What are the so-called Openings to the Influence of the Demonic ?

Openings are those events or conditions in one’s life that allowed the Evil One to have access to the soul of a human being. The Devil has one and only one target when it attempts to tempt, attack, harass, oppress, or possess a person, and that is to get the soul to renounce God. When a human person renounces God or expunges Him in their lives, then the human being becomes a sitting duck to the assaults of the devil because the protection of God is rejected.

There are three key areas of opening and basically all the particularities will fall under one of the three:

1. Iniquitous life characterized by unrepented sin or a sinful lifestyle. This life manifests itself to unrestrained debauchery and a total disregard to God’s salutary commandments. Included in this category are the immoral and illicit relationships.
2. Unrestrained or uncontrolled passions, emotions, and desires. The intense negative feelings brought about most specially by traumas and life changing negative events that breeds anger, hatred, unforgiveness, envy, sloth, despair, despondency, lust, jealousy, pride, vain-glory, gluttony, avarice all affect the disposition of the human person as well as the disposition of the soul in relation to the cultivation of virtue. Often the person will give uncontrolled reign to all the negative emotions in the name of freedom and liberty.
3. Direct contact with the praeternatural world through the use of occult or forbidden powers. This is a direct rebellion against God whether consciously or unconsciously as it is a very clear violation of the First Commandment and leads to idolatry, heresy and apostasy. Any form of superstition that surrenders human destiny to the hands of the so called “occult or esoteric” knowledge, knowledge on how to have “power” over persons and events drawn from the influence of “spirits”, “false Christianity” (false spiritual or religious beliefs –heresies), adoption of pagan religious practices and beliefs, “false mysticism” (attributing and readily accepting occult powers, visions, apparitions, strange events as supernatural gifts from God without duly discerning if they are forms of deception by the Evil One).

These conditions and sins if not truly repented, renounced, confessed, and amended become entry ways for the demonic to take hold of a person’s soul. The entry of the demonic can be very subtle, undetected. Its destructive presence can only be felt when it has taken a large dominion over the life and soul of a person.