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Battling Dark Forces: A Guide to Psychic Self-Defense

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Intentional direction of evil thoughts, the distribution of radioactive waste and materials, the creation of disturbances in certain areas around the electromagnetic sphere of the earth- sound too bad to be true?

Not according to this thought-provoking book on the sources, methods, and techniques of the dark forces. The countermeasures to such attacks must be scientific, moral and spiritual. It is on this psychic level of personal, moral, and spiritual discrimination that the book concentrates.

Battling Dark Forces focuses on the way which we are deceived and led into inertia, confusion, and fear. The book shows how the methods of evil are commonplace and have been easily accepted in our life. The author accomplishes this by using a seemingly inexhaustible supply of illustrative stories. Often amusing, always interesting, sometimes touching, and occasionally even heartbreaking, they bring to life the subtleties and realities of evil. There is the tale of the a garage mechanic who works so fast he has a heart attack, a wife that asks for a divorce because "everyone else is doing it", a father who lets his son smoke "a little marijuana" and six years later loses him to heroin. We come way feeling like the toad in the kettle of hot water who has become anesthetized to the danger of because he has become so used to the heat.

Battling Dark Forces is a wake-up call. It presents us with methods to find and defeat our own inner darkness. The author makes it plain that the battlefield is within us. He states that "an outer force will not attack you unless you have a similar darkness within you." Outer attacks, then, are a reflection of our inner reality.

The foundation of protection and victory is meditation which, he says, creates greater light within us and exposes darkness. Other methods of protection are described, including the importance of the daily use of the Great Invocation.

I came upon the book "by chance." I had a long and unexpected layover in San Francisco, so made a beeline for Shambhala Books in Berkeley. There was this book by an author that I hadn't read before. I finished it for the first time as I was crossing the Pacific, and I've re-read it more than once since then, together with most of his other books.

Torkom Saraydarian taught a form of the Ageless Wisdom based on the Alice Bailey Teachings and Agni Yoga, and he published over 50 books, videos and CDs.

He spent his life making the Ageless Wisdom into a series of practical tools. This one deals with the root causes of many of the difficulties that beset us personally and socially. Many of his ideas and concepts are challenging, thought provoking and intuition provoking. A little pushing against things that we take for granted is always useful, and it certainly is here.

The book contains multiple remedies and recommendations for dealing with some of the things that test and challenge us.

You may not agree with everything in this book, some of which may, perhaps, have been the fruit of the time and place where he was born and raised, rather than insights from the Wisdom. I have been a student of the Teachings for a very long time, and I've had some extraordinarily fine teachers. Yet none has ever been quite as dogmatic and puritanical about sex. In fact, most were the complete opposite. But those comments are only a small part of the book. The thing about following any particular path is to find one that resonates with the Higher Self, and not necesssarily with our own attitudes and former beliefs. I remember a student once complaining that there were levels of unfolding and development when following a path and its practices. "That sounds like being in school," she said, and promptly left. Yet that's the way it is: spiritual practice does normally lead to a series of changes over time, that are usually stepwise and progressive. The student just wasn't ready to follow the program just yet, and that's fine.

Most of Torkom Saraydarian's insights are extraordinary, and well worth your time.

I have to admit that I was a bit discouraged when reading this book. I think the problem that I have with it is that it does not offer solutions that are terribly realistic.

Instead, it condemns behaviors that, like it or not, have become a part of Western civilization. It also encourages what I consider to be a really repressed and unhealthy attitude toward one's sexuality. My personal view is that if you are a consenting adult (and I put particular stress on the word consenting), then it's no one's business but yours.

While I tend to agree that becoming obsessed with revenge is harmful, I don't think that "turn the other cheek" is a terribly helpful attitude to have either. Those who have been abused to the point of trauma do NOT need the insinuation yet again that their anger toward their abusers is not valid. It would be nice for once to see a more balanced view rather than an extreme.

While Battling Dark Forces does a wonderful job in identifying the source of the problem, it does not offer solutions that are palatable to me. Look elsewhere for help.