
	There's a lot of people out there who believe that you have to have a gift to be able to see in the Spirit, that you need a special anointing to see in the Spirit.
	It's very common in the Charismatic and Pentecostal Church to hear people talk about, this person is a seer and that person's not a seer, as if one person is able to see in the Spirit and the other person isn't.
	I don't believe that that's actually true.
	I think the term seer is greatly misused.
	I don't like using it myself because I don't think there are special people who are given a gift of seeing in the spirit that other people don't have.
	You can't find it anywhere in the scriptures mentioned that there is a gift of seeing in the spirit.
	Now, there is a gift of discerning of spirits, but how you discern the presence of spirits, you can use all of the spiritual senses.
	You can use smell, sight, taste, touch.
	So, there isn't really a gift of seeing in the spirit, although I will continue to get emails and messages from people who will say, Oh, you're so gifted in your ability to see in the spirit.
	And I just want to cringe and say, well, no, I'm really not.
	When a baby is born, they have an ability to see with their physical eyes, but what they perceive in their mind is this blurry image.
	They can't focus on anything that's in the distance.
	They have to, over time, develop their ability to see with their physical eyes.
	They have to exercise their eyes.
	They have to learn how to focus the images that come through their eyes onto the retina that are projected to the optic nerve and into the brain.
	It's a process that children have to go through to learn how to use their physical eyes properly.
	And the same thing is true with learning how to use your spiritual eyes.
	Some people are born with a more advanced, developed ability to see in the spirit.
	Blake Healy has a great book called The Veil.
	He writes about his experiences as a child seeing demons and angels and all kinds of spiritual creatures.
	Blake is a guy who was born with a very advanced ability to see in the spirit.
	But he doesn't have a gift or an ability that you or I don't have.
	He just had the same ability the rest of us have.
	It was just more fully developed when he was born.
	But anyone can develop the same acuity, the same ability to see demons and angels that Blake Healy has, or that I have, or that Michael Van Vlijmen has.
	It's really a matter of practice and persistence and exercise.
	Now, I have friends who have contacted me and they said, I've tried these exercises, I've tried this, I've tried that and I still can't see anything.
	I've actually had some people tell me that they have some type of a neurological disorder or they've had a head injury and they insist they are not able to see in the spirit because of it.
	Well, you are more than welcome to believe that if you want to.
	I don't believe that that's true.
	And here's why I don't believe that's true.
	I believe everyone can see in the Spirit regardless of whatever physical limitations they have.
	And here's why.
	These very same people who tell me that they can't see in the Spirit, I ask them, well, can you see with your physical eyes?
	And they say, Oh yeah, I can see fine.
	I just can't see anything.
	I never have dreams.
	I never have visions.
	When I close my eyes, everything's always black.
	I just don't have the ability to see anything other than what's in the physical world.
	So we have to talk a little bit about how the mind is able to perceive the things we see in the physical world.
	And then we're going to compare that with how the mind perceives things in the spiritual world.
	When you have your eyes open and you see something in the physical world, what you're seeing is an arrangement of photons of light.
	Those photons of light are picked up and transmitted through the lens and the cornea in your eyes.
	They are projected onto the retina at the back of your eyeball.
	And the image is actually flipped upside down.
	Once the image appears on your retina, it is transmitted to the optic nerve.
	And the optic nerve transmits it to the brain as a series of electrical impulses.
	It's no longer an actual image.
	It's a series of electrical impulses.
	And your brain has to now reconstruct the photons of light and the electronic signals into an image that makes sense.
	That is what's going on when you are seeing something in the physical world.
	Now, how does your brain reconstruct those images so that it makes sense?
	Well, it takes the electronic signals and it re-images them or re-imagines them on a little projection screen in your mind that is called your imagination.
	Now, when I say the word imagination, a lot of people think, no, wait a minute.
	The imagination is where we make things up in our mind.
	Well, that's true.
	The imagination is the little TV screen in your mind that allows you to invent and create things out of your own soul.
	But, it is also the apparatus that your brain uses to reconstruct images of things in the physical world that your body needs to see.
	If you are able to see things in the physical world, then that little TV screen in your mind where these images are projected, the things that we see in the spiritual world are projected on the same screen.
	You have the same apparatus.
	When we see something in the spiritual world, whether it is an angel or a demon or Jesus, when we see a spiritual object, a spiritual landscape, a spiritual scene, we are seeing it with our spirit, with the eyes of our spirit, what the Bible sometimes called the eyes of our heart, the eyes of our inner man.
	So, we have a physical set of eyes and we have a spiritual set of eyes.
	Both of them work.
	Everybody who was ever born was born with a spirit that has a spiritual set of eyes that can see.
	Interestingly enough, I watched a YouTube video, which was a testimony of a woman who was born blind.
	From birth, she had never been able to see anything.
	She had a near-death experience.
	And in the near-death experience, for the first time in her life, she was able to see images, see people and see things.
	And it freaked her out.
	Now, she came back from the near-death experience and told this testimony.
	What that tells us is even if you are born physically blind, without physical eyes or without the ability to see physically, your spirit still has the ability to see in the spiritual world.
	Now think about this.
	When your physical body dies at the end of your life, your physical body is going to be decomposed, go back into the ground.
	Your spirit is going to continue in the spiritual world, in heaven, in eternity.
	You're going to hang out with relatives and Jesus and the Father.
	How are you going to do that?
	How are you going to perceive the things that are going on in heaven?
	You're going to perceive them through your spiritual eyes.
	Those spiritual eyes that you are going to use in heaven are the same spiritual eyes you can use right now to see things in the spiritual world.
	You have them The problem for a lot of us is we don't think about the spiritual realm.
	We don't think about the world of angels and demons.
	We don't think about or focus on those things in the supernatural realm.
	And whatever world, whatever realm you focus on, that is the one that you perceive and it's the one that seems to be the most real.
	Like I said, I was an atheist.
	Never had visions.
	Never had dreams.
	But once I started to spend time every day, with my eyes closed, asking the Holy Spirit to show me things in the spiritual world, I very slowly, gradually, over months, began to see images appear.
	In my mind, in my imagination, and I started to have this conversation with the Holy Spirit about what I was seeing, what these images were.
	At the beginning, it's very easy to think that when you see something in your mind, in your imagination, that you are making it up.
	But there is a way that you can verify that these things are real.
	So, let me explain what that process looks like.
	When I first started engaging the spiritual realm through my imagination, I would sit alone in a dark ambulance and have my eyes closed.
	I would do that for hours.
	Day after day I did this.
	This is my spiritual training.
	This is learning the discipline of developing your spiritual vision.
	If you have never been able to see angels and demons and things in the spiritual world, it is probably going to help you a lot to get in the habit of doing some of these exercises.
	Now, I didn't know exactly what I was doing.
	I didn't know what I was in for.
	I just figured I wanted to see visions.
	And so I took some time out of my day and closed my eyes and sat on the bench seat in the ambulance.
	And like I said, day after day, month after month as I did this, the Lord began to show me images.
	At first they were images of people.
	And I would guess who the person was and then images would change.
	I would see more symbolic images.
	The Lord was trying to build with me a spiritual language, a kind of a spiritual dictionary, if you will.
	I began to see these different images and he was trying to get me to understand what they represented, what they symbolized.
	So, we had this conversation going on, and I would guess what I thought it meant, and if I guessed correctly, the image would change.
	If I guessed incorrectly, the image would stay there.
	And I would take another guess, and if I guessed wrong, it would stay there.
	And I would take another guess.
	I kept on guessing until I guessed correctly, and when I guessed correctly, the image would change.
	That's how I knew that it wasn't just me making up things in my mind, in my imagination.
	When I was responding to what the Lord was showing me, it would either change quickly when I guessed it correctly, or it would stay there and I would continue guessing until I understood what it was He wanted me to know.
	Through this process, I learned that I was actually having a conversation with the Lord through these images that I saw in my imagination.
	In my book, Seeing in the Spirit Made Simple, I have a series of exercises that I recommend people do.
	And they work.
	I've had people write back to me and say, you know, these exercises are amazing.
	It's great to read the information, but if you don't do the exercises, nothing happens.
	I've had several people write to me and say that once they began to do the exercises regularly, they very quickly began seeing things in the spiritual world.
	Their spiritual eyes were opened, if you want to say that.
	And they were able to start perceiving angels and demons.
	And very quickly, their spiritual vision became sharper.
	They began to see things more regularly.
	When they would travel into the courts of heaven, they would see things.
	These exercises that I recommend are very simple.
	A good way to do it is when you're going to bed, spend 10 minutes looking into the space between where you are sitting and the wall across the room.
	Have some low light and just look into that space.
	And if you do it long enough, you'll see objects, you'll see images, you'll begin to see things in the spiritual world that you never noticed before.
	It sounds crazy, but I can tell you that if you start doing exercises To increase your ability to see in the spirit, you will begin to see things in the spiritual world.
	Now, another exercise you can do is not looking with your eyes open, but you can sit there with your eyes closed and ask the Lord to show you images in your mind.
	Again, at first you're going to think, well, I'm just making this up.
	It's just my imagination.
	Well, you know what?
	At first it might be.
	It might be.
	You might see images that you think are coming from your soul, from your imagination.
	And that's true.
	You may.
	But if you do this long enough, what you'll notice is there are two different types of images that appear in our mind, in our imagination.
	There are those that appear spontaneously, without us exercising our will, they just show up there.
	And if you exert your will over them and try to change them, you won't be able to change them.
	There are other images that appear when you, more or less, you focus your mind on a certain thing and then you see the image.
	If you intentionally think about your mother or your husband or your wife, you'll see an image in your mind of them.
	Those images that appear when we exercise our will or focus our mind on something.
	If you try to change those images and you're able to change them quickly and make the people move around.
	If you can exercise your will over images that you see in your mind, they are coming from your soul.
	But if you try to exercise your will over something you see in your mind and you can't change it and you can't control it, it is not coming from you.
	It's coming from outside of you.
	It's either coming from a demon or an angel or the Holy Spirit.
	It is something you're seeing that is outside of you.
	It's probably something that you're seeing in the spiritual world and that is how you begin to engage the spiritual world by looking for these images and scenes and things in your mind and engage them.
	You might lay there and see a door in your mind.
	A good exercise is when you see a door, Go over to it.
	In your mind, see yourself walking over to it and open it.
	And go through it and see what's on the other side.
	Many times, when people do these exercises, if you see a door in a hallway and you go through the door, you will enter a realm of the Spirit.
	You might enter some location in Heaven.
	Your Spirit will engage that.
	You will meet people.
	You will talk to them.
	You can engage Jesus and God the Father through these experiences.
	And I would encourage you to try doing that.
	I had a discussion on Facebook this last week about the supernatural realms and there's some misunderstandings about how we engage the spiritual realm, how we engage the realms of heaven, how we engage Jesus and the Father in places like the court of accusation.
	When I describe this process where I will close my eyes and in my mind I just see the courtroom and I see my accuser and I hear in my mind I hear these thoughts that are the accusations.
	To some people that sounds contrived.
	It sounds like we're trying to conjure this up, like we're trying to create it in our imagination and that's not actually what's happening.
	I don't create any of this in my imagination.
	And I know that because sometimes a person will ask me, hey, can you go to the court of accusation for me?
	And I might say, okay, sure.
	Well, when I do that, I don't see anything.
	I don't see a courtroom, don't see an accuser, don't see anything.
	In those cases, when I do that, I know that that is a person I am not supposed to be representing in the court of accusation.
	So sometimes I will perceive the court and sometimes I won't.
	And if I don't perceive it, then I know it didn't happen.
	I didn't go there.
	It was not a reality that I experienced.
	I could try to make it up in my imagination, but there's no point in doing that.
	And one thing I would like to say is there's nothing wrong with going to represent other people to the courts of heaven, but I don't like to do it as a habit.
	And there are a lot of reasons why I don't like doing it.
	First of all, when you hear the accusation, Well, it may be something that you need to repent of.
	It may be something that has to do with your genealogy, or your DNA, or something in your family.
	If somebody else is doing this for you, and they need to repent and renounce some things, well, that's hard for someone else to do for you.
	And the other thing is, when you go to the Court of Heaven, many times you're going to meet Jesus and the Father.
	And, you know, I ask people, look, if I go there and I meet Jesus and the Father on your behalf, don't you think it would be better if you were the one to go there and meet with Jesus and meet with the Father?
	I think personally, this is something we should do for ourselves.
	Like I said, you can do it for other people, and I have done it.
	I think it's much better off if each of us learns how to engage the spiritual realm, if we learn how to go to the courts and councils of heaven for ourselves, so we can get our mandates, so we can learn and grow in spiritual maturity.
	Some people hear these types of conversations and think well this seems like you're trying to make something happen Sometimes people will respond and say well I just do it by faith as if to say that I'm not doing it by faith I think what people mean when they say that is They are entering into an encounter with the Lord, but they don't perceive anything.
	They are engaging this without a whole lot of spiritual perception of what is happening.
	And they refer to that as just doing it by faith.
	When a person goes to the court of heaven, and when they meet with the Father, when they meet with Jesus, or when they go to the court of angels, and they meet with the angels, and might receive angelic help, all of this is done by faith.
	That's how I do it, and that's how everyone that I know, you do it by faith.
	You simply believe in your heart that you are going to go there.
	And when you believe that you're going there and you believe that this is real, that this is not something you're making up in your mind, when you believe by faith, you engage the supernatural realm.
	You have these experiences.
	It's all done by faith.
	None of this is anything that we're conjuring up in our own mind or trying to create in our imagination.
	What we're doing is we are perceiving the supernatural realm through our mind, through our imagination.
	I would like to leave you with one final observation.
	In everything that I've talked about so far, when I talk about laying there in the dark with my eyes closed, asking the Holy Spirit to show me images and having those dialogues with Him where I'm trying to understand what those images mean, when I talk about engaging the supernatural realms of heaven and going into the courts and councils of heaven, meeting with Jesus, meeting with the Father, In everything that I'm doing, it is all about relationship.
	In the whole process, we have to be aware that we aren't just trying to get ourselves healed.
	We're not just trying to get a better job.
	We're not trying to accomplish these goals for ourselves.
	The whole point of all of this is building a vibrant, living relationship with God.
	And that's one of the reasons why I really encourage people to do this for themselves, because I do not want to stand in the way of someone else's relationship with God.
	My main goal in my teaching and writing my books and my ministry is not to get people healed, to get people a better job, to get people set free of evil spirits.
	Those things are good, but what I really want to do is to teach and train people how to strengthen their own relationship with God.
	And if you do these things yourself, you will strengthen your relationship with God.
	He'll become more real to you.
	He will reveal to you your divine destiny, the plans and the purposes that He had in mind for you before you were even born.
	My encouragement for you this week is to spend a little bit more time engaging God, turning your heart towards Him, turning your mind upon Him, and asking Him what He wants to do this week.
	Well, folks, that is our show for today.
	I hope you enjoyed it.
	Thanks for dropping by.
	If you're new to the podcast and you haven't been to my website, you might drop by and check out the articles I have there.
	If you have any questions or comments about the show, you can contact me at admin at prayingmedic.com.
	That's A-D-M-I-N at prayingmedic.com.
	You can also contact me on Facebook and Twitter.
	I'd like to thank you again for dropping by.

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