The devil’s side trips

July 18, 2025

I awoke from a vivid dream feeling emotionally captured. After a few minutes of reviewing the elements of the dream and its essential theme, I knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to spend more time in that hypnotic trance. I had a strong sense that this dream was teaching me something, but not by allowing myself to be caught in the emotional field it was capturing me in like a net.

That emotional field was powerful and compelling. The dream wasn’t exactly a nightmare, which made it all the more compelling, as I had little logical reason to dismiss it. It was so interesting! (good tipoff that demonic forces are involved)

In the dream, I did something thoughtless that hurt my parents terribly. My feeling of remorse and anguish was profound, and I woke up in that emotional state. It was powerful dream – but emotionally powerful. It highlighted what I’ve been noticing lately – what I’m aware of throughout the day is largely determined by this push and pull of emotional energies. They keep me locked into a world of preferences and aversions. Am I okay or not-okay. Every moment.

So I’m pretty much a slave to these emotional nets that are cast over me and the thoughts they spin out. And that determines my sense of well-being. All driven by the ebb and flow of those emotional waves, even when I’m not being hit by a big one but is subtly going on as an undercurrent all day, driving me.

And that begs the question: in each moment that I’m gauging my sense of how I am, am I actually referencing reality? Or am I believing a false reality that my emotional life is presenting, like a dream?

Then the enormity of this hits me. I’ve been living in this emotional reality and taking its lies on face value. When I’m emotionally upset, I’m captured. When I’m emotionally happy, I’m equally captured.

Leads me to think that my whole life I haven’t had a clue what it means to be free of emotional traps, to be at peace, to live in joy, to live in hope and faith. To be a dwelling place for the Holy Spirit, you can’t be living a life of distraction by emotional perturbations. By the grace of God, discernment begins to develop. I begin to recognize the distracting “scenic routes” for what they really are – the devil’s side trips.

The secular world and modern psychology has never been able to offer a real healing solution, because the reality I’m devoted to defies worldly reason.

I haven’t seen any of the spiritual traditions get to the heart of this healing, either, after a lifetime of trial and error. I was missing the essential grounding in the life of the Church that Orthodoxy provides. Not a method or a dead moral code to follow, but a calling to reach the real potential of human existence in the living presence of God.