Building off the prior inversion, to declare that the “heavens” are real does not imply superstitious beliefs. Rather, it implies something exists beyond just clouds, stars, feelings, minds, integers, and imagination. “Heaven” implies something unseen, yet knowable in a strange way. We have knowledge of integers, yet no human has ever seen one, and no human ever will. No matter how powerful a microscope or how clever the experiment, an integer will never pop out at us. Yet integers exist. Likewise with angelic beings, we know of them without sensing them. The “third heaven” of a previous inversion is where these immaterial beings live, while mysteriously interacting with us here. Genesis declares this upper floor of this great house called Creation to be real - very real. And angels somehow occupy this house; so too demons, also known as fallen angels.

The word angel means messenger, and if you pay attention during your day, you will notice messages that come from something other than your phone. This inversion is about thoughts, which lead to actions. We should consider each thought, wondering where it comes from, and what to do about it.

Throughout each day, perhaps you will notice that some messages are good, and some are not. When you think, “I’d like to see some nudes on my phone,” that is a message, which is a very different message from the message, “I should call my mother.” I’ll leave it to you to ponder which type of spirit delivers those two different messages.

But it is not the demon who places the thoughts, from what I understand, as Jesus himself says in Matthew 15 that “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this defiles a person. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.” Because of this, we cannot blame our thoughts on the demons, nor our actions. We must cooperate with God, not the accuser or tempter. This makes sin our personal responsibility, which is why we must own up to it in Confession for healing.

St. Paul says to “put on the mind of Christ” and to “pray constantly.” There is solid reason for this, because when your mind is full of God and good things, there is not space for demons. But if you do not believe in the idea of heaven or God, you will be opening messages without even knowing it, and a moving truck of demons may have arrived long ago. Anyone who has dealt with squatters’ rights knows: it’s hard to get unwanted guests to depart. Even in real-estate court, sometimes it takes a miracle.

Since these beings have no bodies, they can move like mathematical points on a graph - that is to say, they move instantly. Thus, when Jesus drives out thousands of demons from one man, and the demons rush into the pigs that drown themselves in the sea, this is not surprising. Like points on a graph, bodiless spirits can be set to the same coordinates, and if those coordinates happen to be your head and heart, then you could be teeming with a legion of spirits as well.

If you ever took Algebra II, this concept should be familiar, as a point in space can be moved with the negation or multiplication of a number. Students learn about translation, reflection, and rotation as ways to move points on a graph. Numbers are not physical, they are immaterial. As Stephen Hawking said, “God created the integers,” and like the integers, spirits have no bodies. Without the weight of matter holding them in space and time, spirits can reflect, translate, and rotate their position from one place to another, a million miles away, without so much as a bus pass.

Perhaps you thought Algebra II would never come in handy, but for understanding how angels and demons can “move” it helps for illustration. Pure intellect can move instantaneously, just like the math concepts of translation, rotation, and reflection can move a point in space any distance with the toggling of a number. Consider this the next time your guard is down and temptation arises. You need only a nudge, and plenty of spirits are waiting for the gap in your spiritual defenses to drop in and say “Hello.” A spirit can - and does - translate to your location to offer a nudge. No airfare needed, it is immediate. In the St. Michael the Archangel prayer, a warning is mentioned about these spirits who seek your destruction: “…the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls.” Because they can arrive instantly, you must pray constantly. The good news is that your guardian angel, St. Michael, and others are there to help. Spiritual combat is real. In any war, successful attacks come swift and unannounced. Like a cyberattack faster than fiber optic speeds, you will be overtaken if unprepared. You are always being watched and studied, steered into moments of temptation. If you are reading this, they are reading it with you and observing your reaction. Demons will translate, rotate, and reflect into your location to suggest doubt in God. Prayer is the weapon, humility is the tactic.

This is something to consider the next time you make a decision quickly without discernment. Even as I make progress toward God, sometimes impulsive decisions occur, after which I wonder how it happened. The suggestions to take an action come in an instant, and this is often alarming. It’s almost like someone or something is guiding me, or waiting to suggest something at exactly the right moment.

This means that when the notion comes to scroll a certain website or tell a lie, a demon is pleased to nudge the temptation forward. It cannot force you, but it can suggest things. In fact, you should start considering where your thoughts come from altogether, because no one can “make” a thought. Thoughts will appear before your left brain has time to reason with your right brain that this was a bad idea. After all, demons are smarter than us, and move even more efficiently than the crow flies. They are like a really good TV lawyer, like Columbo or CSI investigators or Sherlock Holmes, always one step ahead. Surely, many brilliant people are in hell for believing in the delusion that they knew more than spirits. Human brilliance is like a dog thinking it knows more than a human, or a toddler playing hide and seek with a teenager. In a battle of wits with angels and demons, you lose. Spirits are pure intellect and it is folly to think we can outwit them.

Prayer and the Sacraments are what you need to know for the spiritual combat. It’s not terribly complicated or dramatic. Mostly the warfare means knowing when to kneel and pray. Literally, wherever you are when the temptation arises, you must kneel and ask for help. That is the only way to “win”. Surrender in spiritual matters brings aid. Prayer summons the heroes you need. It is knowing who, when, and how to ask for help, so that the right messenger, your guardian angel, appears and gets rid of the other spirit, the demon. This is why the Surrender Novena prayer is becoming widespread in usage again today, as people realize that spiritual combat means surrendering to God.

Because these beings of pure intellect can move about instantly, they can be around us constantly or whenever they like. They move at the speed of thought, far faster than the speed of light. As pure intellect, they are smarter than we are, by a thousand times, because while we are the highest animal, we are the lowest spirit. A brilliant person is a cute case of delusion to angels and demons, like a third grade basketball player who believes he could beat Lebron James in a one-on-one game. This is where “smart” people stumble and the religious “fools” succeed: because the pride of worldly knowledge hoodwinks us. While angels will warn us to back away from that error, demons will stoke the engine of pride, vanity, and sensuality with continuous fuel. Worth noting: knowledge does not equal wisdom. Piles of data do not produce humility; rather, data tends to produce unwarranted pride and a sense of control. We are but one giant solar flare from every data center in the world being formatted to a blank state, thus whatever expertise and security we have today must be received with gratitude instead of hubris.

There are higher spiritual beings than our own rational souls, and we cannot sense these beings. We cannot see them but they can see us. On occasion they are visible, such as what we know from the scripture regarding Abraham and Mary. They may appear to us. They very likely do. We walk among them unaware at times and even interact with them. Hence, “love others” is wise at all times.

There are also lower vegetative souls in plants, and sensitive souls in animals. Consider how we feel superior in our ability to outwit a mindless flower or fish. Yet this is how angels and demons feel about us. We are like a flower or fish to them - certainly simple, perhaps silly…perhaps beautiful. The best scriptural example of this is at the battle of Jericho when Joshua and his army are prepping to fight and the angel of the Lord appears. I get the feeling that the angel is looking at Joshua like I look at my dog.

…when Joshua was by Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing before him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went to him and said to him, “Are you one of us, or one of our adversaries?”

He replied, “Neither.” (Joshua 5:13-15)

Whether this is an angel or God himself, this angelic being in Joshua’s vision seems somewhat uninterested in Joshua and his question. He is there as commander of the Lord’s army, and Joshua appears to be suddenly demoted.

This is important for understanding our place in the spiritual order, in the whole order of creation, and should encourage humility, as Joshua learned in that moment.

We are not that high on the ladder, but we could be in the end. Jesus, who was fully human, is the second person of the Trinity. St. Athanasius famously said that “God became man that we might become God.” That is powerful stuff. Consider as well that Mary is the queen of heaven. She is above all angelic beings, which is quite remarkable, and it is said that this really bothers the demons, who consider humans to be lowly worms.

This inversion is like the others. It is not for trivia night or light conversation: it is for your mental health. Reality includes spirits, which means angels and demons. You have a soul. Your soul has a body. You have a guardian angel. Demons may be allowed to bother you, by God, to draw you closer to God. There is a cherub with a flaming sword guarding the way back to Eden, and we can only return there by persevering in these tests.

Heaven is the place of the the unseen, the invisible, the enchanted world. Even in our imagination we park many things in other dimensions kind of like heaven, like ideas or Platonic forms or fairies. The end-game is Eden, heaven, and the tests that we experience here have supernatural interactions. In our daily lives, we are engaged in supernatural events, which is a reality that we have deadened under the influence of illusory power and knowledge.

A fun historical fact is that in the ancient world, stars were often seen as gods. Even in the Bible, angels and stars go together. A star led the Magi to a little town of Bethlehem, and the star was not Alpha Centauri - it moved to sit right over the place where Christ was born. In other words, this star was an angel, a messenger. If this seems too abstract, then on the next Christmas tree you see, look to see what is on top of it: it will be either a star or an angel. Stars and angels have been used together for a long time. In the ancient world, stars were seen as living beings. They can symbolically be angelic beings, because we need stories to understand the supernatural. Angels are messengers of the one true God. They are not matter, as stars are. They do not twinkle, and they are not magical astrological superstitious objects for use in New Age incantations. But the use of metaphor can help us articulate the supernatural, but we must stop in wonder and not name the stars as angels.

Your soul has a purpose. That purpose is to return to God. The angels will help you get there. The demons, not so much…but they will be granted enough leash to trouble you, giving the exact trials you need to find your way home. All trials are a gift. This is hard to accept. If you wonder why God might do such a thing, find a quiet place and look to the crucifix for the answer.

Some have said these angelic beings cannot know our most inner thoughts, but that they can observe all that we see and hear. Others have suggested that our thoughts are placed into us by angels, or demons. Whichever is the case, the answer to it is that every thought must be captured to Christ. If we “put on the mind of Christ” then Jesus filters and corrects every thought. Thus when we loathe our enemy and have evil thoughts, that is precisely when the thought must be captured and handed over to Christ, or sent to the foot of the cross.

The power of suggestion and placing thoughts into our heads via whispers in our ears, is exactly what the devil does in the Garden to Eve. He suggests that God is lying. “Did God really say that?” He places doubt. “You will become like gods,” he lies. The error of Adam and Eve is to cooperate with the serpent’s lies. These whispers we all hear in our mind and heart is the result of the fall. Thus, influence can come from outside, which is usually called the world, the flesh, and the devil. But we can never just say “The devil made me do it,” as if we have no agency, free-will, or personal responsibility. Jesus states rather plainly: “…what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.”

Because of these influences, we must stand like archers on the walls of the castle, shooting down that which may not enter, otherwise we will be overcome, and it takes much work to eject the enemies that have already taken occupation inside the castle. This is why every thought must be captured to Christ. Thinking is where much of the battleground happens between light and dark, because it precedes the act of the will. The Spiritual Combat by Dom Lorenzo Scupoli is a book to be read and re-read in our age of materialism, because we have been inverted into a worldview where angels and demons do not exist, which is the exact goal of the demons: to be laughed off as unreal. The Screwtape Letters is another fine source to help understand what is happening when we doubt that angels and demons exist. But they most certainly do, and we would do well to meditate on the Fall in the Garden, Jesus’ temptations in the desert, and Jesus’ endurance through prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, for all three have answers regarding how spiritual beings can influence us and how to respond. The word angel means “messenger,” and this is the whisper. We need our mailbox open to receive the good angel’s messages, and the demons’ mail should go directly to the spam folder.

Again, this should scare you, but should also give hope, for the way to win is by trusting in God. This is the inversion of what we tend toward since the Fall, which is to trust in the self. That was the error in the Garden of Eden, and Jesus in the Garden on the night before his death does the opposite. Like his mother at the Annunciation, he says “Thy will be done.” He trusts in God.

As for us, capturing every thought to Christ is critical. Alone with our own imagination is a dangerous place to loiter, and while we may consider that we generate all our own thoughts, an inversion of this modern way of thinking is to consider that the world, the flesh, and the devil all play a part. Go to God, and talk often to other people who are striving for salvation, and you will discern which messages are worth keeping and which messengers should be put on the “cease and desist” and “do not call” list. Keep in mind the shape of the cross, which has a vertical and horizontal beam. Vertically we must speak and look up to God for help, and horizontally on the ground here we must speak to others. Getting out of our head opens up the heart to God and others.

Further reading:

How does a guardian angel work?

Can demons put thoughts in our minds?

Can the devil read your thoughts? (start at 22:14)

Can The Devil Know Our Thoughts And Hear What We Say

Guardian Angels in Catholic Theology (video, Jimmy Akin)

Do a consecration to your guardian angel (and the theology of such a thing)

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