've told my conversion story so often that at times I've thought I'd choke if I told it again. However, after praying, "Lord, as long as it can do some good, I'll keep telling it," I realized that it does good-if for no one but myself, because it doesn't hurt for me to remember, again and again, how the Lord has worked in my life.

In 1979 I was 23 years old. I had just returned to Gainesville, Florida, after more than a year in Israel and Europe. Having had some amazing experiences, I came to believe in God, or at least in some supernatural transcendence-a radical shift for someone who had always believed that all reality, from dreams to collapsing stars, had only a naturalistic, materialistic explanation.

No longer-especially after being swept into the occult. I would lie on my bed when this strange tingling would roll up my body, and I'd feel as if I were hurtling through a wind tunnel. However frightening the experiences, I told myself that the next time it happened, I wouldn't fight it. Sure enough, one afternoon the sensation moved up my body and centered in my head, and suddenly I shot out of my body, went through the ceiling, and began floating in a gray diaphanous mist outside an apartment of two friends.

Now, please: I am an Adventist today; I understand today that there's no such thing as a separate immortal soul, but back then no one could have convinced me that this was anything other than my soul leaving my body.

I had a Bible back then and tried reading it, but I couldn't get past the talking snake. In contrast, after these experiences I thought that maybe in the occult, in spiritualism, was the truth I had always been seeking, so I was going to study it. On my way to the library I stopped at a health food store. When I mentioned to the owner where I was going (to the library) and why (to delve into the occult), he warned me about the devil (which was like warning me that Santa wouldn't come down the chimney if I were bad). Laughing him off, I nevertheless took a book he gave me.

I then went into the library, found a book about the occult, and sat down. After reading a bit, I went to put the book back on the shelf. As I walked through the library I had in one hand, for the first time in my life, a book on the occult; in my other hand I had, for the first time in my life, the book the owner of the health food store gave me.

Which book was it? The Great Controversy, of course.

I had, at that time, no inkling about the forces converging on me. Then a few days afterward, Christ converted me, and immediately those occult experiences stopped. Only later did I realize how precariously balanced on the edge I had been, having an occult book in one hand and The Great Controversy in the other-both for the first time ever!

Since then I've read about those who have "died" and come back to life, recounting the same kind of experiences I had, only I wasn't near dead. All these, I'm convinced, are supernatural hallucinations by Satan; none of us have ever left our bodies. It's all deception, and I shudder when I think how close I came to being swallowed up in it.

Satan, though, with his mind-bending deception, overplayed his hand on this once-hard-core naturalist. When we talk about the devil, we're not talking poetry, allegory, even theology; we're talking about a cunning supernatural entity with the power to control any mind not surrendered to Christ. I know, because I've been there.

Every time I recount this story, that point comes back to me. And, maybe, that's why the Lord has me tell it, again and again . . .

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Clifford Goldstein is editor of the Adult Sabbath School Bible Study Guide.