Spiritual Warfare in the Age of Religious Conversion
A psycho-spiritual look at the Christian conversion trend and the deception of the Veil of Light
By Bernhard Guenther, September 6, 2025
There’s a growing trend of people publicly renouncing what they call the “New Age”, including Eastern spirituality, shamanism, and festival culture, and converting to Christianity.
Many of them claim demonic forces deceived them and believe they’ve found salvation through Jesus Christ.
This article explores the deeper psycho-spiritual dynamics behind this conversion trend: spiritual bypassing, shadow projection, psychological splitting, and the deceptive pull of the “veil of light.”
It also examines how rigid dogma, when unexamined, can become a tool of the very demonic occult forces it claims to oppose.
This is not a critique of Christ or true esoteric Christianity. It’s a call for discernment, humility, and sincere inner work, because the real spiritual war is within and through us, and it is intensifying.
Spiritual Bypassing and the Rising Trend of Religious Conversion
While this shift may stem from a sincere impulse to grow and change, the way it plays out psychologically and spiritually reveals something deeper, especially when the condemnation becomes absolute, moralistic, and generalized in a black-and-white way.
What we’re seeing in this new trend of Christian conversion is a form of spiritual bypassing wrapped in religious language.
The term “spiritual bypassing” was coined by John Welwood, a Buddhist psychotherapist, in the early 1980s. He used it to describe the tendency to use spiritual beliefs, practices, or identities to avoid facing unresolved emotional wounds, psychological issues, or shadow material.
It creates the illusion of growth or awakening while actually serving as a defense against deeper inner work. Instead of integrating, the person becomes more entrenched in the illusion and the lies of the false personality, which is mistaken for the true self.
It happens when the ego becomes spiritualized and believes itself to be awake.
To learn more about “Spiritual Bypassing”, listen to our podcast “Spiritual Bypassing – A Guide To Spotting It And Stopping It”.
This new form of religious spiritual bypassing often looks like this: someone renounces their former lifestyle and beliefs, adopts a rigid Christian identity (usually through baptism and accepting Jesus as their savior; if you’re really on trend now, you join an Orthodox Church, the latest spiritual fashion statement), and starts labeling aspects of their past (especially spiritual beliefs and practices) as satanic or demonic.
Ironically, this plays right into the hands of the very occult “demonic” forces and “Satan” that dogmatic Christians claim to be fighting.
I’ll explore this further in the context of the hyperdimensional matrix and how non-physical forces have manipulated humans for thousands of years, primarily through corrupted religions and scriptures.
I have already touched upon it in a previous article titled “The Jesus Savior Program and Reclaiming Christ – How Literalism, Fear, and Religious Dogma Corrupted the Inner Path to the Divine.” I recommend reading it for more context.
A few days ago, I made a comment on X about Nicole Shanahan’s article, “Is Burning Man Demonic?”, which was quote-retweeted by a man named Cernovich.
His comment is a perfect example of the kind of nonsense that dogmatic Christians believe and project. It also shows how deep religious programming runs. How dare you talk to God directly? You need a middleman, a church, or else you’re demonic. The devil has you.
Apparently, he’s a popular conservative influencer. As a result of his quoting my tweet, I got swamped by Christians preaching the love of Jesus through personal attacks, condemning me for “heresy,” and accusing me of worshipping the devil.
It was more intense than the trolling and attacks I’ve received from woke leftists over the past five years.
It felt like a flashback to medieval times: witch burnings, mobs hunting down non-believers, and violent missionary crusades for “heresy” and disobedience to church authority. It’s no longer physically dangerous, but it still carries the same energy, and it’s far removed from anything Jesus actually taught.
They’d nail Jesus to the cross again if he came back.
Nicole Shanahan, Burning Man, and Satan
Nicole Shanahan is a tech entrepreneur, lawyer, and philanthropist, best known as the ex-wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, the running mate of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and for her recent public conversion to Christianity.
Her article is about her personal experience of no longer being a Burner after being “saved by Christ.” She’s on her path, learning her lessons, and expressing herself. No judgment in that.
At the same time, her article is a good example of the deeper psycho-spiritual dynamics and religious spiritual bypassing behind this growing trend of Christian conversions.
Some may say, “It’s good people are embracing Jesus and getting more religious. At least it’s better than woke ideology or hedonistic festivals like Burning Man, full of drugs and unhinged sensual pleasures.”
Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details (pun intended).
This trend reveals a deeper issue with traditional dogmatic Christianity, Bible-thumping, “Christ is King” proclamations, and the insistence that you must “accept Jesus as your savior if you want to go to heaven.”
The more extreme forms of this neo-Christian revival show themselves when Christians claim that their religion is the only true one, and everything else is demonic, a false idol, or the work of the devil.
Ironically, that narrative only works in favor of the very “demonic” and “satanic” forces these newly reborn Christians claim to expose.
In a nutshell, Nicole Shanahan, a longtime Burner turned devout Christian, reflects in her article on her years at Burning Man and concludes that it’s not just a hedonistic festival, but a spiritually dangerous and demonic deception. She frames the ecstatic and seductive atmosphere of the event as satanic.
She calls Burning Man “one of the most effective tools for Satan to misdirect souls away from our Heavenly Father,” and now refers to herself as a “devotee to Scripture,” seemingly viewing the Bible as the unquestioned truth and literal word of God.
I’ve already addressed the problems with the Bible and the “Jesus savior” program in the aforementioned past article.
But instead of focusing on Nicole as an individual, it’s more useful to examine what her story represents.
She’s one example of a much broader phenomenon: the recent wave of people, especially those coming out of New Age circles, festival culture, or psychedelic and shamanic exploration, who are converting to traditional Christianity, accepting Jesus as the savior, and then labeling their past beliefs, experiences, or practices as demonic or satanic
We called it the “The New Age To Dogmatic Christian Pipeline” in a past podcast.
This is becoming increasingly common: people disown their former selves, reject everything associated with their prior path, and adopt a rigid Christian identity.
The Deceptive Veil of Light
From a Jungian perspective, her story, like many others, reflects a psychic upheaval marked by shadow repression, projection, psychological splitting, and spiritual inflation.
Spiritual inflation occurs when the superego adopts a spiritual identity to avoid engaging in deeper inner work. This is a form of spiritual bypassing, often resulting in moralizing. It’s especially common in many of these new Christian circles that have never engaged in real psycho-spiritual or shadow work.
Worse still, many of them are caught in what Rumi called the “Veil of Light.”
“The Veil of Light, which is the barrier brought about by self-righteousness, is more dangerous than the Veil of Darkness, produced in the mind by vice.”
— Rumi
Rumi’s teaching highlights a subtle yet significant deception.
The Veil of Darkness is vice in its obvious forms: greed, lust, violence, lower nature indulgence, and addiction. These are relatively easy to recognize and, eventually, to confront.
The Veil of Light, on the other hand, hides in the guise of goodness. It flatters the seeker into believing they are already pure, already awakened, already “saved.”
This is where spiritual pride, moral superiority, and self-righteousness creep in. The person believes they’ve crossed the threshold into light, but they have only replaced one mask with another.
When someone adopts a religious persona, for example, proclaiming they’ve “accepted Jesus as their Savior,” and it’s built on denial and rejection of their own shadow, rather than psychological integration, it risks becoming an expression of the Veil of Light that Rumi warned about.
It doesn’t lead to inner transformation but repression. And repression always leads to projection.
Instead of facing the unconscious material and working through it, the shadow gets denied, judged, and cast out, projected on others.
Everything previously associated with the self becomes “demonic.” The new identity is framed as “saved.” This is textbook psychological splitting, not individuation.
In this condition, the ego doesn’t disappear. It simply puts on holy robes. The Bible, the language of salvation, and the newfound devotion to Scripture can all become a spiritualized persona.
The deeper unconscious material is never met and integrated, but rejected and bypassed.
What’s missed is that true redemption cannot come from religious conversion alone. It must be rooted in sincere inner transformation, facing the shadow, integrating unconscious drives, and grounding spiritual insight through lived embodiment.
The Veil of Light is dangerous because it tells you the work is done when it has barely begun. As Gurdjieff warned, it is “dreaming to be awake while still fully asleep.”
Today, many of these same converts call Jung a Satanist or a false idol. They dismiss transpersonal psychology as demonic. They believe that all one needs is baptism, Jesus, and the Bible.
But you cannot cut out half of the psyche and expect to be whole. And you cannot condemn your past and call it healing.
Shadow Projection and Psychological Splitting
Anyone who has done sincere shadow work can see what’s happening here: shadow projection and psychological splitting. This is common in people who adopt a new religious or spiritual identity without integrating their shadow. The disowned parts of the psyche get projected outward.
Psychological splitting occurs when someone divides the world into all-good or all-bad categories because they cannot tolerate internal contradiction or nuance. It leads to black-and-white thinking and the projection of repressed material onto others, who are now labeled “satanic” or “demonic.”
Burning Man, once a source of joy and meaning, becomes a symbol of Satan, two opposing extremes. The former self is cast into shadow, while the new Christian identity is seen as morally “enlightened” and “saved.”
Instead of integrating the complexity of the past through sincere inner work, the past is condemned entirely.
Rather than hold the tension of opposites, the alchemical fire that gives rise to the true Self, Nicole, like many other “saved” Christians, collapses into moral absolutism and simplistic black-and-white thinking.
To “hold the tension of opposites” means to consciously stay with inner conflict, contradiction, or paradox without trying to quickly resolve it through repression, rationalization, projection, or premature action.
It’s a core part of Jung’s individuation process, the path toward becoming a whole, integrated Self. Rather than collapsing into one pole (e.g., good vs. evil, light vs. dark, spirit vs. matter), the individual must hold space for both opposites to exist within, even when it’s uncomfortable or painful. This tension is not meant to be “solved”, but endured and metabolized.
Holding the tension of opposites is not the same as neutrality, apathy, pacifism, or finding the “middle ground.” It’s not that truth lies somewhere in between two extremes. It is also not dissociation, nor is it a philosophical or intellectual exercise.
The inner process of holding the tension of opposites inevitably brings about what esoteric science calls “conscious suffering”, a necessary kind of suffering that ignites the alchemical fire within.
By doing so, a third element can emerge. This is not a compromise, but a higher synthesis that transforms the psyche. It’s how psychological and spiritual growth occurs. In esotericism, it is known as the Law of Three.
It is through this alchemical inner fire that the real “I” is born, as an expression of the Divine. From Lead to Gold.
In yogic psychology, this process leads to a state of true equanimity, where the soul and the true Self emerge. This inner equanimity is not to be confused with the outer personality’s concept of “equality” or passive indifference.
Holding the tension within is painful. That’s why most people avoid it. Instead, they dissociate or project their unresolved inner conflict and tension onto the world and attach to a group, movement, ideology, political side, belief system, or identity to ease the pressure.
Not being able to hold the tension of opposites can also result in jumping from one identification to another, from New Age to Christian, from liberal to conservative, or from one spiritual system to another, all in an unconscious attempt to escape the inner fire that would otherwise forge the soul.
If you want to learn more about the psycho-spiritual concept of “Holding the Tension of Opposites”, listen to our podcast episode “How Can We Heal This Polarized World?”
I’ve witnessed the same pattern in some old friends who were deeply identified with the shamanic and medicine plant path.
After not getting the results they hoped for, despite repeatedly drinking ayahuasca and doing dietas without sincere inner work, they jumped on the Christian conversion bandwagon, got baptized, and now preach that shamanism and ayahuasca are satanic and demonic, completely throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
They literally went from one extreme identification to another.
Jung referred to this as a flight into the opposites. It may bring temporary relief, but it suppresses essential parts of the psyche that remain unintegrated and continue to feed the shadow.
This false persona is often reinforced by fellow Christians who applaud the conversion, not realizing it reflects the same unresolved shadow suppression and projection they themselves carry.
Sooner or later, the shadow has to be faced, whether in this life, the afterlife, or the next. No Jesus, and no savior, will integrate your shadow for you.
Religious Dogma and the Afterlife
The afterlife will come as a big surprise for many dogmatic fundamentalist Christians. Instead of instantly experiencing “Heaven,” they will first encounter their own shadow reflected back to them before they can enter the light.
Christians who hold rigid, literal interpretations of the Bible, who externalize God and lack an inner experience of the Kingdom within, may get stuck in the afterlife as earthbound spirits. Their expectations and fixed beliefs do not align with spiritual reality.
Dr. William Baldwin, who spent decades working with earthbound souls and helping them transition, documented several cases where fundamentalist Christians did not cross into the Light due to fear of judgment, hell, or punishment.
In one example shared in his book “Spirit Releasement Therapy”, a devout Baptist minister refused to enter the Light after death because it didn’t match what he believed Heaven should look like. Despite his unwavering belief in Jesus Christ as the Savior, his soul became trapped in the earth’s astral realm.
Iris Paxino, who has also worked extensively with the dead, describes a similar phenomenon in her book “Bridges Between Life and Death.” She explains that individuals with rigid religious beliefs are at risk of becoming stuck in the etheric realm after death.
Their inflexible thought structures harden the etheric body, making it difficult to dissolve after death. As a result, they confuse their own mental constructs with the actual spiritual world.
Actual spiritual development after death requires emotional openness, inner flexibility, and a heart-centered perception. Intellectual religious knowledge or belief is not enough.
In other words, the soul is not liberated simply by “accepting Jesus as the Savior,” reading scripture, or engaging in theological studies. Freedom and salvation come through genuine inner psycho-spiritual development.
That process involves confronting and integrating whatever has been repressed or projected onto others, known as the shadow. This is a core part of the afterlife experience, as described across many esoteric traditions.
“People who, during their incarnation, have developed very dogmatic spiritual views or fixed mental ideas about the spiritual world form a group of the deceased trapped in the etheric world.
Dogmatism of any kind produces one-sided thoughts and inflexible inner images. Since the etheric body is the carrier of our ideas, rigid thought formations cause it to harden, meaning it then has difficulty dissolving after death.
The solidity of the deceased’s mental structures remains, leading them to confuse their own fixed ideas and imaginations with the actual spiritual world that now surrounds them.
Spiritual thoughts alone do not guarantee a healthy development after death. Instead, emotional and spiritual mobility, tolerance, and openness of heart are the prerequisites for an unbiased perception of the spiritual world and a harmonious development after death.”
– Iris Paxino
Radical Christians would call Baldwin and Paxino heretics and accuse their work of being demonic. But the truth is, everyone will find out for themselves when the inevitable moment arrives and the transition to death is upon them.
The afterlife is not about reward or punishment. It’s not about heaven or hell. These are limiting beliefs implanted by the authoritarian Church to control people.
The deeper truth is that it’s about soul evolution. This path requires making the darkness conscious and uniting the opposites in order to become whole, not perfect. It’s about facing what we’ve repressed, projected, or bypassed, not denying or spiritually bypassing it.
As I’ve written in a previous article, one of the most significant corruptions in the Bible was the removal of the concept of reincarnation, along with the understanding of karma and the evolution of the soul across lifetimes.
Festivals, Psychedelics, and Medicine Plants
Burning Man is a massive gathering of around 70,000 people. Attendees create art, dance, express themselves, party, take drugs, and explore altered states. Some overdose. A few die each year.
It’s a bit like “Sin City” in the desert, with hedonism, sexual orgies, and wild escapades. But to label the entire thing “demonic” or “satanic” is a reaction rooted in psychological splitting.
Especially when the superego takes on a spiritual mask and views everything through the lens of one of the most corrupted religions and texts in history.
I know many people who went to Burning Man long before Nicole did, some for ten years straight between 2000 and 2010. They did all the drugs, dancing, and partying. Most of them stopped going years ago. Today, many are married with kids, grounded, and spiritually engaged, without ever needing to be “saved by Jesus” or convert to Christianity.
I never went to Burning Man myself, but I spent years at full-moon desert raves in the 1990s, high on MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms. In the words of the late comedian Bill Hicks, “I had a great time, then went about my day.” Those experiences never felt demonic. If anything, they sparked a deeper interest in inner work, psycho-spiritual study, and healing my childhood wounds.
I was a psychonaut for years. After I stopped partying in the early 2000s, I used psychedelics and medicine plants only to explore my inner world and other realms by myself.
I’ve taken heroic doses of mushrooms (in the Terence McKenna sense), smoked DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in controlled settings, and traveled to Peru to work with Ayahuasca and Huachuma (San Pedro), before plant medicines became trendy. I’ve seen both the light and the dark sides of psychedelics and shamanism.
I’ve worked with people who took on entity attachments from poorly held aya ceremonies. I’ve also seen spiritual bypassing in the medicine world, just as I’ve seen people swing to the other extreme, condemning it all as “Satanic” and “Demonic” after converting to Christianity.
Yes, there are real risks associated with drug-induced altered states and festivals like Burning Man. I’ve written about the darker side of both in detail, especially from a hyperdimensional occult perspective:
- Reflections on Ayahuasca, Psychedelics, Marijuana, and a Critical Look at the Psychedelic Movement
- Altered States of Entrapment: The Plant Medicine Manipulation
But it’s not black and white. I never felt the need to adopt a spiritual identity that demonizes other paths.
The main reason is that my focus has always been on inner work, integrating the psychological and the spiritual. I never identified with a religion, faith, scripture, or teaching. I never took any path or modality as the sole foundation or the lens through which to view the world.
What guided me was an integral approach to psycho-spiritual work that includes all levels: physical, somatic, emotional, psychological, intellectual, and spiritual.
The more I engaged in shadow work and faced my own darkness, my potential for evil, the less I projected it outward. The more I integrated what I found, the less I was able to deceive myself or adopt a fixed spiritual identity based on a particular path or belief system.
In this process, I found God, not through any church, book, priest, or ritual.
That doesn’t mean I’m fully awake. There’s still more work to do, more layers to shed and integrate. But I no longer look for a savior outside myself.
The Hidden Trap: When Demonization Serves the Demonic
Here’s the big irony behind this rigid black-and-white labeling of things as “demonic” or “satanic,” especially from the moral high ground of being “saved by Christ” and quoting Bible verses.
This kind of moral labeling, where complex human drives, archetypal forces, and other spiritual paths are reflexively condemned, often serves the very occult forces that dogmatic Christians claim to fight.
From the perspective of spiritual warfare and the hyperdimensional matrix, this mechanism of shadow suppression and projection becomes a tool for hostile entities, especially when fueled by the guilt-and-shame programming of the Church. These forces feed on fragmentation and repression of the shadow.
When someone disowns their lower nature and primal impulses, especially around sexuality and altered states, and labels them “satanic,” they split off vital parts of themselves.
That split creates an opening for entity interference, as understood in all esoteric traditions. The repressed energy then feeds projections toward others who carry the disowned shadow.
This shadow hides behind the veil of light mentioned earlier. It is one of the most deceptive states of being.
In my previous article, I explored how dogmatic Christianity’s repressive view of sex created a deep, unconscious sexual shadow. This often leads to moral posturing on the surface while secretly indulging in the very “sins” being condemned.
From a Jungian lens, this dynamic of repression, guilt, and projection explains why the regions with the most rigid conservative Christian values often have the highest rates of porn consumption, including taboo content.
The more these primal drives are denied rather than integrated, the more powerfully they resurface through projection, hypocrisy, or even abuse. True transformation doesn’t come from suppression or moralizing, but from conscious inner work and transmutation.
When you project your own repressed drives onto festivals, subcultures, or “the other,” you become blind to those same energies within. That makes you easier to control. Entities feed on the fragmentation and projections toward others that you refuse to face in yourself.
Calling Burning Man satanic without engaging in sincere shadow work is not genuine awakening. It is psychological splitting, deceived by the veil of light. It is repression dressed as salvation.
The hyperdimensional matrix (and what Christians call “Satan”) doesn’t just thrive on indulgence in the lower nature. It also feeds on dogma, rigidity, and religious absolutism. The false light is more deceptive than obvious darkness.
In that split state, people become more programmable. They mistake corrupted scripture and the “Jesus savior” program for Divine guidance.
The so-called “devil” (occult hostile entities) most often appears as an “angel of light,” even taking on the appearance of Jesus, a Pleiadian, an alien, Mother Mary, Buddha, or any other form that appeals to the seeker in order to deceive.
In other words, having a “vision” or “encounter” with Jesus is not proof that it’s the real thing. I know several people who fell into this deception, what’s known as a “trap of agreement,” an occult law that hidden forces use to gain permission for interference or possession.
“The chief characteristic of these beings is falsehood: their nature is made of deceit. They have a power of illusion; they can take the appearance of divine beings or higher beings, they can appear in a dazzling light, but truly sincere people are not deceived; they immediately feel something that warns them.
But if one likes the marvelous, the unexpected, if one loves fantastic things, if one likes to live a romance, one is likely to be easily deceived.”
– Mirra Alfassa, The Mother
“To say that all light is good is as if you said that all water is good – or even that all clear or transparent water is good: it would not be true. One must see what is the nature of the light or where it comes from or what is in it, before one can say that it is the true Light.
False lights exist and misleading lustres, lower lights too that belong to the being’s inferior reaches. One must therefore be on one’s guard and distinguish; the true discrimination has to come by growth of the psychic feeling and a purified mind and experience.
The word “Appearances” refers to the forms they take in order to rule the world, forms often false and always incarnating falsehood, sometimes pseudo-divine. Often, representing themselves as divine powers, they mislead…”
– Sri Aurobindo
The Real Spiritual War Is Within
Many Christians talk about spiritual warfare. They’re right about that part. We are in a spiritual war. I’ve been writing about it for over 20 years.
What they don’t seem to see is how the hostile forces are also working through them and how easily they can be deceived. Through their rigid religious identity. Through their self-righteousness. Through their moral absolutism. Through their projections. Through distorted doctrines and scriptures, they cling to dogmatically.
This is why the esoteric traditions emphasize sincere inner work. Knowing all parts of yourself. Especially the dark and uncomfortable ones. Not bypassing them with an external salvation program.
Not hiding in a new identity or taking on the deceptive veil of light. Not projecting the shadow onto others and calling them demonic or satanic in an oversimplified black and white perception, but facing that very “evil” you project outward onto others within yourself.
Confronting the darkness within yourself without flinching, without escaping it, without repression, while resisting the urge to project it externally by holding the tension of opposites within, is one of the most difficult inner processes. It requires a spiritual warrior’s attitude to face it, because you will fight demons both within and without.
Moreover, if you haven’t faced your own evil and shadow, all the disowned parts, sub-personalities, inner child wounds, trauma parts, and the like, you won’t be able to discern demonic or satanic forces truly. You’ll mistake your own shadow projections for “demons” and only see them in others, not in yourself.
It’s a big red flag when someone claims to see only demons and entities in others, but not in themselves.
Anyone who claims they’re not affected by entities at all is deceiving themselves. The only exception would be a fully enlightened being.
The real spiritual war is within, and it works through us. It always has.
“The majority of people find many excuses not to work on themselves. They are in a complete prison of their weaknesses.
Understand me right, I do not need followers. I am rather interested in finding the real warriors of the new world.”
– Gurdjieff, The Last Hour of Life
