Two Books on Exorcism

"Exorcism: Encounters with the Paranormal and the Occult" by Fr Jose Francisco Syquia is a true narration of the author's adventures as an exorcist in the Philippines. Published in 2006, the account is set recent and interspersed with teachings Fr Syquia has studied.

In parallel, "The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist" by Matt Baglio (2009) tells the account of Fr Gary Thomas, who was a skeptic of modern-day demonic possession, until he has had to undergo a course on it in Rome. The skeptic-turned-exorcist Fr Thomas tells his journey under the tutelage of a renowned exorcist (who accepts cases in a church as would a doctor in a clinic), until such time he has to lead an exorcism himself.

Aside from exorcism and the supernatural being real and practiced until now––the Modern Age of Science––the following are noteworthy in the two books:

1) Having been involved with the occult and the New Age Movement (beyond-curious or habitual interest in Astrology, Numerology, Tarot cards, fortune telling, etc.) or being an occult practitioner increases the chances of you being obsessed, oppressed or possessed. Having a sinful lifestyle will do so too.

2) Temptation from the devil is an ordinary demonic activity, while unusual types of demonic harassments are possession, oppression, obsession and infestation.

3) Possession is a state of full control over a body (but not the soul) by demon(s). The mental, affective and volitive faculties of a patient are suspended. Obsession is characterized by thoughts that spring up momentarily or more frequently. These thoughts may be absurd, blasphemous, shameful, horrifying. They come especially at night. When suicidal in nature, the obsession would be at a dangerous level. Oppression is defined more variedly: burdens or afflictions that torment, affecting one's health, emotional and psychological well-being, spiritual life, relationships and work. Such misfortunes may come from nowhere. Deliverance prayers would be adequate for the latter two, while an exorcism is required for possession. Infestation is locational or material control of the demons. This may involve objects accepted from occult practitioners, or houses that are haunted.

4) Fortune tellers border the Quiapo church––an irony of strong forces localized.

5) Albularyos sometimes work because they call on to spirits that may be stronger than the spirits that have caused the illness. A visit to the albularyo may incur wasted money: getting healed on the first visit might assure the albularyo a second visit; thus the albularyo may implant on you another sickness.

6) Deliverance prayers can be thought of as a private exorcism. Crucial is the praying individual's faith for the success of the deliverance.

7) Trained exorcists discern the psychological from the non-human. An exorcist might say a prayer in Latin, dual-purpose: To check if the human reacts from it as a demon would, and to not traumatize a potential possessed individual.

8) Different exorcists have different styles. Different possessed humans have different reactions to different exorcists.

9) Demons do not want to get noticed. They'd manifest scientifically or naturally to deceive, especially the exorcists.

10) Being sinful makes you vulnerable to spiritual attacks (curses that may be spoken unintentionally or otherwise, spells).

11) Demons are fallen angels that are experts at deception. They may know secrets and use these to assault an exorcist or his team (which may include a psychiatrist, a doctor, a charismatic group).

There is an archdiocese in Manila, an office in Exorcism. http://exorcismphilippines.com/
Read this recent interview with Fr Syquia: http://www.mb.com.ph/node/339374/the-exorci

Eiga Sai: Villain

"Villain", one of the films of Eiga Sai, the Japanese film festival held at Shangri-la, is a story of the two alternative theme interactions of love and irrationality: 1) How people are able to do stupid things (or weird) out of love for a person; 2) But more uncommonly, what love can do to irrationality.

The former talks of love as the cause to irrationality, such as how a death of a daughter urges a father to try to hunt down her daughter's murderer to seek justice extremely. The slightest defamation of his daughter's death would mean attacking with a wrench, an act only to be punctuated by his realization that some people laugh at other people's irrationalities because these people do not know how it's like to love. They laugh at other people's miseries, thinking it's comedic how fathers could go so far as to confront strangers and fall down pathetically for their daughters. But, in this laughing, they do not see the value of crying because of love. Another undertone is that of the female protagonist Mitsuyo–how in desperate need of love, she succumbs to a stranger from a dating site.

The latter revolves around irrationality as the cause to love. This delves with irrationality as a premise, and with what can love do to save it? as a question. Little did Mitsuyo know that the stranger was a murderer, named Yuichi, until he confesses to have killed the daughter of the irrational father. The confession would be ignored by Mitsuyo because: 1) the murder was an accident triggered by a malicious threat of the daughter; but more importantly 2) she's seen the side of Yuichi that knows how to love. She still is determined to love him, perhaps even more.  The news announces he is wanted for murder. Falling in love for the first time, Mitsuyo continues to fight for her love with Yuichi and flees with him, until she discovers that Yuichi is really a sociopath. This discovery is unfortunate however: in the middle of lovemaking, he snaps and tries to strangle her. 

The authorities find them in a lighthouse, just in time to rescue a breathless Mitsuyo. However, we see Yuichi trying to reach for the hand of Mitsuyo as he is taken away by the police. This indicates that he really loved Mitsuyo, albeit his love was temporarily restrained by his condition. 

Had Yuichi not been taken in by the police, Mitsuyo would still have loved him despite his fits.

The emotional battles of the different characters converge at a denouement: how acknowledging love becomes key to acceptance of the irrational.

"It's not ___, it's __"

Not about fondness, but of friendship

HUMANITY
Not culture (pressure), not tradition (habit), but of divine
Not logic, not emotion, but just measures and fair scales
Not irrational, but just human
Not logical, but just human

Not existence, but life

RELATIONSHIP
Not parasitic nor commensal, but mutual
Not wasting time, but spending time
Not correspondence, but friendship
Not romantic, not platonic, not brotherly, but raw love
Not about the label, but the feel
Not pleasure, but gladness
Not power of friendship, but raw trust and belief--simple yet powerful
Not hate, but love--hard though undeserved, albeit right

Not resolution, but reconciliation
Not problem, but relationship

SCIENCE
Not dilute nor saturate, but concentrate
Not filtration, but titration
Not the endpoint, but the change
Not so much of the change as with the changing

Not virtual, but real
Not idealistic, but realistic

CHANGE
Not servitude, but help
Not passive, but passion
A temporary distraction, a transient refocus
Not presence, but influence
Not change, but improvement
Not progress, but growth

Not a struggle, but a striving
Not so much of the way than it is with the will

LANGUAGE
Not to give up and tire, but a pause and a rest
Not a period, but a comma
Not punctuation, but conjunction

Not about not's, but about but's
Not adjective, but verb
Not words, but deeds

Not so much with the beatings and blows as it is with the healing and hello's

Not to keep it up, but to keep up
Not to keep it up, but to keep it

Erratum

I classify my previous post as a joyous exclamation of the inexplicable that I felt that day--emotion-inspired, and thus rash.

When I think about it though, that supernatural moment should not have been a "validation" of Jesus, in that the Bible says that the Lord's grace is sufficient. I was duped into thinking that the possibility of the supernatural in our time and age could be used to prove God's wonder; when in fact, His word is enough. Despite having been deceived, I trust in the Lord that He will reveal things far better.

What it did was to strengthen my faith. I tried to convince myself to trust in Him a lot more. I thought it was that easy, having experienced the magical as a testament of His power, but as I later on find out, it's still a struggle, even with His supremacy clear.

One thing's clear: The Lord Jesus Christ ultimately wins.

Supernatural

Wednesday June 20, 2012
Today I experienced the supernatural--a validation that Jesus is living, real, loving and supreme. He reigns above all.

Praise be to the Lord. HALLELUJAH!

Maladaptive

Six months into the medication (9 months sick), I still am change-averse. How long must I undergo this period of maladjustment (having difficulty in adapting)? Usually knowing the problem is the first step in solving it, but even knowing that I am having difficulty adjusting doesn't help. I struggle at everything!

This state I am in just proves how human beings can be "human". Such torture to feel no one understands!

Lord Jesus, rescue me. I pray that my condition and my brain don't get the best of me, but that You do.

Extension

It has been a good two months since I joked about my sick friend having her treatment extension, so we would finish treatment together in 2013. 

I am remorseful over the fact that two months ago would have been her last through hell, but it was not. She had made it through 19 months of religious antibiotics, enduring the commute from Antipolo to E Rodriguez, and groggily returning home, drugged and with in-between vomits. She obediently accomplished what most patients hardly considered--a perfect streak of attendance. 

But despite this, she still had to extend her treatment, with that questionable damage bored through her lungs. An operation would have been feasible, but the trusted doctor recommended an extension of treatment. 

Now, her end of treatment screams "uncertain"--with her perfect streak scratched four times by despair and deferred hope. Unrewarded obedience for 19 months is of course frustrating, torturous and debilitating. Rebellion would be predictable for such disheartenment.

I can only reprimand her so much, but the doctors have warned me to stay away from the patients; or I can get infected in the lungs, and my treatment would be extended as well.

My friend must have a harder time than I--she has to accept the fact that her certainty became an uncertainty. I can only pray for life. 

Psychological distortion

Spatio-temporal discrepancies
Distance me from the world and the people.

Upon reunion, I fail
At the challenge of relating,
And discerning what's normal
And what's inappropriate,
What's weird.

Such collisions
Are an urge so hard to fight:
The bottled up frustrations
I fume myself with,
Will I let them out?
In a simmer, in graduation,
Or in total?

I cannot fathom

The polarities that don't seem to meet

Statement 1

When the pitcher is about to tip over, will you not avoid the spillage if within your reach?

Karma

That moment when you realize that the things you've done are happening to you.

Downfall

Today I was given anti-depressants and anti-anxiety pills. And no, not by a psychiatrist. Just my neurologist.

When taking pills, I would usually want to know the mechanism of action, but right now I'm just too tired and apathetic. I've lost lots of weight in the past 5 weighings (55 kg, 52 kg, 50 kg, 48 kg, 47 kg, 44 kg), and that downslope is not good for my immune system, says my neurologist.

I don't want to go to the psychiatrist. Please haul me out.

Aguidao, aguidao!

Tacloban has been quite uneventful. I have no friends and experience the longest days ever. But it's okay, my mom bakes me cookies, and although the social disconnect's quite saddening, I get by. I can't even read books. I don't have space for new series so it's such a struggle thinking of what to do. It's just me and myself. Can't seem to rediscover myself because I realized I am not that interesting when sick. I can't even sing. I can, but after a few notes my body tries to want to puke. It's disgusting really. The battle is against my throat, my tummy, my tongue. I don't know. All these things, when irked, lead to vomiting.

This phase has convinced me of how human I am. Now I know I'm not extraterrestrial. Now I know my parents are real and that they're not secret agents pretending to live a normal life. Now I know how hard it is to feel pain constantly. Physical pain is much worse than any other pain. It really is. Sure other pains affect you probably longer, but when physical pain lingers, it's a struggle every moment. Time dilates for you. It's not "it too shall pass" but "please let's get this over with" every single time. Mind you, it's not that easy. I have never seen wellness and normality as something to cherish. Never really desired wellness. It was just taken for granted. Now I'm not trying to be inspirational here. Just being real. Surely, you don't want to be sick for a year of your young life. Never really thought that in a snap of a finger, the jumpy, lively, energetic I would have to lie down in bed for most of the day.

I can feel my bones crackle. I don't know if that's the healing process, but sometimes I feel muscular jerks from my back. Like it's healing or trying to heal. The jerks don't hurt, so it's probably good for me. I hope. I hope the spasms are a way of the body to combat these abscesses. And I hope they're successful.

Just a quick log of my drugs:
Streptomycin (8/40 shots)
Rifampicin + Isoniazid (2 months out of a year by Dec 6)
Pyrazinamide (Oct 6-Dec 6, yey it's near!)
Ethambutol (2 months out of 3 by Dec 6)
Dexamethasone (Nov 8 until Dec 7)

Daily Routine

I usually wake up at around lunch or a little after lunch. The latest recently was 2:30.
And that's because, during the night before, I would not have something to look forward to: no play to rehearse, no song I will need to prepare, no party to celebrate, no book or series that I am so engrossed with to read or watch.

I've probably wasted two weeks' worth of my parents' money on groceries and meals. My bed reeks of fatigue, from supporting my tiredness and laziness most of the day. And my body, slim and sloppy, is so exhausted from the inactivity: my muscles are worn out, my bones are aching from the diversity of fetal positions I have learned to learn in the past two weeks, and my toes have nails longer than my hair. I am so worn out that it feels like I have been trapped on a deserted island, helplessly struggling with my day.

Allow me to narrate my day:
I wake up to shower and to eat my brunch.
I go back to my room.
I brush my teeth, and either play with my phone, read and watch something from the Internet, try to fix my desk or pretend to lengthen my list of to-do's.
Maybe, I call the laundry shop.
I eat dinner, and then drink some milk and nutritious foods I've convinced myself to prioritize.
I brush and wash up.
I browse the Internet some more, before calling my parents and falling asleep.

That's basically it. It's a long list of things that I do, yes, but it always involves being in my room, or in the vicinity.

Get me out of my box.

Lost

It had never occurred that finally being done with school and actually doing nothing puts me in a box, until I realized that shooting home videos of myself screams boredom. Ironically and sadly, being free to do anything I want drains me. Every single day of insignificant eventfulness wears out the youth in me. Probably since the day I had finished with Rizal X (a professional play I had busied myself with for the past three months) until now I cannot remember a single moment of significant activity (except for the mascot-making, which counts as negligible when it comes to progressing my life as a scientist)--a timespan I can cross off my life calendar were I given the chance.

My life sucks. I can't even contribute to society. It's like being a kid again, playing board games, reading fairy tales, running around sweaty and not caring at all, except that now, there's a scarcity of verbs. I never thought that choosing to veer off from the scientific track for a bit could take forever, and now I'm running out of ideas.

Making long checklists of things to do and organizing with my planner were never this difficult. No wait, I take it back. I'm not running out of ideas. I'm running out of realized ideas: it's actually the profusion that holds me back. Too many arrows, can't find the right path.

FIND ME A DAMN JOB. SOMETHING. GIVE ME ANYTHING. And yes, I'm choosy, so if that's joining performing arts groups without getting monetary compensation, then I'm not going for it.

Backlog

It conquers me.
The pain,
Flows through my alveoli

It takes my soul.
My spunk, my appetite.
Gone with every momentary headache

It wants me to hide
From the rest of the world.
My left lung burdened
By the heaviness in my heart
Or from my heart--

As it is inflammed
With B cells and T cells and antibodies

That's why there wasn't a lot in my urine.

It conquers me. And I am defeated.

Perilous Proclivities

There are three things I learned from tonight's turn of events:

that childishness begets happiness. But along with it are immaturity and the danger of losing control of emotion. A child's happiness is as shallow as a pond, and as he ages it deepens into an ocean. But childish instances of the mature occur from time to time, and such times incur momentary happiness that will later on become guilt by virtue of playful actions. A child can be so impish that he can do anything out of impulse.

that cautious action may come from grave sadness. Prudence is dismissed once someone becomes mired down with the hypnotic happiness. And consequences start to fall on him like Tetris bricks--quick and to a certain degree, uncontrollable.

that getting used to certain personalities too much garners the risk of fitting in other different personalities to the ones one is so used to. It's like there is a particular premise to which he patterns what he perceives so his perception is affected by the preconceived notion, just like words that have all the letters in between the first and last jumbled, yet a reader still understands. But, heed must be taken because what may be fitting for one may be repulsive for another.

Tonight's turn of events has been an essential wake-up call for someone so insouciant when it comes to inflicting physical pain, someone so lured in with the rewards of happiness, someone too lax with his relationships with friends he's in good terms with.

Hello, is this what they call sembreak?

Time is running out and there still are a lot of to-do's on my list: books, films, series, ice skating, tennis, Snow World, letters and mice cages.

But when you put them side by side with what I've accomplished--EK, Anvaya, Risk, the integrins experiment, badminton, Pisay revisits--you'd notice that the happier to-do's have already been done.

In 8 days, I hope to accomplish at least half of what are left. So help me God.

BACK

I am back, for realz. Tumblr gives me shit. Blogspot gives me the quietude.

Heartbreaker

I can't believe I'm having a hard time forgetting. I can't believe you, out of all people, act so unladylike and so childlike. Do not be so Katy Perry-ish because nobody likes that, and every relationship's goal is to last long. Why do you have to switch so quickly, without ever feeling so guilty? And I can sing "Addicted" and "Lying is the Most Fun a Girl Can Have Without Taking Her Clothes off" all day long.

And although you are a girl who's at her peak, you do not deserve the right to say "It was nothing" and think straight because we both knew there existed something. Do you not see the pattern you have been leaving? You sound so undecided and yet so impulsive. Get rid of that urge to be in a relationship because although nobody has a right to keep you from doing what you like, trust me, that is not what you ultimately like. And although you told me of your willingness to wait, I now understand that there is nothing to wait. There is a problem with you. You have been evidently immature in this aspect, and I think you need to grow up some more.

And although you feel so sure at times, I'm sure you're blinded by something else. Don't be easily infatuated. Enough said.

I just hope there never was, because it really is a challenge to move on, and apparently, you have moved on to other people. In a span of what?

Conclusion by assumption

A liar is not incapable of telling the truth
As is a fool to complex things
Although unbelievably so,
The wolf can cry too.

We must never assume and deduce from something unfounded
And biased and we must never turn to our attachments and emotions
More so against--
In time of thinking, or in time of fabricating

I once watched a film entitled Shattered Glass
Wherein, for a story to be believable it has to be written so believably
And in detail you dwell
For as the reader is toured around the wordplay
The credibility is not qualified, but is disregarded

And although it seems unfair,
Others seem not to care
For what sparks the interest is the trust
That that someone's profile conflicts
With what he really is

Well, maybe for you
But two things irreconcilable do not
Defy the possibility that the two may be both
And not either or

And in time all will be well,
Because a sinner is capable of doing good
As is a joker to crying and hurting
Or the innocent being imprisoned
Or the school dropouts from inventing

And the veracity matters not to people,
Because it is the human interest that is sparked

The Lord is our Weighing Scale and The Man is a Great Pretender

Some things just must not be taken too literally.
And some things should just be left untouched by others
Especially when others know NOTHING