I want to hear everyone's story about how they got free of the occult.

My Catholic teachers kept telling me absurd things.
Punishing me when I asked questions they didn't want to answer.

I wasn't much more then 10 when I stopped asking questions and just watched the results. It didn't take long for me to leave Christianity. I was maybe 11-12 when I realized that the Bible doesn't actually teach Christianity.
But, by then, I knew better than to ask questions. So, I didn't.
I just made up my own mind.
Tom

 

Occult simply means hidden from view.

I began learning to induce altered states when I was 15.

I’m fine, thanks.

 

There is no "freedom" from the occult, everything has it's occult (hidden) aspects, therefor I freely embrace the occult as the best way to approach and show respect to the Gods. Trance states, ritual offerings, divination, and what have you.
In doing so my life has only gotten better and more positive; I just had to lose the crutch of monotheistic thinking.

 

The occult can lead to freedom.

All depends on how you read the tea leaves.

 

ah so thats it. you blame those wicked teachers in your youth. so now youve discovered an alternative truth?

 

Why do you so much enjoy nasty, interrogative, scenarios?

Is it because it gives you the opportunity to pretend to forgive people?
Tom

 

Can we make one up, or does it have to be real?

 

I never had to get out of the occult because I never got in. Maybe I'm just a mutant who was born with a skeptic mind? I never believed in Santa, the Easter bunny or any gods. I investigated some occultist claims with an open mind and decided that most are BS.
But learning to think rationally won't help you. Witchcraft, New Age and "the occult" are built on the same magical thinking as religion. The moment you start questioning the occult with skeptical scrutiny, you have done the first step to get out of religion also.

 

I quit goin to church

 

Learn the laws of physics.

 

C. S. Lewis wrote a book Surprised By Joy. It's about his conversion to Christianity. Desire for Joy is what he experienced as the deepest Desire. He couldn't find this Joy in worldly and sexual pleasures and in the occult (what he poetically named the World, Flesh and the Devil).

I haven't read the whole book. It caught my attention because of some passages dealing with the occult. It's the only book that talks about "spiritual lust". Here's one passage that may be of interest to you:

Two things hitherto widely separated in my mind rushed together: the imaginative longing for Joy, or rather the longing which was Joy, and the ravenous, quasi-prurient desire for the Occult, the Preternatural as such. And with these there came (less welcome) some stirring of unease, some of the immemorial fear we have all known in the nursery, and (if we are honest) long after the nursery age. There is a kind of gravitation in the mind whereby good rushes to good and evil to evil. This mingled repulsion and desire drew towards them everything else in me that was bad. The idea that if there were Occult knowledge it was known to very few and scorned by the many became an added attraction; "we few", you will remember, was an evocative expression for me. That the means should be Magic--the most exquisitely unorthodox thing in the world, unorthodox both by Christian and by Rationalist standards--of course appealed to the rebel in me. I was already acquainted with the more depraved side of Romanticism; had read Anactoria, and Wilde, and pored upon Beardsley, not hitherto attracted, but making no moral judgement. Now I thought I began to see the point of it. In a word, you have already had in this story the World and the Flesh; now came the Devil. If there had been in the neighbourhood some elder person who dabbled in dirt of the Magical kind (such have a good nose for potential disciples) I might now be a Satanist or a maniac.

In actual fact I was wonderfully protected, and this spiritual debauch had in the end one rather good result. I was protected, first, by ignorance and incapacity. Whether Magic were possible or not, I at any rate had no teacher to start me on the path. I was protected also by cowardice; the reawakened terrors of childhood might add a spice to my greed and curiosity as long as it was daylight. Alone, and in darkness, I used my best endeavours to become a strict Materialist again; not always with success. A "Perhaps" is quite enough for the nerves to work upon. But my best protection was the known nature of Joy. This ravenous desire to break the bounds, to tear the curtain, to be in the secret, revealed itself, more and more clearly the longer I indulged it, to be quite different from the longing that is Joy. Its coarse strength betrayed it. Slowly, and with many relapses, I came to see that the magical conclusion was just as irrelevant to Joy as the erotic conclusion had been. Once again one had changed scents. If circles and pentangles and the Tetragrammaton had been tried and had in fact raised, or seemed to raise, a spirit, that might have been--if a man's nerves could stand it--extremely interesting; but the real Desirable would have evaded one, the real Desire would have been left saying, "What is this to me?"

 

And what has that to do with the occult? Whatever definition you choose, I'm unaware of anyone who includes religion under that heading. But a proselytising atheist can never resist the temptation to hijack a thread for preaching!

 

By occult, I mean people making confident, but unsupported, assertions about the supernatural. Usually, recommending behavior based on those assertions.

Practically every religion I know about meets that definition. The RCC certainly does.
Tom

 

I got into The Occult five years ago or four years ago after my father got sick with Parkinson's Disease and Ended up in a wheelchair. And I had to take care him and I have been doing that ever since then but almost my life I have watching Horror Movies and Listened to Rock Music since I was a kid.

 

I want to add something here. To the ones saying occult means hidden. That is obvious. There are different meanings to the word occult. The occult the OP is referring to is the practice of the spiritstic arts, demonism and spiritsm.

To OP. I recommend these experiences:

Breaking Free From Occult Power — Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY

The Demons Controlled Me — Watchtower ONLINE LIBRARY

 

I dont believe the occult is anti-Christian, it is just a tool and how you use it makes it either good or evil. It is just concentrated and correct prayer, and is effective because of the effort put in.