Hi I am a bit confused at the moment,but i keep getting this voice telling me to do everything in threes or something bad will happen,i try to ignore this but its coming to me every night and sometimes in the morning.I dont do everything in threes but it keeps insisting that i do,not sure what to think about this.Is it a good spirit or bad spirit.
Love and God bless you Juditha

Hi Stephen you are right,i should be doing what i have told you to do.i admit i have been neglecting saying my prayer of protection lately,which i will now make sure i do.
Love and God bless you Juditha

Hi Juditha-
First, heed Stephan's (?) advice to keep it focussed on God. Then it may be perplexing, but only good will come of it.

Second, you may be listening to the spirit of a yogi, Hindu guru or the equivalent. If I may, I'd like to point you toward the philosophical traditions of the East in which the ultimate nature of reality has been studied and publically debated for many thousands of years. These ideas do not replace your present beliefs, nor should they, but they do uncover some of the stuff that the West still views as mysterious, and which bears on the way all spiritual reality is constructed. The essence of the use of threes is that reality is a sort of trinity composed of three aspects, one is processes and activities by which changes and transformations come about, the second is obdurate extended matter that forms the bricks and trees that provide the physical furniture of the world, and the third is the collection of relationships and connections by which the natures and properties of these others are expressed. (You can find all this is the Upanishads, if you want to read it for yourself. The Upanishadic term "Atman" is literally "Greatest Soul", meaning God, it is monotheistic. )

Given these basic Eastern ideas, "to do things in threes" means that  in what ou do you must retain spiritual validity in terms of the activities and processes, in terms of the objective structures involved, and in terms of the descriptions and understandings involved. In this way, all three of the effects of your words will carry the nature of God to others. Were you to only retain spiritual validity in one or two of these aspects, it might lead others astray, because we are imperfect beings who don't always listen properly, and who are prone to misinterpretation. If you cover all theee bases, the chances of error are reduced. In passing, you might notice that the Trinity fits this descriptive mode, although the terms are a bit awkward, so that God-as-Father-Creator is the objective structure, Jesus-as-God-the-Active-Redeemer is the process, and the understanding of it all is God-as-Spirit-Inclusive-of-All.

I have great respect for what you are doing, and I wish you every possible success. As a vehicle for God's truth you are participating in the essence of Christ.

PUL
dave

Hi Recoverer i will tell the voice i will follow the father,the son and the holy spirit.
Love and God bless you Juditha

Hi Juditha-
The Upanishads were named for "upa" = near and "nisha" = sittings,  advice from ancient teachers for those students who sat nearest (as opposed to fringe dwellers who sat in the back and talked). I have a fairly complete set in four volumes There's a lot of repetition as various teachers expressed the same things in their own particular way. There's also a summary of yoga techniques etc, including one for meditation on the cosmic sound current that uses the right ear exclusively. I'm glad that you find their ideas useful to some degree. As you continue to move into the world of advanced spiritual practitioners you might keep this in the back of your mind as a resource. But - like everything else -  it's best not to believe anything unless it makes sense and works for you personally.

It's unfortunate that Western mysticism and metaphysics had to go underground in the Middle Ages to escape the Inquisition. Else we might have the same kind of writings from more familiar sources. A lot of Sufi and Dervi material, as well as Bahai writings have similarly been suppressed by Islamic intolerance. That means that the West must rely upon people like you and Bruce, and a lot of the other wise folks on this site, because the West's "formally accredited saints" have been pretty well silenced by well meaning critics.
PUL
dave

Hello, Juditha---
Sorry I've been away from the forum for several months.  When asked to do things in threes-- also remember the power of the pyramid.  It is a very strong symbol which represents many aspects of belief, not just Christianity. The Spiritualist faith say this little prayer before they give out readings: I refuse to be influenced by any spirits below me in mind or in character.  Of course, they repeat it three times!   ---cat

Hi, Juditha...I know where you are coming from on this matter...and put simply, it may just be some form of ocd. it's easy to nip in the bud, though. i used to "hear" voices, too, that told me to do something like..."wear that particular shirt, or something bad will happen"..."tap your foot three times or something bad will happen"...these thoughts disturbed me for quite a while as i was growing up b/c i felt that i had to follow them, but one day i talked to my mom about it and had to come to terms that these thoughts were just compulsions or something to set myself up for feeling guilty about not doing. i believe this is a lot more common than people may care to admit...i was rid of these voices after resisting the impulse to follow what they said. it sure was uncomfortable at first, especially w/ the impending "bad thing" that would happen if i didn't do what the voice said. but eventually, those voices went away after i had ignored them for long enough. my brother says he has had those same voices growing up...he would feel he had to say "in jesus' name, amen" a lot or something bad would happen. weird, ay?? i don't think these voices have spiritual significance...perhaps something to do w/ genetics, parenting, or a combination of both. think about it...good luck!
alanna

With due respect for Heirloom and Cricket, trying to find a diagnostic term from the DSM (Diagnostic and Srtatistical Manual of Psaychological Disorders) to "explain" subjective phenomena is a slippery slope that leads to dogmatic materialism, yet often is little more than change of definitions and expectations without any true insight. I suggest avoiding such labels unless you are a trained therapist in a clinical setting in which they are necessary.

When teaching psychopathology to grad students in psychotherapy programs there is a phenomenon  that professors often call "psych student psychosis" (usually with a slight chuckle).  This is the tendency of students to learn different diagnostic categories by rote description, and then to apply the description to themselves. As students, we have all gone through this, and we have all been terrified at the thought that we have had virtually EVERY ONE of the hundreds of psychopathological ailments and disorders. Amazingly, by the end of the cours, after a little study and insight have clarified how the disorders actually work in intrapsychic trms, we all seem to have had miraculous recoveries.

The reason for this uncomfortable phenomenon is that all disorders are nothing more than exaggerations of normal behaviors. In fact, they are so similar that it was necessary to create a manual of differential diagnostic methods in order to separate one from another. In therapy these manuals are generally of little or no use, because the name of an ailment is trivial, what is treated is not a diagnostic, but an entire person. Unless we are doing a statistical workup, or a formal diagnostic, to label a person as a "compulsive" or "paranoid" or suffering from "OCD" misses the point, because it substitutes a label for the warm and vibrant experience of the individual. (In the present case, after years of professional diagnostic experience for County Mental Health, as well as in my own clinic, I feel the label of "OCD" is inappropriate. If we were to do a differential diagnostic, a very different label would be selected, based on intrapsychic understanding, and that label would apply only at a sub-clinical level.) Labels are like handles, they are used to grasp things without regard to the rest of the shape of the object. When teaching psychodiagnostics, the first thing I emphasize is that a formal diagnosis is a potential liability to the psychotherapist. Too often we wind up looking at the label instead of the person, As a result, we often miss the content of the experiences and try to treat the diagnosis, not the human individual.

As an example, look at what we are doing! Already we have a discussion about the diagnosis! Where does that leave Juditha? Do we really wish to reduce her to an empty box filled with diagnostic definitions? If so, how about  each of us - are we no more than a page of descriptive nomenclature? Do you really want your enjoyment of a good dinner to be reduced to Pavlovian conditioning to salivate on cue? When making love with your Significant Other and you feel the Earth move, do you really want to recall this as just another experience of reinforced skill acquisition? That's where this kind of thinking goes. Ugh! Yuck!

Respectfully, I suggest that use of diagnostic terms intended primarily for the psychiatric profession has no useful application when we are dealing with exotic human experiences.

dave