Gems and gold dust from God...is this common?

[emmiedahl]

I have heard of the feathers and gold dust, but wtf is a glory cloud?

ibethel.org/testimonies/2011/11/01/miracles-in-the-glory

eta: they talk about it here too ibethel.org/testimonies/2011/10/28/a-cloud-in-someones-home

[Heaps of Eeps]

I have heard of the feathers and gold dust, but wtf is a glory cloud?

ibethel.org/testimonies/2011/11/01/miracles-in-the-glory

eta: they talk about it here too ibethel.org/testimonies/2011/10/28/a-cloud-in-someones-home

On the face to face facebook (ugh too many faces!) theres a pciture of oil and someone comments about "honey oil"

which a quick Googling tells me is a common hash byproduct which amde me LOL.

Maybe a glory cloud is similar to a glory hole...but more holy.

[emmiedahl]

Here is a video of a supposed glory cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOxm5k3Mvs

[oscar]

Here is a video of a supposed glory cloud http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAOxm5k3Mvs

So it's like a fog machine? Only crappy?

When I watched the glory cloud video, this was linked in the related videos sidebar.

7-yIkMtTl4Q

[yetanothermeg]

As someone who went to my share of raves back in the good old days, I want to visit a Vineyard church now and see if I can get a contact high! I do love to dance.

[Brainsample]

Thanks for al that, brain sample. I am a psychology grad, so I find this kind of stuff very interesting.

I remember suggesting something like this in class occurring in worship services once. Went over like a lead balloon in my So Baptist college! :lol:

To keep my license, I have to take a certain amount of continuing ed every year, and I chose to train as a hypnotherapist as an adjunct to the treatment of pain and because I was fascinated to learn that people have reversed allergies through hypnosis and wanted to test that out. It was remarkable to me how so many of these elements of this stuff came together. The hypnotherapy stuff confirmed the material I'd read in the anti-cult exit counseling literature, and it dovetailed with my own religious experience in the Word of Faith movement.

My branch of Pentecostalism derived from Mesmer. Mary Baker Eddy studied with a European trained mesmerist named Phineas Quimby, and from that, she created Christian Science. Kenyon took Eddy's book and essentially tried to sanitize it by introducing more Scripture and by taking other elements out of it creating Word of Faith theology. I was dumbounded, blown away, freaked out, etc. as I eventually learned that a good deal of what I grew up believing was the Holy Spirit was little more than mass hypnosis. And all of that primed me well to get brainwashed in a patriarchal/shepherding/disciplieship/submission doctrine church, a la Gothard. I grew up believing very many impossible things before breakfast, though.

I've been at serious Holy Roller meetings, have been "drunk in the spirit" and have exhibited "holy laughter." I've been at some of these meetings where people have gone wild, seeing gold dust and with ministers claiming that they had oil on their hands that just spontaneously appeared. I didn't see any of it. I was once at a meeting of about 300 people, and there was a loud clap of thunder in the room at a key place in the sermon. I bought the audio tape, and you can hear everyone scream together in shock like I did because of the noise, but there was no thunder clap on that tape. I believe that was also hypnosis.

[Brainsample]

As someone who went to my share of raves back in the good old days, I want to visit a Vineyard church now and see if I can get a contact high! I do love to dance.

I still visit Messianic Jewish services fairly often, sometimes just to go to dance. It is one of the most wonderful things. I can't do the fast ones anymore because of my back, but there is a nice and gentle one called "Old Friend" that most everyone everywhere I've been seems to know. There's also a really cool Yemenite dance that I love to do, too, but I don't know the name of it.

[Witsec7]

Brain I appreciate these posts. I've spent some time with snake handlers and try to get out to a couple of pentecostal holiness tent revivals a year. I'm certainly not scientifically trained but well read. I do agree with you on the mass hypnosis. Rhythmic music, body movement. I can do it with trance dancing/sufi dancing, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I went though a personal enlightenment 'course' where the staging and the process of making folks open to a particular experience (that was being sold to you) was artfully crafted. I knew what I was getting into and didn't pay for it, but naturally they had the folks beggin for more when it was over. They also asked you to isolate yourself for 3 days after the experience.

edited for spelling

[Brainsample]

Brain I appreciate these posts. I've spent some time with snake handlers and try to get out to a couple of pentecostal holiness tent revivals a year. I'm certainly not scientifically trained but well read. I do agree with you on the mass hypnosis. Rhythmic music, body movement. I can do it with trance dancing/sufi dancing, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I went though a personal enlightenment 'course' where the staging and the process of making folks open to a particular experience (that was being sold to you) was artfully crafted. I knew what I was getting into and didn't pay for it, but naturally they had the folks beggin for more when it was over. They also asked you to isolate yourself for 3 days after the experience.

edited for spelling

It is really amazing and wonderful that we can move in and out of these states to help regulate and soothe ourselves and that our brains will shift us around in these states of consciousness to preserve and protect us. I know that some time ago, Al Mohler recommended that no Christians should do yoga because it does alter consciousness, because he's the new protector of the Christian masses. But I had to laugh. If Mohler's right, you should never deep breathe. Don't walk for very long. Don't drive the car very far. Never let yourself get light on sleep. Never get under florescent lighting. Don't say words in a certain progression. Don't count aloud. Never get hungry.

But it is these very things that help us move through our day and give us access to the most pleasurable things. An alpha state is the state of meditation -- and meditation is prayer. But song and breathing and dance and body posture also do this same thing.

If you ever get a chance to watch a traumatized person undergoing a session of EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing), the dramatic change in their posture is one (of many) key indicator of that person moving out of a trauma state (half high beta at about 30 Htz which is an ineffective kind of frenetic thought state while another part of the brain cranks theta waves like crazy in fight or flight) into a state of relaxed alertness (alpha at about 8-10 Htz). The subject's hands warm up, they open up, and when seated in a chair, guess what posture they generally rest in when they get through to the self-soothing of an alpha state? They sit like the Buddha posture. Upright head, arms at the sides, full belly (facilitates that slow, deep breathing). It's almost eerie, and beautiful. Buddhas are seated that way, perhaps on purpose to imitate another or to induce a mental state, but it fascinates me from the other direction. When in a state of relaxed alertness, apart from any kind of yoga or anything, that's the posture that people will shift into when they move out of that recall of trauma (a memory that is associated, experienced as a live and ongoing thing). That's something else I've picked up from the study of PTSD.

Oh, and SPECT studies of the brain are also verifying what we've been able to observe with brainwaves via EEG. Amenclinics.com has some great images of what happens in the brain by showing bloodflow (and therefore brain activity). Amazing stuff.

[Brainsample]

...And how angry I feel when I consider how manipulators have harnessed many of these things to exploit people, minsters in particular.