Stay humble, stay connected to your parish, and don’t trust your own spiritual experiences without checking them against your priest or spiritual father. That’s the short answer. The longer one requires understanding what the Orthodox Church means by spiritual deception in the first place.
The Fathers call it prelest in Slavonic or plani in Greek. It’s a spiritual illness where you accept something false about your relationship with God. Usually it’s rooted in pride. You might think you’re more spiritually advanced than you are. You might trust a vision or feeling that didn’t come from God. You might start believing you’ve got special insight that sets you apart from the regular life of the Church.
St. Ignatius Brianchaninov said something startling about this: we’re all in a state of spiritual deception to some degree because of the Fall. The greatest deception of all? Thinking you’re immune to it.
That should make us all pause.
The Real Danger
Here’s what makes prelest dangerous. It feels spiritual. A person caught in spiritual delusion doesn’t usually know it. They might be having what seem like profound prayer experiences, seeing lights, feeling spiritual sweetness. They might be convinced they’ve achieved some breakthrough. The problem isn’t that all religious experience is suspect. It’s that our fallen nature makes us terrible judges of our own spiritual state.
Pride sneaks in. We want to feel advanced. We want to believe we’re making progress. And the enemy of our souls is happy to provide false consolations that feed our ego while pulling us away from genuine repentance and humility.
The Fathers who lived in the desert and spent decades in prayer knew this territory well. They left us warnings. They also left us a map for staying on safe ground.
How the Church Protects Us
First thing: you need a spiritual father or mother. This isn’t optional for serious spiritual life. It’s medicine. When you submit your experiences and thoughts to someone who knows the Tradition and knows your soul, you’re protected. Your priest can serve this role, or he can help you find someone who can. The point is that you don’t go it alone.
Obedience undercuts the pride that feeds delusion. When you’re accountable to someone else, when you’re willing to hear “no, that’s not from God” or “slow down, you’re getting ahead of yourself,” you’ve got a safeguard most people lack.
Second: stay grounded in the sacramental life of the Church. Go to Liturgy. Go to confession regularly. Receive communion. These aren’t just nice practices for when you feel like it. They’re the normative means of grace and healing. The Church is a hospital, and the sacraments are how the medicine gets administered. People who drift into prelest often have one thing in common, they’ve isolated themselves from regular parish life. They’re off doing their own private spiritual thing.
I know folks here in Southeast Texas who work offshore two weeks at a time or pull night shifts at the plants. You can’t always make every service. That’s understood. But when you’re back, be back. Don’t let your spiritual life become a solo project you manage on your own terms.
Third: practice humility in prayer. The Jesus Prayer and other simple, patristic prayers are safe precisely because they’re humble. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” There’s no room for spiritual pride in that. You’re not asking for visions or special experiences. You’re asking for mercy.
If something unusual does happen in prayer, if you see something, feel something extraordinary, experience what seems like spiritual consolation, bring it to your priest immediately. Don’t treasure it up as your private spiritual trophy. Let it be tested. The Fathers teach us to be skeptical of such things, not because God doesn’t work in our lives, but because we’re so easily fooled.
What This Looks Like Practically
Keep the fasts as you’re able. Follow the prayer rule your priest gives you. Read Scripture, but read it in the Church, with the Fathers as your guides. Don’t go off interpreting things on your own and deciding you’ve discovered what nobody else has seen.
Stay in community. The person who thinks they’re too advanced for their parish, who looks down on the simple piety of the grandmother lighting candles or the guy who struggles to stay awake during the homily, that person is in danger. Real spiritual growth makes you more patient with others, not less.
Cultivate repentance as a daily habit. Not morbid self-hatred, but honest self-examination. Where did I fail today? Where did pride show up? Where was I impatient, unkind, judgmental? This kind of watchfulness keeps you grounded in reality. It’s hard to think you’re a great mystic when you’re confronting the fact that you snapped at your spouse over something trivial.
The Long Haul
Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Fr. Thomas Hopko both emphasized that Orthodox spiritual life is ecclesial. It happens in the Church, not apart from it. Your growth isn’t measured by the intensity of your prayer experiences but by whether you’re becoming more loving, more humble, more patient. Those are the real signs of grace.
This matters because many people coming into Orthodoxy from Protestant backgrounds are used to a more individualistic spirituality. You had your personal relationship with Jesus, your private devotional time, your own interpretation of Scripture. Orthodoxy asks you to surrender that autonomy. It asks you to trust that the Church knows better than you do, that the Tradition tested over centuries is more reliable than your current feelings.
That’s hard. But it’s also liberating. You don’t have to figure everything out yourself. You don’t have to achieve some spiritual breakthrough on your own steam. You just have to show up, be honest, stay humble, and let the Church do her work in you.
If you’re worried about spiritual deception, that’s actually a good sign. It means you’re taking the spiritual life seriously. Talk to your priest. Ask for guidance. Keep coming to confession and communion. Read the lives of the saints and notice how even they struggled, how they remained humble, how they submitted to their elders. That’s the path. It’s not flashy, but it’s safe. And in the spiritual life, safe is what we need.
