Can people be possessed by demons today?

Spirits eat the spiritual counterpart of our food, feel both keen hunger and thirst.

All are free in the spirit world. All must follow only where their own wishes and desires lead them. If they study to cultivate the higher desires, means will be given them to attain them and they are strengthened with such help and strength as they may need.

All things come by earnest prayer whether you are conscious that you pray or not. 

For good or evil your desires are as prayers and call around you good or evil powers to answer them for you.

In the spirit world, there are many strange places, many wondrous sights, many organisations for helping repentant souls. 

These societies exist in the spirit world for the purpose of giving help to all who are in need. Their operations are carried on everywhere and in all spheres, and their members are to be found from the very lowest and darkest spheres to the very highest, which surround the earth and even extend into the spheres of the solar systems. They are like immense chains of spirits, the lowest and humblest being always helped and protected by those above.

Each spirit has only what he has earned by his earthly life, and some have nothing but the little couch on which they lie and suffer. 

For all suffer here. It is the House of Sorrow, yet it is also a House of Hope, for all are striving upwards to the light, and for each has begun the time of hope. 

Each has his foot planted on the lowest rung of the ladder of hope by which he should in time mount even to heaven itself.

Advanced spirits whose natural desires and tastes make them doctors and healers attend on the poorest and most suffering spirits. These spirits are put into temporary forgetfulness of their pain, and though they awake again to a renewal of their sufferings, yet in these intervals their spirits gain strength and their sufferings are mitigated with time and the growing development of the spirit body. 

It is the state of the spirit itself in the spiritual world that makes the lightness or darkness of its surroundings.

Unfortunate spirits who dwell in darkness have none of the brightness of happy spirits to give into the atmosphere. 

The sense of darkness is also due to the almost total blindness of spirits whose undeveloped spiritual senses make them insensible to all around them, just as those born on earth in a state of blindness, deafness and dumbness would be unconscious of the things which are apparent to those fully endowed with senses.

In visiting earth's atmosphere, which is a degree more suited to their state of development, these spirits are still in relative darkness. They possess the power of seeing those beings like themselves with whom they come into direct contact, and also, such human beings as are in a sufficiently low spiritual degree of development. 

The higher and more spiritualised humans and still more the disembodied spirits in advance of them are only very dimly discernible or even totally invisible.

In the lower spheres the spirit is conscious of bodily sufferings. As it grows more advanced the suffering becomes more purely mental, the less material envelope of the higher spirits making them insensible to anything like material pain.

Many spirits go back to earth in search of the means to satisfy their desires through the material bodies of those yet on earth. 

Many yield to the temptation and go back for a time to haunt the earth and there to enjoy sensual pleasures through the organism of those yet in the flesh, and whose sordid lives and low desires place them on a level with the spirits of the earth plane*.

*Those countries, which are situated in the third circle of the earth plane or first sphere are called the Twilight Lands, and it is to these lands that those spirits pass whose lives have been too selfish and material to allow their souls to reach any higher state of development. Even these Twilight Lands, however, are a degree above those haunting spirits of the earth plane who are literally earthbound to their former habitations. No flowers, not even a leaf or blade of grass, not a tree or a shrub however stunted grow in this land, for the dry arid soil of selfishness has no blossom or green thing to give to anyone.

Few people understand that spirits can and very often do take complete possession of their bodies.

Many cases of so-called temporary madness are due to the controlling power of very low spirits or frivolous minds who are put into complete rapport with the embodied spirit whose body they seek to use. This controlling or overshadowing of an individual is used in many ways, and those who foolishly make themselves liable often find that the low spirits who haunt the earth plane, and even those from much lower spheres can often obtain so great a hold over them that they become mere puppets in their hands whose bodies they can use at will.

Many individuals are drawn into sins for which they are only partly responsible. 

Those evil spirits who tempt and use another's organism render a terrible account since they are doubly guilty. In sinning themselves and in dragging down another soul with them, they sink to a depth from which many years and even many centuries of suffering cannot free them.

The old beliefs in demoniacal possession are not so visionary after all, only these demons or devils had themselves been once earth's denizens.

A spirit has far greater capabilities of suffering or enjoyments, pleasure or pain, love or hate. All the senses of a disembodied spirit are tenfold more acute.

Spirits see a spiritual light around those whose lives are good and pure, just as a dark mist surrounds those who are evil.

A desire of vengeance draws up dark, awful and nightmarish spirits from their haunts in the lowest hell. These beings cannot live on the earth plane, nor even in the lower spheres surrounding it, unless there are congenial individuals or some strong magnetic attraction to hold them there for a time, and though they often rise in response to an intensely evil desire on the part of either an individual or spirit on the earth plane, yet they cannot remain long, and the moment the attracting force becomes weakened, like a rope that breaks, they lose their hold and sink down again to their own dark abodes. 

At times of great popular indignation and anger, the bitter wrath and thirst for revenge, the oppressed feel will draw around them a cloud of these dark beings who are truly as devils.