I want to teach practically, to give you some understanding of why we struggle with the spirit realm. The Lord has given me insights into how things work. When I was speaking in America, I did not know it, but I had a neurosurgeon in the meeting. I talked about this subject and he came up to me afterwards and said, “Ian, I only have one thing to say to you: ‘where did you get it from?!’ I spent fifteen years of my life learning about this and you are not even a doctor!” I said, “Well, I asked the Spirit of Knowledge to show me how God created the mind, and he showed me” (See Chapter on the Seven Spirits of God).
I have some idea of how it works, of some of the things that are behind it, why we as believers often struggle with seeing in the spirit and why we cannot retain the information. That is why each of these chapters links to one another, with activations and some teaching, to try and train your mind away from what it is used to doing.
I am going to give you a whole lot of terminology about the human mind and things associated with it. Then I want you to start to work with them, so you get some understanding and revelation.
The Seven Spirits of God is something the church has really wrestled with. Some people do not understand it and really wrestle with it and that is okay. My experience has come out of Galatians 4: 1: “Now I say that the heir, as long as he is a child, does not differ at all from a slave, though he is master of all, but is under guardians and stewards until the time appointed by the father.” (Galatians 4: 1-2).
The human brain is like the latest huge shopping mall. If you could build a computer big enough to do the function of just the hippocampus area of the brain, it would be large enough to cover the whole state of Texas! It is like a hundred billion dealers on the Stock Exchange making transactions every second, and this is just a small part of what we use in our brain. Much of our brain is not even being used yet, because that is all connected to the realm of the spirit and the supernatural, and that has to be activated.
Your brain is constantly storing, exchanging, cancelling, offloading, inverting, planting, recording, and analyzing short-term memory. In the process happening every second of the day there are a hundred billion transactions that go on in the hippocampus area of the brain. That is just one part of the human brain – a hundred billion transactions! Every skill we acquire and every memory stored is as a result of new connections being formed and built by the brain, which makes new connections in seconds and new memories in minutes.
That is why you need to go and record, review and revisit your experiences in the spirit. Unless you use the memory, the brain will purge it and say it is irrelevant. This means you will never have an anchor for all the information that your spirit man is seeing to be retained, so it can never be stored in your memory. It just goes into the hippocampus and is destroye
People say to me, “I do not see in the spirit.” Well, actually you do, all the time, because you are a spirit being. You just do not store what you see, that is the problem.
When we are born, we are trained to receive information from outside us, into our soul. All our life we are trained how to receive information coming from the outside in.
When we get born again the greatest problem and struggle exists because now we need to unlearn this process that has been established for years so that we can learn how to receive information from the inside out.
Because you have a neuron functioning in one way with an impulse that will be travelling down one direction, you cannot make that impulse go backwards. You need to ‘un-use’ those memories and start new ones.
The new memories are built on revelation. They are built on meditating on the Word of God and being captivated. This builds new memories on the anchors of the Word. The Word of God then becomes the anchor to your next spiritual experience. Your spiritual experience then becomes anchored onto the Word of God. Each new spiritual experience is anchored and measured against your awareness at that present time. If there is no anchor for it in the present it gets shredded in your mind.
So, you end up struggling between what is real and what is not real, thinking you cannot see, your brain making you believe you will never see, when in fact you are seeing all the time. This is because you are a spirit being first, which has a soul (your brain’s functions are part of your soul) and has a body.
Because no one has ever taught you how to see, there is no relevant information for your spirit man to anchor new information on in order to retain it. So it goes into the hippocampus and disappears.
I have worked on this for eight years now, and the spirit world is as real to me as you are. It is so real that you can touch it, you can be in it, you can experience it, and you can relate to it.
What God wants us to understand is that we are still struggling with the temple we live in? The struggle is not that you do not see, the struggle is that you do see but you just do not retain what you see.
I have given you some keys on how to retain some of that information, on purging images, meditating, and things like that, in previous chapters. Each of these things builds on itself.
All the information that we have received from the time we have been conceived is received and processed from the outside in. When Adam was in the garden he did not live from outside information in, he lived from the information on the inside out.
Every natural thing came out of the realm of the spirit. What we see around us came out of the realm of the spirit and therefore must be in, and have its birth in, the realm of the spirit.
When Adam and Eve sinned with the devil it caused a depolarization of the human mind (the Bible does not say they bit an apple by the way) and all that was connected with the realm of the spirit and the ability to retain information was cut off.
The neurons that were going to that part of the brain were seared. That is part of what the flaming sword was doing at the Tree of Life (Genesis 3: 24). So, the human ability to retain spiritual information got seared. The occult world knows about this. They teach their people how to see in the spirit. They teach them how to go in the spirit and they go. They are not afraid of it, they follow demons, and the demons take them. But all they have done is taken what belongs to us, polluted it, poisoned it, and made us hate it. They have made us feel it is not for the church because we are too spiritual for that! Well, really?!
Hardly any of us are spiritual. We might think we are, but if you are spiritual then you do things that are spiritual.
When you can understand a little of how the human mind functions, it really helps to understand why we struggle with sin.
The flow along the memory neural pathways that used to exist when Adam was in the garden, now no longer functions.
When we get born again their ability to function is given back to us, but the same way as you learn in the natural, you must learn in the spirit. It must be line upon line, glory to glory, precept upon precept (Isaiah 28: 10). It does not just happen by somebody laying hands on you and praying “Shundy bundy, you are blessed this Sunday – you are going to see for eternity!”
I have only met two people in the world that were like that. One of them spent a year out in the spirit – every day drunk in the spirit, every day seeing, just absolutely captivated and God purged his life.
Most of us will need to learn the process of seeing and activating, you need to learn the steps: A, B, C, etc. And the more you walk in it, the easier it is to activate it.
When we get born again there is already an established problem. The pathway of neuron functions and synapse impulses are so strained that, unless you make a conscious effort to give your brain something else to work with, you will only ever get what you have always got.
You need to give your mind something to work with and that is why the Bible paints pictures. Neurons store pictures, pictures create memories and memories create the ‘now’ as permanent memory.
Memories that happen in the Word create the ability for the ‘now’, the present, to be stored in that memory. That is why you need to meditate in the Word of God and spend time going around it.
The electrical receivers and pathways long unused by our spirit man need to be activated. As with a learned experience that creates a unique pattern of neurons, there is now a need to create a new pattern of neurons in your brain.
That is why the Bible says, “And be renewed in the spirit of your mind” (Ephesians 4: 23,). You need to be renewed in the pattern of your life.
The word ‘spirit’ there comes from the word ‘breath’ or ‘life’ or ‘movement of the wind of God’. You need to have a new mind in you, as the Bible says: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2: 5).
When the Bible talks about Christ Jesus (as opposed to Jesus Christ) it is not talking about the person of Jesus, it is referring to the anointing of the Son of God, which is what Christ Jesus is.
It is only in the anointing of the Son of God that our mind can be renewed. It is only as we abide in that anointing that our mind can be transformed.
When the Bible talks about transforming, it is talking about the process that happens with a caterpillar. This beautiful little thing comes out of its egg and gorges itself until it becomes barrel-shaped. Then it sits on the side of the leaf and the sun comes out and it thinks, “One day I am going to spin this wonderful woolly blanket and I am going to spend the rest of my life soaking in the sun; wouldn’t that be idyllic?!”
We are going to do that one day. Hopefully we will be too busy creating universes to do that! So, the caterpillar spins this blanket, it does not know that it is going to die.
To understand the Bible when it talks about being transformed, it helps to understand the process that happens with a caterpillar. The complete DNA strand of the caterpillar disassociates so that there is not one single strand of DNA record in the memory of that caterpillar’s structure.
The heat of the cocoon does that and it is the way God has made it. We can see in nature what is supposed to happen with our brain. God wants new DNA to start in our brain. It is the heat in the caterpillar’s cocoon that enables the creation of a new DNA strand. When it gets to a certain temperature, suddenly a new DNA strand starts to form and it is called a butterfly.
We need to see that God wants us to go from the worm to the butterfly, where we can fly. We see first that which is natural and then that which is spiritual. In the natural world there are things that give us the secrets of the spirit.
Inside our minds God wants new DNA to start forming that comes out of the life of Heaven that is already inside of us. We release it from our spirit man, into our soul and into our mind. We release it by meditating, by worship, by the things I have talked about in previous chapters.
The world is waiting for you and me to come into divine order. I had the opportunity to be in the River of Glory that has been dammed up from when Adam fell. Did you know the River of Glory still flows in the spirit realm? The devil has just surrounded it and shuts believers out.
When Jesus was taken up into the exceedingly high mountain (and when you look at that phrase, it actually means the edge of the atmosphere, not a physical mountain), and the devil showed Him the kingdoms of this world (Matthew 4: 8, Luke 4: 5). Which world was that? It was not this world, but the world in the spirit realm, because everything that controls the spirit realm controls what goes on in the earth.
Everything in the coming years in the church is going to be wrestling with the spirit realm and the control that goes on there. That is the heavenly place. That is where Adam got kicked out of when his role there got destroyed by his sin with the devil.
We are able to retrain our mind to captivate things of the spirit, because all the information that comes in through our natural senses is processed, logged, stored, or shredded. The normal pathways of spirit information never become experience in our lives. We are never able to decipher that information, or process it, or store it, because we have never given it an anchor to remain on, to accumulate the ‘now’. I am talking about the rule of your spirit over your soul.
You must dictate to your soul, because what comes out of your spirit will change your soul and make your body come into obedience. For example, in the last week and a half I have had three hours sleep a night. I actually had four hours sleep last night, and I do get tired, but I can make a choice.
I either live out of another kingdom and the realm of that kingdom, draw on it as my source and as the government of my soul and my body, or I subject myself to this world and shut that out. You choose which master you serve.
I love the realm of the spirit because there is power in the realm of the Kingdom for you and me to stand in who we are. I am looking forward to being like Paul. Well, I am and I am not! He can preach all night and walk all the next day and preach all the next night, without sleeping! I know I can stay awake for 48 hours when I go to the United States. But that is pretty hard work when you need to teach and deal with spiritual issues for the next 12 hours! You make your body do it, as Paul says: “I pummel my body into submission” (1 Corinthians 9: 27).
You need to pummel (to hit something repeatedly) your body and make it do what your spirit wants it to do. In the same way as when you are quietly reading the Word, you do not actually have to say anything to make it happen, but you stand up on the inside and claim it with your heart. Your body will come into line. You need to practice that. It is not hard once you have practiced. David had found some wonderful keys to bring some of this about in his life: 1) Meditating 2) Worship 3) Spending time in the presence of God: “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand [anywhere else]” (Psalms 84: 10 AMP).
David found being in the presence of God was a key. Worship was the thing that opened the doorway for him. David knew what it was to be in the spirit. All these men in the Old Testament knew about the spirit world.
The Bible says about Abraham that he encountered God and then he was sitting in the door of his tent (I wonder which tent he was talking about). It says he lifted up his eyes and he saw three men coming towards him (Genesis 18: 1-2). He knew who they were. Why? Because he had already seen them and encountered them before this time; he knew who they were – Melchizedek and two men in white linen (Revelation 15: 6; 19: 8; 19: 14).
Melchizedek is the king of the treasury room of Heaven. Intimacy with God is vital in all the areas pertaining to spirit life. We must deal with our imagination. You need to go through the process of redeeming your imagination, as I have already taught in a previous chapter. You need to build your faith. The last thing is to practice. I always come back to this. Everything in the spirit is a learned process. The personal gifting that is on our lives enables us to activate some things better than others, but all of it is a learned process. That is why we have classrooms at school, because everything is about learning something. There is no difference in the spirit.
You need to learn about the ways of the spirit. The ways of the spirit are all to do with pathways and repetitive activities that enable your mind to store information and to be able to retain it; to be able to accumulate the ‘now’ in the spirit and to be able to store it, so that you can receive and experience it now.
The only way to do it is by practice. You need to practice meditating on the Word of God. I practice and I do things. The Bible talks about Ezekiel’s river (Ezekiel 47); it talks about how it went to his ankles, then to his knees, then to his hips, then to his shoulders and finally over his head. Well, I have got a snorkel and a weight belt. I went to Lake Taupo (New Zealand) and stood on the side of the lake with my feet up to my ankles in the water.
What I am doing is giving the ‘now’ in the realm of the spirit something to anchor the reality onto of the Word painted in Ezekiel’s experience in the river, because I want the same thing he had.
So, I was praying in tongues as I allowed my body and my spirit to accumulate the information of what it would be like to stand in the River of Glory. Then I went up to my knees, praying in tongues for ten minutes, accumulating the information of what it would be like to be in that River of Glory. Then up to my waste praying in tongues, another ten minutes accumulating the information. Then up to my shoulders praying in tongues another ten minutes and then I was up over my head praying in the snorkel.
I do not really know what the people thought on the beach! I really do not care.
I had transitioned from the natural because the supernatural had something to anchor the memory and the information on. It is the most wonderful thing to go and bury yourself in the River of Glory and swim upstream at will! To float and watch the glory flicker on the surface or go down and get some big gems and stick them in your belly. You need to enjoy it. That is what the Kingdom is about, to enjoy! That is why God made it, for us to enjoy. It was not hard.
I take that information, write it down, take it into my quiet time and, praying in tongues, and begin to draw on the memory of what happened, to give it a ‘now’, more relevant information to anchor on.
I was in my bedroom an hour and a half later and realized I was on my floor lying backwards, but I do not have any record of falling backwards on the floor, because I was in the spirit. My body will not get hurt when I am in the spirit.
That is why they could not touch Jesus when they took Him to the edge of the cliff (Luke 4: 29-30), because he was in the spirit.
That is why the devils cannot touch you when you are in the spirit, because the glory of God surrounds you.
These things have mostly been hidden from the church, but they are real. I have been there and I know others who have been there, and we have struggled to try and put some teaching process in place that will help you to believe.
I have hungered after the Cloud of Glory. I wanted to know what the Cloud was like. I have a friend who takes me flying and one day we went with my father-in-law. They did not know what I was doing, but we flew straight through some of these clouds and I was busy looking, thinking, “I want to go in the middle of that. How do I get into the middle of that in my body? What do I have to do?” So one day, when everybody went out, I was praying and the Lord said, “Go into your shower and turn the hot tap on.” So I went into the bathroom and turned the hot tap on. At this stage the bathroom was half the size it is now and the shower was on, so it was really nicely filled up with steam. As the water kept coming out and the room started to fill up with steam I began to think, “Well Lord, You are cheating me out of a shower tonight, that means I am going to have to have a cold shower! But I will put down my own ideas and focus on what I am doing here now.” What happened was that the room got so full of mist that I could not see the other side of the wall. In fact, when I held my hand in front of my face I could not see my hand because of the steam that was in the room.
I closed my eyes and began to allow my body to feel what the steam was like while my mind was beginning to be caught up in the Word, of the Cloud of the glory of God descending on Mount Sinai – what it would have been like to be like Moses walking into that cloud, experiencing the revelation of the thunder and the beauty and the majesty of God.
The Lord said to me, “Turn the light on.” I turned the light on and the whole room went absolutely white because every drop of mist reflected the intensity of the light bulb. There is no diminishing in the reflection; that is why we are going to be the reflection.
That is why when the Bible says we are going to be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air (1 Thessalonians 3: 17), it is not those fluffy things up there, it is the reflection in us that is going to be revealed to the world around us.
God wants to reveal His sons on the earth, to the earth (Romans 8: 19), so that the earth will know that there is a God in Israel. God made these statements: “And I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the heathen, which ye have profaned in the midst of them”; (Ezekiel 36: 23 21). “… and the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, the Holy One in Israel” (Ezekiel 39: 7).
God wants the realm of the spirit to be real to us so that the heathen will know that there is a God in the church.
I do not know about you, but I am not satisfied with what I have and what I see in the church.
It is up to us as individuals to cultivate a life with Heaven, the realm of God and with the angels that walk there.
Angels are amazing to be around. I have encountered twenty-seven types of angels and there are about another fourteen to fifteen different types of creatures that are in Heaven. They are not all mentioned in the Bible and I do not care because I know what is around the Throne and when something flies around the Throne you need to believe it is of God! God never stops creating, just because of who He is, what He is and what cascades off Him, in His Glory. There is a continual flow of glory coming off Him; it is the residue of the power that has been unused. That residue of power forms a River. Where that River comes out from under the veil it comes out as diamonds and oil and eventually turns into water that we can live in. It is alive. I teach on being baptised in that River (Chapter 7) because we need to identify with the Father. I have been there and it has changed my life. There is a River and it is for you and me to enjoy. It is the residue of the power of God. God wants the supernatural to be real. He does not want it to be some fluffy thing that is out there and when people come around you they say, “Oh…. you are spiritual!” What a load of religious baloney! We are all called to be spiritual, because we are spiritual beings. We are all called to be with God and walk with God because we are the sons of God. God wants us to know that Heaven is accessible now. I have tried to give you some understanding of why you would struggle seeing. It is basically because of the established processes of your brain and the way it has been trained to think. You have to ‘un-train’ it by retraining it to do something else. The most amazing thing is that when a neural pathway is not used for a long period of time it disconnects and the synapses break off and the neurons disconnect. That only happens when you have
Established new pathways, then the old one does not exist anymore. We can use our pain as a springboard, instead of going down the pathway of sin. I go down the pathway of using that pain as a springboard to encounter, because I am establishing a new neural pathway to a place of encounter. I persistently use it until it is established as permanent memory. Then other things can be retained on that. Then it springboards off there and creates a whole synapse field and tree of its own with experiences of the realms of Heaven. This is how God has created us, with the ability to experience Heaven and make Heaven real. Your experiences of the realms of the Kingdom of Heaven are not just to make you feel good. They do make you feel good and they are the most wonderful things that could happen, but people want to know about the realm of the spirit. That is why there are so many occult things going on -people are absolutely fascinated with it! I can think of one particular story of witchcraft for children, which came out of the mouth of a dragon! It is one of the greatest introductions to the occult world I have ever seen. If you have read the books you need to repent. One of the things God wants is for the natural world around us and the environment we live in to see that the realm of the Kingdom is real. We need to work in Words of Knowledge. The only way you can work in Words of Knowledge is if you have a relationship that knowledge can flow from. The only way you will work with miracles is if you work with the realm that the miracles come from. A famous pastor was doing an overseas conference and a sister of faith sat next to another lady who had a dead knee, which had been welded together. This sister saw the lady’s new knee in Heaven. There is a room of body parts in Heaven. This lady went into the room in Heaven with the body parts and said, “Yes, I will have her knee, thanks”. No big “shundy-bundy” fluffy prayers. She just said, “There we are, a totally new knee, able to bend”. Whatever you see in Heaven you can bring to the earth. Not what you hear from Heaven, but what you see in Heaven, because only what you see can you have. It gives you something to run towards. It is all about seeing and then hearing; seeing and releasing; seeing and bringing it down. I love bringing the glory and the thunder of the presence of God through the spirit realm back to the earth. I love it because it wrecks the devil in the spirit realm! There is nothing they can do about it, because light destroys and disperses darkness. Darkness cannot penetrate light, you go out as a child of light carrying the glory, it spirals down and the devil gets wrecked, and anything that tries to touch it gets singed to a crisp! It is wonderful! But that is the way it is supposed to be, instead of us trying to fight through the darkness and get to Heaven, Jesus transitions us there because we are in Him. Seeing in the spirit realm is the key to releasing the Kingdom. Renewing your mind is the key to seeing the spirit realm.