Course XIV - Teaching 6: Psychic Confusions

If the soul may start the ascetic path for personal purposes, as it progresses in his practices fatally has to understand that the only reality that it seeks is not the conquest of certain powers but the Divine Union. If a being, after certain mystical experiences, persists in his personal selfishness, is carried away by evil destructive forces and becomes what we may call a black magician.
Forces of the Great Element from the sacrum plexus ascend voluntarily of involuntarily, by Meditation or Concentration, to the brain and reach the Crown Center and facilitate the Divine Union. But in a lost and selfish mystic, these currents are deviated by the personal impulse of the individual, and thrown to lower centers.
If this wrong procedure does not lead to unbalance or despair, brings psychic depravation. A black magician refuses to join his powers to the Eternal Forces, to the Divine Union; he wants to keep them in himself and to use them for his own purposes; therefore, he is like Lucifer, thrown to depths, to the abyss, and forsaken.
By virtue of a force that cannot go out of him, a being that missed his way is harried by horrible and bestial desires, and his urge for physical suffering even becomes self-martyrdom. Self-imposed practices of certain Indian fakirs of low category are well-known; they sleep on iron-pointed beds, remain on improper postures until they atrophy their members, eat portions of ground glass and commit many other mad things.
The astral body is directly influenced as the result of these aberrations.
The individual being is protected by an astral radiation so as the shell covers an egg; this impedes that other emanations to his type may reach him. When his control-wheel is improperly forced by wrong psychic practices, this control-wheel loses its balance and gives free way to any influence. Then strange materialized thoughts, mental larvae and elementary beings of Nature enter this protective circle and finally vampirize and control their victim.
Sometimes this is so serious that the individual being does not act alone but is directed like an automaton by evil entities who have taken possession of his auric circle. According to Christians, these men are possessed by the demon, and according to spiritualists, obsessed by demon, but always it is the same thing: improperly oriented evil forces burst when they do not find the right way and produce a split in the astral aura.
Many times, some defensive forces that remained in the astral body can repel these influences and restore normality and health in the individual being, but other times the balance in these souls can be reestablished only by death.