Nine Months of Deception

This is one of the hardest parts of my testimony for me to talk about because I experienced deception more than once. There is a part of me that has always been afraid that people will hear about these things and look down on me, judge me, or somehow think that the work God has done in my life is less meaningful because of my messy journey. But I believe this part of my story is important because it shows just how easily a person can become convinced of something when they don't know the truth for themselves, or when they are not fully grounded in the truth. When I was twenty-three years old, I came across many sources that were teaching various forms of spirituality and ideas about consciousness, reality, and personal transformation. At the time, what I was hearing sounded incredibly truthful to me. It resonated deeply with the way my natural and carnal mind already wanted to understand the world. The ideas seemed profound. They seemed to explain things I had been wondering about. They gave me a framework for understanding life, spirituality, consciousness, and even my own existence. I didn't realize at the time how dangerous that could become. What I was learning began changing the way I thought about practically everything. It changed the way I perceived myself, other people, the world around me, spirituality, and even God. I became convinced that I needed to be vegan because I believed I needed to "raise my vibration." I believed that eating animals meant absorbing the negative energy they carried, which would lower my own vibration. I became extremely focused on doing whatever I could to keep my vibration high based on the information I was consuming. I learned about meditation, although it wasn't the kind of meditation I now understand through the teachings of Jesus Christ and Scripture. I learned about manifesting the worldly and vain things I wanted. I became interested in crystals and what I believed their influence could be. I learned about "soul ages," reincarnation, and the idea that souls return to earth multiple times. I learned about solfeggio frequencies, brain and heart coherence, and various practices surrounding mindfulness and consciousness. I became interested in the idea of creating my own reality. I became deeply involved in astrology and numerology, including zodiac signs, life path numbers, angel numbers, and many other ideas connected to spirituality. And then I embraced what, looking back, was probably the most extreme belief of all. I believed that we were all God. I believed that there was one consciousness, one being, experiencing itself through all of us. At the time, I genuinely believed these things. That is what makes deception so serious. When you are deceived, you don't necessarily realize that you are being deceived. You can sincerely believe that you have finally discovered truth when, in reality, you have simply found another belief system that happens to make sense to you. Whenever I learned something new, I would immediately tell my wife. Every new teaching or belief I encountered, I would share with her because I wanted us to be on the same page. At the time, I didn't know that many of the things I was learning were deceptive or misleading. I genuinely believed I was searching for truth, and I wanted her to come along with me in that search. I remained in that season of deception for approximately nine months, and I am incredibly thankful that it lasted only that long.