Many, many years ago, I was involved in some pretty heavy New Age stuff. Then I began what turned out to be my Christian conversion following an experience I had. Anyway, the more I read the Bible, the more convinced I became that Christ really was the Truth. I went and threw out these particular New Age books I had been exploring. I began to pray to be led to the "True Church". Well, about a day or two later I met this lady on the bus who was reading the Bible and asked her if I could come to her church. She seemed at first suspicious, but then agreed. I went regularly for about 3 weeks. It was called the International Church of Christ, and is well known to be a spiritually abusive and manipulative cult. I didn't know this at the time, of course! Anyway, the whole while I attended, the "disciplers" were trying to break up my relationship with my then girlfriend (now my wife), and pull me further under their influence, all in a very sneaky and contrived manner. They had a teaching program that involved using the Bible and twisting the words out of context to get church noobs like me under their spell. It all seemed a bit weird to me after a while, but I was "on fire for the Lord" and felt that God must have led me here. I also had no church experience to compare this to. One night, I had this really lucid dream that I was in the church with some of the parishioners, and they started pulling the communion wine out of the cupboards in big jugs and guzzling it, and began turning into wolves and urinating all over the church. Right around that time, my wife (who is very intuitive... maybe a little psychic) had seen on separate occasions a large black wolf at the end of our bed, as well as a shadowy human figure. She still insists to this day that this occurred. Other weird stuff happened surrounding my experience with this church. Fortunately, one day I snapped to my senses, prayed for guidance, and went and researched the ICOC, uncovering what they were up to (which was no good). That same day I received a call from one of the parishioners asking me how my day was, and sounding suspicious that I had done something wrong. Later that week, parishioners baked a cake and left it at my doorstep. We threw it out. I suspect there was something demonic going on there. I still get the chills.
When I first began exploring the Orthodox Church through books, I was also foolishly exploring all kinds of other esoteric lore, including western occult books. I had a huge pdf collection. One day, I opened this pdf file about Enochian magic. The opening page showed a picture of Christ crucified upside down. I looked at the blasphemous image for a few seconds and felt like it was raping my eyes, pounding my psyche or something. I felt horrible. I immediately closed the book, fell on my knees, and made the sign of the cross. It is hard to explain, but I could physically feel something happen to my body, as if the sign of the cross itself was getting between myself and some other kind of unwanted energy. There was a palpable tingling experience. I am ashamed to say that I put myself into a lot of danger of this kind when I was younger.
One more... oddly, the morning I was baptized in the Orthodox Church (or maybe the night before), I received an email from a representative of the Raelians. You know... the Raelians! The people from Quebec who claimed to have cloned a human and whose leader claims to have an open communication with aliens. They're like eccentric atheist futurists, or something. A year or two before, out of curiosity, I had perused the weirdness of their website and maybe even downloaded a free e-book (too much curiosity can be dangerous!). So this unsolicited email I get on the morning of my Baptism is from a Raelian, and it is very personable. He tells me about how great of an adventure it is to be a Raelian, and how much this person's life has been transformed because of his involvement with this group. If I am interested in communicating or if I have any questions, he'd be happy to tell me all about it. The timing and out-of-the-blueness of it made me suspicious that it was a last temptation or attack.
I don't know if any of these experiences were demonic or not, for sure. I'm a bit more skeptical these days. For a long time, I was rather convinced that they were.
Worth mentioning: I also have unusually heightened temptations for some reason the day or so after I take communion. I have always found this strange.
