James continues with his example of John Jones: “So you can see that spirit influence can be very harmful on occasion (James calls this “spirit obsession” as opposed to “spirit possession”). It is unfortunate that those who die in an unenlightened state are most likely to attempt to exert their influence, negative as it is. Those still on Earth who are receptive to them may, therefore, be led by them into wrong or inadvisable deeds. The humans who are influenced have no idea they are being coerced from another world when they make mistakes by following what they think is their own intuition. … Wars, you must know, do not kill a man; they only change him into an invisible enemy. Capital punishment does not get rid of a criminal, it only unleashes him in an unseen form to prey on the world in an even more harmful way.” James continues: “Being earthbound is the worst possible thing that can happen to one. It is truly a condition of hell and is so tragic that much effort is being spent from my side (the spirit world) to get the word to those on Earth who are in danger of dying without any awareness of their spiritual nature.” What is Creator’s perspective?

The example of a lost soul human spirit simply wandering about, believing it is experiencing a dream, is the most benign of consequences. Just as with humans being quite varied in their makeup, degree of divine alignment, and moral character, when they eventually pass on, they will be the same person but in spirit form. The many who are criminals will still have a criminal nature, a criminal bent to their thinking, and, in fact, people who are disheveled, disoriented, delusional, or functional sociopaths are the least likely to transition fully to the divine realm. So the domain of the lost soul spirits is truly one of darkness and a place of danger. Spirits can prey on one another and on the living. If they have a malevolent nature, they can cause great harm depending on their ability to manipulate the physical plane. It is a blessing they are vibrationally somewhat removed so they cannot pick up a weapon, but they have the wherewithal to perturb the bodily energy of living beings, potentially, as well as impulse dark thoughts and intentions, and this is what is being described by James in his account of what could be thought of as "spiritual lowlifes" and their potential for harming the living. There is a whole panorama of possibilities James does not describe because criminals in spirit form can be serial perpetrators of a kind of crime in tormenting the living with dark thoughts and, if persistent, this can grow in its influence through the accumulation of negative thought forms, a kind of energy projected by consciousness having an evil intent, and that will undermine the recipient eventually, if only to trigger anxiety and even a state of depression over time. Such thought forms can even give rise to physical illness because that negativity might trigger a revisiting of negative karmic trauma energies to pile on. So a lost soul human spirit attacking a living person constitutes a real threat to body, mind, and spirit of the living. They will sometimes join forces with the dark spirit meddlers, the fallen angelic cohort of Lucifer and his minions who are highly experienced from living for eons in a disconnected and malevolent state of being, and that partnership enables them to gang up on a living person to compound the injury. Such attacks can be quite savage in their fury and intensity and can be a major source of emotional discord. It can grow to a level that will tip the balance in making someone experience hallucinations and delusions so their own thinking becomes dark and misdirected towards evil ends and self-destruction, or can be projected on others in triggering criminal behavior such as harassment or physical violence. The severe mental illness exhibited by those with psychotic symptoms is a consequence of spirit possession and manipulation. So those in a desperate state mentally are a mirror image of a spirit cohort that is invisible to the eye but constitutes a mass of highly dysfunctional and disturbed entities looking for trouble, and an outlet for their savagery gained from a long-term existence focused on tormenting others. For the fallen angelic spirit meddlers, it is a life and death need to have a source of energy as they have become true parasites who can only exist by taking energy from other life forms in order to survive. Once they attach to the energy of a living person, they will torment them relentlessly in order to keep the energy coming, which they siphon off for themselves. Another way in which spirits are a danger to the living is because they are often commandeered by dark extraterrestrial lost soul spirits who are tasked with the agenda of manipulating human lost souls as well as the spirit meddlers as a kind of weapon to undermine human beings. That is the mechanism for creating the out-of-control terrorists, mass killers, and suicidal attackers that have a reckless disregard for their own lives while attacking total strangers, only to be killed themselves as well or take their own lives to avoid capture. Another way of looking at this, in the big picture sense, is to realize that level of evil malevolence is a measure of how out of divine alignment those spirits have become as examples of what happens when beings lose their way and distance themselves from the Almighty.