by Winafred B. Lucas, Ph.D.

In a recent stay in Egypt I deepened my understanding of the nature of entity attachments. Our group of 23, under the leadership of Dr. Brugh Joy, was spending a week riding camels across the Sinai and climbing mountains there. During a particularly steep climb, in which a fixed rope was used to assist the ascent, the rope broke and the person on it, Mark, fell some distance, scraping rocks on the way down and landing on his left ankle in a shallow pool. Several of the men carried him back to where the camels had been left, where the group, many of whom were healers, succeeded in reducing the inflammation. However, the possibility of a ruptured Achilles tendon led Brugh to decide that Mark should return on the most dependable camel, along with a companion and two guides, to the Gulf of Akaba, where he could hitch a ride over the border to Israel, which was not far away, and seek medical evaluation in a hospital there. (On the almost deserted Akaba road, Mark and his companion did find a ride—with a physician from Brooklyn!)

Several days later Mark rejoined our group when we returned to Nuweiba on the Akaba Gulf. Though on crutches, a few days later when we embarked on our Nile cruise boat, the Noor II, at Aswan, he was able to take part in sight-seeing activities. Just after we sailed toward Luxor, however, he became ill. His intestinal distress, which was extreme, escalated, no matter what treatment was attempted, and he became severely dehydrated. Within a day he could scarcely speak and seemed to be fading away. At this point Brugh held a meeting on deck and said that he felt Mark had contracted an entity during our two days in Cairo at the beginning of the trip. He asked what could be done about an entity.

Releasement

I suggested a releasement and Brugh responded, “Exactly,” and to my surprise told me to take over. Mark was carried up to the deck and laid on a reclining deck chair. He was so weak that even though I sat almost over him I could scarcely hear him. However, I inducted him into a garden meditation to accustom him to imaging, and then asked the entity to appear. He came, and through Mark I asked where he had made the attachment, He responded through Mark that he had attached on the first day of our trip, when we were exploring the second floor of the Cairo Museum. He shared that his name was Horheb and that he needed to “piggyback” into the Light. Since it was his impression that Mark was having longings to “return home,” he had taken advantage of this to get a ride with someone who was sure to go to the Light.

Because I could scarcely hear Mark, who was growing increasingly weaker I cut short the usual conversation with the entity that I would have liked to have had and simply explained that Mark did not mean to “go home,” and the entity would do better to go to the Light on his own. I asked him to speak through Mark to say if he was willing to go, and if he was, I would find helpful guides for him. Under my persistence the entity finally agreed to leave, and I sent him on his way but didn’t check to see if he actually went.

I protected Mark with light and brought him back into his body. Almost immediately he started getting well, and by the next day was hobbling along on his crutches for our explorations of the temples. He continued to improve to where he could manage without crutches but upon his return home, X-rays showed that the Achilles tendon had been severed. The hands-on healing had acted like an aspirin to relieve some of the symptoms while obscuring the true situation. Norman Shealy, in his currently released book The Creation of Health, claims that this is often the case. Later in the trip Mark had a dream in which he was struggling literally to go home, and with this wish made conscious, he could work on the underlying depression. Evidently the emotional energy field must be brought into balance for healing to occur.

Second Attachment in the Temple of Karnak

Much of my interest in visiting Egypt was due to regressions I had made to an Egyptian life where I had my first Saluki (an Egyptian dog which in this lifetime my daughter and I bred and showed). I had recovered specific images and memories of this dog, set in the time of Ramses II, and the evening after the releasement I spent some hours with Ashrod, a Cairo tour leader who was managing our trip. He enjoyed a broad-spectrum background of Egypt, and I asked him about the Salukis of the Pharaohs. He replied that the Pharaohs didn’t have Salukis: the one in the Cairo Museum belonged to a desert tribe.

This information negated all my memories, which up until that moment I had considered informative and authentic and which had always checked out with any archeological evidence. It meant that I would have to start over to develop a sound world view, and with my 77th birthday coming up in a few days, I wasn’t sure if I had the energy to do that. The next morning I joined the others in the horse and buggy procession to the Temple of Karnak, but the shock and depression of the night before muted my interest. I walked through the extensive courts, the broken temples, hypostyle halls, transverse halls, obelisks, and sanctuaries of what seemed to me, in that mood, a wasteland charged with negative energy. I began to think about the contra-indications to further living, about having to start over again, and I found myself beginning to consider the merit of “going home.” By the time I got to the shabby Sacred Lake I felt desolate.

Almost immediately I became ill. That isn’t unusual in Third World countries, so I found a bathroom and made my way out of the jungle of broken columns and took the next carriage back to our boat.

Second Releasement

In my tiny stateroom I began hours of continuous heaving, which Lomatil and all other medications failed to stop. I felt as though I was being compelled to heave out my entire insides, and I found the pain and distress overwhelming. Then it occurred to me that this was exactly what Mark had gone through, and I called the entity Horheb and asked if he had not gone to the Light but instead was still hanging around. The answer was immediate: he had to find a way to piggyback—he could not go on his own. In the Temple of Karnak he had been drawn by my thoughts of “going home.” Rudely I told him to “get lost,” a sad injunction to an entity who was already hopelessly lost! I sensed that he left, and immediately I stopped vomiting. In a few hours I felt better, though I declined to join the group that night for the Sound and Light Show at the Karnak Temple.

Later, while going through the tombs at Beni Hassan, I found inscribed on the walls scenes of Salukis that exactly resembled those in my regression memories. I realized that my host was uninformed in this area, and that my suffering had been unnecessary. However, I felt glad that I had been willing to release a conceptualization when it seemed to be without foundation.

The Father Entity

The learning of the experience with Horheb was deepened by a second and more personal releasement. For years I had been aware of a pervasive shadowing which often muted my natural joy and constantly made me tired. Often I found myself speaking inappropriately, or telling stories that, though not entirely inappropriate, were not what I had planned to say. I was distressed with this high-handedness but put it down to a sub-personality. When sub-personality work did not bring change, I asked my Inner Mind if the compelling energy was a sub-personality or an entity, and to my surprise the answer was that it was an entity.

With hours for meditation as we drifted down the Nile, shortly after dismissing Horheb, I decided to dialogue with this unidentified entity. I started by asking why it had attached to me. It seemed eager to tell me: “Because you are rather colorless and I need to speak through you to make you more interesting.”

Then suddenly I knew. It was my father, the charismatic storyteller who had sexually and physically abused me in a mild way when I was a child. I had held anger toward him for this, but when he died 50 years ago, I decided it was time to let the anger go. I wrote the story of his death, channeling it because I had not been home for four years, and by the 13th draft I had released the anger and generated compassion and love.

At the time of his death I had seen my father going toward the Light. I realized then that he thought it was fire, but since he was always talking about “keeping the home fires burning,” I thought he had translated the Light into this metaphor, so I was astonished in this new contact to find that he had never made his transition. At this time I didn’t explore the confusion, which would have given me more understanding but simply told my father-entity that I didn’t need him and he should leave. This he did, declaring as he went that he had only meant to be helpful. I realized that I had drawn him to attach to me by my too loving and compassionate an attitude, taken without protection for myself, since 50 years ago I didn’t know anything about entities.

As we sailed down the river I became aware that the long-standing shadowing was now gone. My energy and joy increased. At first there was regret because it seemed I had been deflected from my original intention, which was not to be householder or professional but to spend my life seeking and writing. I had followed this direction until I was 27. My father, however, had believed strongly in the family as the ultimate good, and it was at the time of his death that I made the shift to a life I had not chosen, for reasons I did not understand. Gradually as I meditated on the river I came to understand that there were karmic reasons for the shift, lessons to be learned, the relationship with my father to be set right, a gifted grandson’s life to enrich.

Why Piggyback?

I found myself in an introverted mood when I returned home, and I spent the first weeks thinking about the events of my Egyptian sojourn. Early in this meditation I realized that I had never understood what the Egyptian entity Horheb had meant by piggybacking, and in the pressure, first of Mark’s escalating weakness and then of my physical distress, I had not asked. I called Horheb and found, as I had expected, that he had not gone toward the Light but was still hanging around. When I asked him why he hadn’t gone, and what it meant to piggyback, he explained that he was afraid of the “weighing of the heart.” He told me that he had been an overseer in the time of Ramses III and in a dispute over land had killed a man. He was sure that his heart, put in balance against the feather of Ma’at, would sink down and he would be thrown to the crocodile-headed Ammit, who was waiting in the dark Netherworld to devour those who did not pass the test.

The Weighing of the Heart

I told him that the true situation was different, and I offered to take him to the Light. I hadn’t been able to do this sort of guiding before, but now it was possible, and once in the Light, I told Horheb that between lifetimes he would always have a similar glimpse so that he would know where he was headed, though each time he would be pulled back to the soul level of the preceding lifetime. No one was ever lost to the Netherworld forever. For a long time after that, whenever I remembered the joy and relief that this guilty and frightened soul experienced when he realized that he wasn’t condemned forever, tears came to my eyes.

The experience with Horheb after my return from Egypt made me wonder if I had sufficiently understood what happened to my father when he confused the Light with fire. I called him and found that he, too, was still lingering, though with no intention of further bothering me. I asked him why he didn’t go to the Light, and he said that because of what he had done, he could see that he was headed for hell-fire, which was the way he had interpreted the Light, and he just couldn’t make himself go toward it.

In this new meeting I told my father that eternal hell-fire was a fiction and I took him to the Light, where my two brothers who had already gone on were waiting for him, and also my mother, whose great love affair with him had been blighted by his guilt. I told my father that what he had done was nothing very much, that I had released it, and he should learn from it what he could and let it go. He was quieter in his relief than Horheb had been, but I saw that he was moved by being met by his family.

Therapy for the Concept of Hell

This Egyptian experience and its aftermath convinced me that when we work with releasement we need to do careful therapy with the entity: this is just as important as doing careful therapy with a patient. We need to know why the entity has not gone to the Light. It can be attachment or anger, but it can also be guilt over misdeeds and a fear of punishment—the result of one lifetime’s conceptualization about sin and punishment. As in any false conceptualization, reframing is necessary, and this must be handled patiently and gently. Blasting an entity into the Light or giving it a hard sell for the sake of a patient is not enough.

Finally, attachment experiences exhibit pulls from both sides. One aspect of the releasement is the unearthing of whatever pull the patient has—often unconsciously—exerted on the entity, as with Mark’s and my tentative thoughts about “going home,” or the pull of the positive feelings I held for my father at the time when I had finally released my anger at him. Attention to all these factors is needed if releasement is to result in a permanent solution to the patient’s difficulty.