Will Spencer: From the New Age Movement to Christianity

Conversations That Matter

Subscribe

Download

Share

00

00:16

Welcome to the Conversations That Matter podcast, I'm your host, John Harris, for an exciting and interesting discussion today with someone who hasn't been on the program before, and that is

00:28

Will Spencer. Hey, Will, how are you doing? Doing great, John. Thanks for having me on. So I haven't,

00:34

I'm going to be honest, I'm not extremely familiar with you, but you, as Twitter, I mean, there's blessings and curses with Twitter, and one of the blessings was you made a comment on a recent video, which

00:46

I will not play for people, but if people want to know the image from the video I'm talking about, it's this one, with this girl who was, who went down to Peru and talked about,

00:56

I guess, trying, I think, hallucinogenic drugs and being with shamans and all this stuff. And anyway, you basically said that you've done all this stuff and it's a dead end, right?

01:05

Very much so, yes. And then I found out we had some mutual friends and you have a great podcast if people want to check that out.

01:12

It's called The Renaissance of Men. They can go to renofmen .com. And so I just thought it'd be interesting to talk to you about that because you sent me a list of all the things that you've done, like as far as,

01:26

I don't know if you call it new age or what may be new age healing modalities.

01:32

You got deep, like you got really, really deep into it. So I'm going to just kind of let you talk and share your story and then you're a

01:40

Christian, so how did you make your way out of that? How did the Lord work in your life so that you rejected the new age movement stuff and you embrace

01:49

Christianity? So, so why don't we start with this? So you have a public platform, you have a podcast, you've,

01:58

I know you've talked about masculinity related things, and I know you're talking more now about like this new age stuff. And this video becomes viral on Twitter that you decide to comment on.

02:09

It seemed to me like some people, like the people who would be more positive about what this young lady was saying or singing about, they think that there's this sort of like new perspective they have on life, like this awakening, this this understanding that's beyond, that transcends the understanding that we mortals normally have.

02:35

And and some people are giving testimonies to like, yeah, there's some legitimacy in this. So that's

02:41

I guess my first question is, did you find when you started down this track that there was something that drew you in that seemed legitimate, that seemed like it gave you some kind of a spiritual perspective?

02:52

It seemed that way. And I did receive what I thought was value. But from a

02:58

Christian perspective, it's valueless. But it doesn't look that way from inside.

03:03

So the people go to the new age world seeking two things, enlightenment or secret knowledge and betterment or healing.

03:13

Right. And those are the only two things to find in that world. So when you enter into the new age and different people are interested in different things, it tends to be the men are probably more interested in secret knowledge, mysticism, and the women are more interested in betterment and healing.

03:28

But it's it's not necessarily even in that regard. So the secret knowledge, secret knowledge has two halves.

03:37

There's Eastern mysticism, which is Hinduism, Buddhism, prana, qi, kundalini, yoga, all these terms that have forced their way into American consciousness in the past 60 or so years following the 1960s and the

03:50

Beatles, mostly. So there's Eastern mysticism. But on the flip side of that, there's

03:55

Western occultism. And Western occultism is things like tarot. Right. Kabbalah is a part of that.

04:01

Astrology, alchemy. Right. These are two halves of the same coin. And so usually what happens is by entering in,

04:09

Westerners will be attracted by the Eastern mysticism and end up in the Western occultism, which is explicitly

04:16

Luciferian and satanic, like explicitly anti -Christ. The Eastern mysticism doesn't come off that way at first.

04:22

Right. Because it's just this exotic foreign culture. It's appealing. It's different. There was this wholesale rejection of Western values that began with the boomers in the 1960s and in the 50s, too.

04:33

And then it propagated through their kids. So Generation X, millennials, et cetera. And so there's this appeal of the other in Eastern mysticism.

04:41

Now, just real quick, when you're looking at that woman, that photo from that video, she is wearing all kinds of indigenous kind of symbols and traditions, dreadlocks and stuff like that.

04:52

Yeah, exactly. So the stage that the New Age is at now is that it's kind of moved on from Eastern mysticism and now is kind of fetishizing indigenous traditions, again, as explicit rejection of Western culture.

05:05

So that's what you're looking at. You're looking at the rejection of Western culture appealing to Western kids, essentially.

05:11

So that's Eastern mysticism. Then it leads into Western occultism, which is satanic in nature, explicitly so in many ways.

05:18

Like you saw that at the statue in the sculpture in Iowa that got torn down by that man.

05:25

Praise God for him. Like you're starting to see it bubble up to the surface of American consciousness. So that's a secret knowledge.

05:30

We can talk about that first and then we can talk about the betterment if you want, because that shows up in yoga and stuff like that.

05:35

And it's a whole that's its own whole conversation. So is that what attracted you first? And when were you attracted?

05:42

How did that that movement from whatever you were before to Eastern and mystical stuff start?

05:49

Well, I grew up Jewish, liberal, atheist, Jewish. And so so Christianity, of course, was far outside of my realm, like any world that I grew up in.

05:59

Bar Mitzvahed, we celebrated Hanukkah. We didn't celebrate Christmas. We went to high holiday services. I did my birthright

06:04

Israel trip and we could talk about that is so. But I always had this interest in God. Like I've always

06:10

I've always been, I guess, innately curious. It's a gift. And the story that I've told is when

06:15

I was 12 years old getting ready for my bar mitzvah, I was with the rabbi and my

06:20

Torah portion was the Ten Commandments. And so this was assigned providentially. Like I didn't pick that.

06:26

You don't get to pick your Torah portion. It's just this is what's being read this week. And so what was being read the week of my bar mitzvah was the

06:31

Ten Commandments. So score. So I was talking with the rabbi at age 12, and the rabbi said something along the lines of the second of the second half of the

06:42

Ten Commandments are there. So you don't violate the first half of the Ten Commandments. And I remember being 12 years old. I was like, that's interesting.

06:48

But I wouldn't have thought that there was that logic to them in a way. This is my. And so I would say I identify that as the beginning of my interest in spirituality.

06:56

So a religion broadly. So then I went to college in the Bay Area. And this is in 1999, 2000, 2001.

07:04

You had this big rave scene at the time. There's this exploding Eastern mysticism kind of world.

07:11

And so that was how I got involved in Eastern mysticism. And then it wasn't until 2013, 2014 that I made a viral post on Facebook.

07:21

And someone reached out to me and said, are you interested in learning about Kabbalah? I'm like, sure. I've never explored that before.

07:28

And so I trained with an online they call themselves a mystery school. It was a correspondence course where I would get a series of lessons in the mail at the start of every month.

07:37

And I would work through one lesson per week. And so it was I got two years into a 15 year program.

07:42

I passed a couple of different exams. So this was like a daily a daily practice for me. So that's how I got introduced to Western occultism.

07:49

And God prevented me, I believe, from going any further with that because the later lessons were explicitly about making contact with higher beings is what they said.

07:57

And so naturally, we can imagine what those higher beings would have been and wouldn't have been. So did you you went down to the

08:04

Andes, though? That's what I think you had said. And you like spent time with shamans and so like your understanding of mystical religion is pretty broad, like you tried a lot of different things from a lot of different traditions.

08:17

How long were you in that world? So I would say that I was actively engaged in kind of new age practices for about 20 years at different levels of intensity.

08:30

So from Jungian Jungian psychology, which I took in college, Carl Jung is really bad, by the way.

08:35

I recommend the book The Other Worldview by Dr. Peter Jones. He has a whole section on Carl Jung. And he's like way worse than even

08:42

I knew. And so then I would be just living in the Bay Area in San Francisco. It's just what you do, right?

08:47

You go to a yoga class or you go see a transpersonal psychotherapist or you do sound healing.

08:53

It's just it's just part of the culture. And so that I spent a bunch of time overseas between 2016 and 2020. And that was a big part of my travels was to go experience different religions and cultures and spiritualities of the world.

09:05

And so, again, for my own individual search for God, I was going the directions that I knew about because, again,

09:12

Christianity was not it wasn't really part of my worldview. I didn't understand it. That came later. Yeah.

09:17

What were some of the experiences that you had? And I'm sure you don't want to share all of them, but like some things that stand out to you as like,

09:24

I don't know, something happened that made you think this is legitimate and kept you because I think you had mentioned it's like trying to chase the rainbow.

09:33

It's always in front of you, but you never quite reach it. Yeah, yeah, that's that's correct.

09:39

So so we'll talk about the secret knowledge first.

09:45

So the secret knowledge of that world is all about being able to manifest like reality with your mind.

09:52

Like you you by embodying the secret knowledge and mastering it, you have the ability to master reality and bend reality to your will.

10:00

This is what the movie The Matrix is essentially about. Like Neo becomes this master who can bend reality to his will.

10:05

That's literally what what the secret knowledge allegedly teaches. So along the way, there are various tests to try and do that.

10:12

And then things happen. And it's like, oh, wow, I was successful. It's like the secret. You know what I mean? Like maybe maybe there's no reality to it or maybe there's some supernatural reality, infernal, supernatural reality to it.

10:24

But it seems like it's working and it becomes very seductive. Right. So there's that. And then the the inner healing component is all about healing from trauma.

10:33

Right. How to work through trauma, how to release it, how to go through things in your childhood and feel relief about them.

10:40

Right. How to grieve. And there is value in that. But it doesn't actually make you a better person because it doesn't include the component of sin.

10:48

It's just this happened to me. I feel sad and mad about it. And now I feel less sad and bad about it. So like, congratulations,

10:54

I got past this little bit of victim victimhood. Like, no, it's like it doesn't teach people to become better people because it doesn't force them to confront their flaws.

11:02

So on one hand, I had this perception that I was making. I was manifesting reality in various ways, like nothing serious, but like it seemed like it was working and I'm feeling a sense of subjective relief in terms of my own inner relationship with my past.

11:18

So it seems like something's happening. But really, nothing really nothing's happening at all. And it's hard for me to imagine the world, the mindset that I was in at the time because I'm in such a different place now, it's actually strange to go back to that, that I that I believe that stuff, but I'm not

11:33

I'm absolutely not alone. Yeah, I mean, the list you sent me, I don't even know how to pronounce some of these words like I who's got

11:42

I was that's a very popular one right now, actually. Yeah, I see. So that's just how much I know about this stuff.

11:49

There's I think there's like a bunch of drugs here. And then you also talk about like, like what's family constellation therapy?

11:56

I saw that when I was like, what is that? So family constellation therapy is it's a way of understanding the your family and how the different hang ups and flaws of your family influenced you as a as a person.

12:15

So who was your mother? Who was your father? Who are your grandparents? Who are your cousins? And how do you orient yourself in the constellation of these individuals and how do they impact you and essentially like cause you pain and generate the circumstances of your life that you were out of control of?

12:31

OK, all right. So some of this stuff is like semi psychological. And these would be tools,

12:37

I guess, used by some psychologists in the West. Yes. And maybe more so. I mean, it shows how much

12:43

I know. I still kind of associate psychologists with more of like a hard science like they're they're trying to figure out what's going on with someone using certain models and theories that have been tested and that kind of thing.

12:57

But, you know, I could be wrong. Maybe it is more just Eastern now. Yeah, that's that's

13:03

Carl Jung's influence. So the image. Yeah. The image that most people have of psychology today is

13:08

Freudian, right? Maybe Adler or cognitive behavioral therapy, things like that.

13:14

That's a more we'll call it mechanistic kind of version of. Yeah, exactly. Versus Carl Jung and Stanislav Grof, who started transpersonal psychology, which is purely mystical.

13:25

You can read Jung's Red Book or you can read Stanislav Grof and you can see just how driven by Eastern mysticism and mystical all as one concepts their psychology is.

13:35

Right. And that's a lot of psychology today. Not to get on the rabbit show, but isn't Jordan Peterson a Jungian? Yep.

13:41

Yeah. Very much. That's kind of a problem, right? It is. Yeah. I was just I just saw his live show here in Phoenix two weeks ago.

13:50

And so I was on Cultish with Jeremiah Roberts and we talked about it. But, you know, he he has some good personal growth stuff to say for men and for women, too.

14:01

But his interpretations of of the Bible are viewed through a Jungian lens.

14:07

And so in twenty seventeen, when he was when he was not a no name professor, but not of high profile, it was fun to watch his

14:16

Genesis lectures and to see him shine a new light for a small audience on Cain and Abel.

14:22

But now, as he's this global leading public intellectual to hear him do it, it hits very different.

14:31

Gotcha. OK, so, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff here that I could probably ask you about.

14:37

But yeah, and I don't even know. I do want to ask you about some of it, please. The astrology.

14:43

So so so explain that aspect of this whole thing to me, because some of these seem like they're like taking drugs is like looking into yourself.

14:51

Right. Like you're I think you're trying to figure out like the truth is within you somewhere and you need to figure it out and you need these drugs to like look in.

15:00

Yes. But something like astrology is looking out like you're you're not looking into yourself. You're looking at the cosmos and trying to figure out,

15:09

I guess, where you fit in, which I think for Christians, that's probably more attractive in a way that like there at least is a sense of like there's a plan.

15:17

There's there's transcendence. I mean, we even have Bible verses about that that I think are taken out of context, but about how

15:25

God gave us signs for seasons and the stars, the moon, the sun.

15:34

And so what's the significance of that in the New Age world? When they look at the stars, are they seeing like a deterministic plan of some kind by God or like what is it they're doing?

15:45

Mm hmm. Yeah. So so astrology at the at the highest level is and this is not often talked about.

15:55

It's it's an intuitive art. So you give someone your birth time and your birth place. Right. And then they get a chart, which is a circle that shows the position of all the planets and stuff like that.

16:05

And so they look at that and then supposedly they're able to look at various other times in the past when planets planets and stars like planets lined up in a particular way.

16:16

Oh, and this must have happened on like April 31st, you know, 2019, because if you run it back, they lined up in this particular way.

16:23

Did something big happen around that time? OK. And so then they run it forward and they can see other alignments. Right.

16:28

And they can say, well, something big will probably happen in the future, that it's all foreordained written in the stars, right.

16:34

Which is which are unique at your time and place and moment of birth. Like there's no you know, there's no two people that are born in precisely the same moment, the same time, except for twins.

16:45

And I'd be very interested to know how that works with twins. But that's a whole other conversation. So what people are turned to astrology for is they want to know that the events of their lives have meaning.

16:55

They want to know that this thing that happened in the past is tied to this thing that happened in the future and that there's a narrative to my life and that I'm going somewhere.

17:05

That's the comfort. Right. And that these things have significance again, in a godless world, in a in a in a

17:12

God of the Bible less kind of world. It's reassuring. But what they don't tell you is that it's not a mathematical calculation.

17:19

The astrologer is not looking at it and running numbers and just spitting out a result. Skilled astrologers are intuitives.

17:26

And I believe that they have they called friendly spirits, right, not so friendly, that are giving them information from a higher plane of reality that makes the astrologer appear like a lower plane of reality that makes the astrologer appear like they have wisdom that they're deriving from the chart, when in fact they're just hearing messages from these from these spirits.

17:46

It's not different from other forms of spiritism. Like, you know, I'm going to communicate with the dead and all that you're doing is communicating with a demon, you know, that was able to look back at something and pull some information out.

17:57

And so it's like, oh, I'm talking to my mom or my dad or whatever. It's the same thing. But they leave out the part that there's an intuitive component to it.

18:05

And so what you're being given, you may be given something true, but the truth is is wrapped around a very poisonous lie and the lie is both.

18:14

You can imagine that if someone tells you something true about your past, you're like that there's no way they could know.

18:20

You may listen to what they have to say about what you should do for your future. And if it's being guided by a demon on some level, they're probably not going to send you to do something that's ultimately in your interest.

18:30

And that's the danger of astrology. So give me like an example for maybe from your life. Like what was something when you got into astrology that you saw maybe like a date correlated?

18:38

And what does it mean for you significantly? Yeah, so there was an astrologer

18:45

I talked to. I'm going to I'm going to guess on dates. It was like twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen.

18:52

And he was looking back at my chart and he was like, well, was the dates of like January twenty one, twenty sixteen significant to you somewhere around there?

19:01

I'm like, you know, it's like, yeah, it's like, what were you looking into travel or something at the time?

19:07

And I was like, yeah, actually, that's the day that I bought my plane ticket to fly down to South America. You know, we could break up with a girlfriend.

19:13

And like, you know, that was when I finally bought the ticket. And so I heard that it was like, oh, my gosh, travel. And how did he how did he know?

19:19

Like I had the recording of it. So it seemed very credible, like of all things to say. And of the date in particular, it seemed very, very credible.

19:27

How did he get that information? I don't know. But I wouldn't say that like the advice that he gave me following it was

19:33

I mean, to go back and listen probably wasn't awesome, but it certainly lent him credibility, you know, in various ways.

19:41

OK, yeah, no, that's interesting. You just said something I think you hadn't said before, which is that demons were behind this.

19:47

Yeah, I try to avoid that word. It tends to turn it tends to switch off people's brains. Well, you're it's a

19:52

Christian podcast. So, you know, the audience still. Yeah, it's not really hopefully believes in demons.

20:00

But, you know, I would assume that this applies to a lot of the things that you were doing, like the past life regression, hypnotherapy and EMDR and all this stuff.

20:10

Do you think that it's all essentially demonic? Probably. Yeah. I mean,

20:16

EMDR is a bit different. EMDR is EMDR is like it's it's it's a form of hypnosis almost.

20:26

It's probably not doing it justice, but it's just it's someone asking you questions. About an experience that's difficult.

20:32

So there's no there doesn't need to be any supernatural component to it. It felt very mechanical. But certainly of the list that I sent you, a great majority of those probably are demonic.

20:41

Like ayahuasca is a classic example in their own literature. And everyone listening who will hear about ayahuasca very soon who has heard about it, what you're doing when you drink this psychedelic brew is you are consenting to commune with a with a spirit.

20:54

They call it the plant spirit. Grandmother ayahuasca, who then works on your, quote, energy body to heal you and give you secret knowledge.

21:02

And so they refer to this as a conscious entity, a plant spirit, multiple plant spirits.

21:08

And by drinking this brew, you're able and that's the consent to do that. And what is that? That I guarantee you that grandmother, grandmother ayahuasca, whoever she or it is, isn't preaching the gospel.

21:20

Right. So, yeah. So and that's and that's that's how you know. So, OK, so so this reminds me of like the whole like First John or is it

21:33

First John test the spirit, see if they were from God, right? So this is kind of like as Christians interact with these ideas, what they have to do to figure out whether it's legitimate or not, so like,

21:45

I don't know, just pick one out of the hat. I don't think what I don't know any about Philip Shepard embodiment.

21:53

I don't know who Philip Shepard is, but so if let's say a Christian is confronted with whatever this is, you'll have to explain it.

22:01

How would they test the spirits? Right, so so then the question with with Philip Shepard embodiment embodiment is one of those things that that there's a way in which we can get in touch, this is the argument, the same argument as yoga.

22:17

All I'm doing is just stretching. Right. It's fine. Right. The problem with yoga is that the spectrum of practices of yoga, this is yoga will be the easiest one for people to kind of tie on rather than Philip Shepard, because everyone kind of knows like there are thirty five million yoga practitioners in America, right?

22:38

So so with yoga, there's a spectrum like you. OK, sure. You can do you can go to like the local

22:45

YMCA or 24 hour fitness and just do a bunch of poses. And there's not a single religious component. You don't chant om nothing.

22:52

They never even tell you that these poses have Hindu names. Right. So it's completely stripped away of all possible religious connotations.

23:00

Right. And so like, is that OK? Well, I mean, you can go to Yoga Basics dot com and you can see that these poses do have names of Hindu deities, but you may not know that at the moment.

23:09

Right. But then the spectrum, that's just the very tail end of it. All forms of yoga go in stages of of gray to what we would consider explicitly religious practice, meaning like Bikram yoga with all these contortionistic practices in a hot room with a

23:27

Shiva statue chanting om. You are there therefore now participating in a religious ritual.

23:33

Right. And so the vast majority of yoga lives on the spectrum between there. Is there a Shiva statue?

23:39

Are you doing corpse pose at the end? Are you chanting om? Right. As you start introducing these elements that work their way in, you begin moving away from the purely, we'll call it mechanical versions of yoga.

23:51

There's very little bits of that. And so yoga, the word itself means union or yoke with the divine become one with the divine.

23:59

That is the meaning of the word. And so even there, you can't separate it from the religious practice.

24:04

Sorry, I just had some. Yeah. You're good. Yeah. Would you tell Christians like because there's

24:10

Christian yoga, I've seen this, right? I've heard of it. You've heard. Yeah. OK, so I've seen at least advertisements.

24:16

I've never been in a room doing it, but where they're, I would assume, just stretching.

24:22

I hope like, would you say Christians stay away from that?

24:28

Like, it's just opening the door to a world you don't want to enter or I mean, are people just slapping the label yoga on things that really aren't.

24:37

Aren't fully yoga. Yeah. So I mean, how how uncomfortable do you want me to make your listeners know?

24:45

You could say no yoga. I'm fine with that. Well, I mean, like I can I can explain to you who yoga is designed to appeal to.

24:55

Right. And why it's like it's middle class moms.

25:00

Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah. And so the movie, excuse me, the movie

25:07

Eat, Pray, Love was was very popular in the United States. Now, that doesn't mean that middle class

25:13

Christian moms were watching that movie, but it portrayed yoga as this very sensual, you know, kind of liberating, freeing thing from all the strictures of being a wife and a mother and all the responsibilities.

25:26

And I just want to be free. That's what that movie was about. And so yoga as a practice has been playing that role in American culture since the 1960s when it was introduced.

25:38

It was part of the sexual revolution. A big part of the sexual revolution was progressive new age

25:44

Eastern spirituality. Right. It was woven right in there as a rejection of Western Christian values.

25:51

And so you can't just take that and you can't, you know, well, we're just going to scrape off all the Hindu stuff and we're going to slap some

25:58

Christian labels on it and Bob's your uncle. But that's not that's not how that works. There's a heart posture component to like, why are you engaging in these practices?

26:06

What is it you're hoping to get from them? And the Christian yoga sites that I've seen are targeted to exactly the same people.

26:14

That doesn't mean you can't stretch and reach down and touch your toes. Doesn't mean you can't reach up and try and touch the ceiling and stretch your arms out to the side.

26:21

Stretching was around long before yoga was right. Like we can just do that. But you can't just take this

26:27

Eastern mystical practices practice, which is what it is, and strip away any trappings of spirituality and call it

26:34

Christian, like people say meat sacrifice to idols. And I roll my eyes at that because it's not that simple.

26:41

Yeah, I mean, I guess so. So motive would play a part in this. Like, are you trying to release or develop a kudalini force?

26:49

That's part of it. Also, yeah, at the extreme end. Oh, yeah, I mean, I obviously

26:54

I don't know. I remember in gym class, you know, there was one day that they wanted to do a yoga thing.

27:01

And I think I just, like, tried to take a nap. It was it wasn't much. They just played some homes and you laid there and we're supposed to, like,

27:09

I guess do different poses, but but I didn't really participate in that.

27:15

And I guess I was there. And I'm wondering, I don't know if I should have like, should I have been there? Like now now you have me second guessing it a bit like you're probably

27:23

OK being in the room because you're in school like you don't have much of a choice. But, you know, the it's not the end of the world.

27:29

You know what I mean? Like, but this is the I'm sorry I don't mean to cut you off. No, I really wasn't saying anything other than that.

27:35

Just just spitballing about like like where the line is. Is it the motivation? Is it because of the labels that are on these things?

27:42

Is it the actual movements themselves? Like it's not just stretching, but it's also like with these added elements, because I don't really know all the yoga poses, but that are, you know, there's really not a health benefit, but it's a spiritual thing like or all of the above.

27:58

The question itself is is what conceals the problem, like because it's almost and you don't mean it this way.

28:04

But the question is, the question is, is a little bit like, well, can I just drink just a little bit of water down poison?

28:12

How much poison is enough? Right. And this is the thing is that the world is very much with us.

28:17

Right. These these are not like I, I, I, these practices go to Google and you can

28:25

Google Google's graph where you can see the usage of words over time, right, and you can search for the word yoga.

28:32

And what you will see is that there is no use in Google's records of language going back 100 years until the 1960s, and then it starts escalating the 1960s and it explodes in the 70s.

28:43

These are not you know, these are not harmless practices that just showed up one day. These were forced onto American Western consciousness explicitly to undermine the

28:53

Christian faith. Right. And you can go back and you can look at the Theosophical Society, Madame Blavatsky, the world parliament,

29:00

Chicago World Parliament of Religions in 1893, and you can see every religion represented there except biblical

29:05

Orthodox Christianity. This was an active attempt to subvert Christianity in the West.

29:11

And so when people ask me, like, well, and I don't mean you, how much yoga can I do? Like, can I just check a little bit of astrology?

29:18

Can I do just a little bit? There you go. Yeah, see? Right. So like this is not this is not a coincidence.

29:25

This is not an accident. This is orchestrated. And you can look at the UN and you can see the

29:30

UN Project for Oneness by Robert Mueller, and you can see that all of these things, you know, they've been forced onto American public consciousness exactly in line with the decline of Western Christianity, of biblical

29:42

Christianity inside the United States. This is the transition, as Aaron Ren says, from positive world to neutral world to negative world.

29:50

And so when Christians are asking, but I like my yoga, I'm sorry. Like, go like it, but don't call it

29:55

Christian. Yeah, no, no, that's I'm totally in agreement with you there. So for people who are wondering, it took me a minute to try to figure out how to get this on the screen.

30:04

But I do have it on the screen. Is this the list you sent me of all the different things that you you've participated in before becoming a

30:12

Christian? And I want to get to that soon to your conversion. But you meant you open another can of worms. I have to ask you about now.

30:18

So let's go. I don't know if you would apply it to all of these practices, but the New Age stuff in general, you just stated that the or at least you alluded to the idea that this was like a top down kind of move, like like you said, there is a theosophy society.

30:34

And I think King Charles is that's his philosophy, right? Yep. And and so these guys, these powerful people.

30:43

Essentially planned to subvert Christianity through introducing this stuff, do you think like I'd be curious about the mechanism that how that happened, if you think that's how it happened, or do you think that was in tandem with just,

30:57

I don't know, globalization and just people from different and ethnic backgrounds interacting and traveling and figuring stuff out?

31:07

I mean, are the Beatles, you know, like how do you think this actually became popularized?

31:14

Yeah. So there are a number of there are a number of outstanding books about it. I'm working on one right now.

31:19

So this is the book Game of Gods by Karl Teichrib. And so I'm reading this right now.

31:25

This is a big doorstop size book, 550 pages, extensively footnoted.

31:31

Yeah. So so he's been an on the ground researcher for for about 30 years, attending festivals and attending

31:38

U .N. meetings and political gatherings where an agenda of oneness, as is the word that's used, is explicitly promoted.

31:47

We are all one. The Earth is all one. You know, Mother Earth, like these kind of these kind of ideas.

31:52

He's been on the ground doing this for this work for 30 years. He picked it up in the 90s. But this goes all the way back to the 1960s and in fact, also the 1950s.

32:01

Right. And so there's another book I have in the back called Libido Dominandi by Michael Jones. He's a he's a controversial professor, but this is one of his first works that he wrote in the mid 90s.

32:09

And this is this is the history of the sexual revolution. And so you can see the seeds of that going all the way back to the

32:14

French Revolution, essentially. Right. So there have been consistent themes working for centuries to try and undermine

32:21

Western biblical biblical Christianity. There's a book, American. Sorry about my voice.

32:27

There's a book, American Veda by I can't remember the author's name, Philip something. He talks about the

32:34

Hinduization of American religion. And then there's a couple a couple others that I have in mind. There have been a lot of books that have been written about this phenomenon as being orchestrated.

32:43

You can look at Timothy Leary, funded by the CIA. Right. You can look at Operation Midnight Climax, which were some of the first LSD experiments done on the population.

32:52

So this this has been as uncomfortable as it is to say this has been orchestrated. Yes. Immigration, of course, is a part of that.

32:59

Like people moving, traveling across the country. But like you look at the Beatles and you look at, like, you know, the influence that they had, you know, and there are all sorts of channels about what was actually going on behind the scenes with the

33:09

Beatles. Like and they were such a force. They went to go meet Maharishi Maharishi Yogi, the inventor of what's called transcendental meditation or TM.

33:19

Right. And so they began doing that. And then that was brought over to the United States in force. At the same time as you have

33:25

Woodstock, at the same time as you have all these different these cultural things going on with music, a weird scenes inside the canyon.

33:31

That's another one by Dr. Dave, not doctor, but Dave McGowan that talks about some of the strange military intelligence stuff that was going on with some of the early rock stars in the 60s.

33:43

This has been extensively. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's so many books, so many Christian books as well about the new age, particularly in the 80s.

33:50

So I live about, I don't know, an hour maybe from Woodstock and about 30 minutes from Timothy Leary's house.

33:58

There's a lot of, as someone put it once, there's a lot of Zen in this area. And and it is interesting to me, like what you said at the beginning is true, that the

34:08

Eastern stuff kind of mixes with like witchcraft and these indigenous like it's just pretty much everything that rejects

34:14

Christianity explicitly lives together and they're fine with each other.

34:22

You get it. Yeah. I mean, I could there's the Omega Institute, which is not far from where I am. And the chapel is sacred mirrors.

34:28

I'm realizing all these things now. These are all new age stuff. Oh, my goodness. You're in danger. Get out. Yeah, I need to get out.

34:33

I really do. But you mentioned Timothy Leary, though, and I was just curious. So the CIA was funding him because I thought he was just kind of a professor.

34:42

It was the college professor who just said to tune in and drop out or something. And yeah, he was involved with the

34:48

CIA. So the CIA wanted him to promote drugs. Yeah. So was Gloria Steinem. See, I never heard that.

34:54

That's that's interesting. I thought he was kind of like against the government. That's what you always think is these guys were like against the machine.

35:00

But you're saying actually the machine was kind of like controlling him. Yeah. So so what the interest of the machine, right, is, is of course, it's you can be angry and shake your fist at the at the military industrial complex.

35:13

Right. As Truman, I think, described or Eisenhower, one of those two. But ultimately, yeah, what the machine ultimately wants is is the subversion of any values that might stand in its way.

35:27

Right. That has the that has the notion that there is a God sovereign over government. That's the real threat.

35:33

The real threat to government is God. And so if you can get a bunch of people mad about the war and ultimately they can't do anything about it because their senators and congressmen are going to vote for it regardless so they can stage or gin things up in the media or stage events to direct public consciousness, they can and they do do that.

35:52

But what you really don't want is you really don't want strong Christian families, right, productive households saying, no,

35:59

God is sovereign over the state. That's what the state doesn't want. And so naturally, the CIA, which is trying to remove remove any impediments to some of the kind of tyranny that we're experiencing today, is not going to want especially strong Christian fathers and husbands and households standing in its way.

36:16

Faithful Christian and churches as well. So naturally, the CIA would have interest in propagating these mind altering chemicals and practices, particularly to to rebellious baby boomers who had had the notion of the teenager just invented for them.

36:31

Right. And they have cars and they have all this American prosperity coming out of the 1950s. Parents giving their kids a good life.

36:38

Right. And you have this you have all this riches and sloshing around inside the riches. You have all these very subversive ideas that took root in the 50s and the 60s.

36:47

And so now we're living on the tail end of that. You think it was really that thought out?

36:52

It seems it's it's definitely it sounds conspiratorial, right? Like the government is like we'll undermine the household, we'll undermine people who want to,

37:02

I guess, oppose us because they believe in God by introducing this stuff. I mean, I believe

37:07

I can believe it. After 2020, there's I can believe almost anything. But exactly. Well, the interest of the state in undermining and undermining religion is is not new to this era.

37:20

Right. It's it's been happening forever. Right. That was the French Revolution was an explicit attempt in killing the king to kill

37:28

God's representative on Earth. That's what I think was Jean -Paul Sartre wrote. Like, that's what they were trying to do.

37:34

And so communism, same the first one of the communists, communists do is they take out religion, anything, any dictator around the world.

37:41

The first thing they do is they eliminate any religious impulse to them being set up as gods. That's not new.

37:47

But in America, because of because we have what we might call like a distributed government, it's very difficult to subvert all of a distributed government.

37:55

We're at the federal, local, state and local level all at once. So what do you have to do? Well, you can't really come in over the top.

38:01

You have to get in under the ground. And when everyone's, you know, intoxicated essentially on wealth, on prosperity, post -war prosperity, people are going to take their eyes they're going to take their eyes off the ball.

38:12

There's TV. We do not understand just how powerful a medium television is because we grew up with it.

38:20

But there was a moment in time where people having media that they could consume privately in their own homes.

38:25

It was huge. People used to go to movie theaters or used to get like little, you know, record players like records.

38:32

Right. And they wouldn't you couldn't play a record in the car. But then suddenly in the 50s and 60s, you had movie theaters.

38:37

Right. And then you had television where you can consume media privately and then you have the radio in your car and so you're consuming media privately.

38:44

And so that was an enormous shift that we just live with every day and it doesn't take a lot to start inserting messages like go listen to all the music of the 1960s.

38:53

There's nothing in there about family fatherhood. It's all about freedom and rebellion and all that stuff. It's great music, but it doesn't take a lot to shift the values of people.

39:02

And whether it was intentional, 100 percent of it, or whether like it was the cultural zeitgeist that no one pushed back on, that there was no spine to push back from, we're still in the same place.

39:13

I think it's both. Yeah. Yeah. So it's all bad. Throw it all out. And I don't know, maybe we should go to the

39:20

Andes. You know, not with the shaman, but just a little community. So no, in all seriousness, though, like it's true, like this could be like the black pill some people take when they realize, like so many things that they took for granted that they thought were harmless that that just, you know, they didn't think affected them.

39:43

Actually, it turns out they affected them in deep ways and and sometimes damaging ways. So I do want to get to your testimony before we do it, though.

39:51

Is there anything else on this list? I mean, is there anything you want to talk about, any experiences that stand out that you think would be important to warn people about, maybe who who might

40:02

I don't know if there's any that are popular for Christians to get attracted to. I think yoga is probably the big one.

40:08

Yeah. So I want to talk about I want to talk about two things. I want to talk about meditation. That's the going of a person, a 10 day retreat, which is very popular around the world.

40:19

And then also talk about psychotherapy, psychedelics we've covered. So here here's the thing.

40:24

So you can look at the list. I was that's a very popular one. Watch you, my San Pedro cactus. That's a that's a similar psychedelic made again, made from a cactus.

40:34

I was made from a vine. Bufo Alvarez is the venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. That's probably the most intense new age, quote unquote, sacrament that you can do.

40:43

I didn't know that at the time. There have actually been whole books written about it that I've discovered recently. Five.

40:48

Yeah, yeah. So so but the thing that Christians will be most likely to encounter will probably be psychotherapy and meditation.

40:57

So let's talk about meditation. So meditation from a new age

41:02

Eastern perspective is empty your mind to experience oneness, right? There's all kinds of ways to do it.

41:08

The whole the whole idea is that you empty your mind of your own consciousness, of your own discernment, of your own ability to make distinctions between things and you experience the oneness of all things.

41:18

That's Eastern meditation. That's really bad. Don't do that. Right. Mindfulness meditation was very popular in the

41:24

American workforce about 10 or so years ago. Right. And it was based on these kind of ideas that if we can all just realize that we're one, right, then we're all going to get along better and work better in teams as a company.

41:35

That's what that's based on. So all is not one. Right. If as soon as you start saying all is one, you start saying, well, are men and women one?

41:43

And so men can become women and women can become men. That's what that leads to. From a Christian perspective, meditation is meant to meditate on the word of God.

41:51

So we don't empty our mind. We fill it with God's word instead of emptying it. So pick a scripture verse and contemplate it.

41:58

A better word is contemplation. Contemplate it deeply as a way of focusing your attention on God's word and his teachings to us or to you.

42:06

And that's that's a Christian version of meditation that I recommend much, much, much more highly. Yeah.

42:12

What about when Christians hear that meditation, like there's scientific studies that have proven that they've scanned brainwaves and it's good for you.

42:22

And it turns out it helps reduce stress and this kind of thing. Is there legitimacy to any of that? Yeah, so this is this is was always this is actually documented.

42:33

I'm not sure which book it was in. I think it was in Peter Jones's book, The Other Worldview, that, oh, no, there was a there's a video on YouTube.

42:40

I'll find it and send it to you. But the gurus of the East realized that if they wanted to sell their practices in many sense,

42:47

I mean, sell like literally like financially, that the way to appeal to Americans was to frame it in terms of science and health benefits, that that was something that appealed to us uniquely as people.

42:59

And so you see a lot of these practices being sold like, oh, it's really good for you. It's really it's really healthy. Right. And so that is when we're talking about, oh, we never got to the conversation in the beginning.

43:09

I talked about enlightenment and betterment. All right. Right. So this is the betterment component. Right. So like the betterment component of health and healing, you may experience some sort of benefits to your health and well -being or physical body.

43:24

Yes, I'm more flexible from all the doing of yoga. Yes, I'm I'm I'm I'm less stressed now that I'm meditating.

43:31

But then the question comes in, at what cost to your theology? What is what are these practices teaching you?

43:38

Oh, maybe all truth isn't in the Bible. And that's how they get you. Right.

43:43

Oh, maybe. Well, this this scientist is talking about this meditation and that's not in the Bible. So maybe science is an authority.

43:50

So, oh, these yoga poses like I just I'm so flexible, but there's no physical training is just of some value.

43:56

Maybe maybe Christianity doesn't value training. So maybe there's truth outside the Bible. That's the hook.

44:02

Right. And so, yeah, you might experience some subjective health benefits, and the big reason is because I believe

44:07

Christendom over the past 60 years has had a really terrible relationship with the body, with the body, with the earth, with sexuality, right.

44:15

And with and with with health and nutrition. And so it's abdicated on all of these questions.

44:21

And so people have gone looking elsewhere for the answers because these questions are not addressed in churches.

44:26

And so what they find is they find like, oh, yeah, here, come have this little bit of wellness stuff. There's just a little bit of spiritual poison in there.

44:33

And then over time, you don't pick up on it. And you become kind of like desensitized to it. And before too long, you're going from the 24 hour fitness yoga class.

44:41

You're in the Beakram class. Right. And then you're in then you you're outside the faith essentially at that point.

44:47

So and so so when you say people hook on to these scientific studies, yeah, you can engage in these practices.

44:54

But are you aware of the worldview that's behind them and would you not find more peace and well -being in prayer and confession of sin?

45:03

We could talk about that. That was a huge one for me in the confession of sin and the relieving of your conscience.

45:09

Are you stressed because like work is really bothering you? Maybe. Or is there unconfessed sin that you're holding on to that you need to go confess that?

45:17

And that's what our culture does not deal with. And people really need to hear like like someone could say, oh, alcohol numbs you and makes the pain better, too.

45:26

Like it helps. But obviously we know that that's medicating yourself, quote unquote, with alcohol over the long term is going to cause lasting issues and even in the short term, like there's a much better alternatives that don't leave you with a guilty conscience and that kind of thing.

45:45

So it seems like it's similar to that. It's interesting you talk about Christians not being good in this area because I wondered that, too.

45:54

I haven't delved into it, but there was a little controversy maybe like, I don't know, five months ago. I don't know if you saw this on X, formerly

46:01

Twitter. There was a whole thing about it. It was so silly, but it maybe sort of revealed something.

46:08

There was all these younger guys posting like AI generated images of really strong church fathers.

46:15

You remember this? Of course. And then there was some guys, generally older guys who were just chiding them about how they need to realize what real manliness is and it's godliness.

46:26

And it's not really it's not about strength. And and I just thought the whole thing was silly because, of course, being a man is like that's one of the main things that makes men men is like they're stronger than women.

46:37

And you look at a lot of the even popular preachers and you can tell they spend a whole lot of time in their study and not a whole lot of time doing actual work physically.

46:48

And there just does seem to be something wrong with that. And I don't know why this is such a rabbit trail.

46:53

But I really just don't know why that's the case, like how we got there and how it's just so stupid that Eastern religion swoops in to kind of fill that void where Christians.

47:08

I mean, if you went back, I think you said 60 years. So if you went back to like 100 years ago, I'm sure that wouldn't have been like as big of a draw because I think

47:16

Christians probably were more fit and were active in that kind of thing. So I don't know if you have any follow up thoughts on that.

47:21

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think a big a big part of it is that I think where to start.

47:30

Cheap plastic fiat food has been sold to the American public since since the 1950s and 1960s.

47:37

So fast food is just a manifestation of it. You can go to the supermarket, you're getting a lot of processed stuff.

47:43

And Americans have generationally enjoyed eating. Prosperity leads to eating.

47:49

It has led to gluttony. It has led to very high BMI, has led to medication. You know, all these different things that people just kind of accept as normal.

47:57

And when you point out to people that like, hey, you know, that 50 percent body fat, that's not good.

48:03

You shouldn't have done that. They get really offended. Like, how dare you? Because in America are three every.

48:09

OK, so I've done a lot of travel around the world. That part of the New Age stuff was that was what I was doing. Every country has its own set of taboos.

48:16

Right. So so, for example, in China, the taboo, the cultural taboos, the things you're not supposed to mention in polite company, they call them the three

48:23

Ts Taiwan, Tibet and Tiananmen. Right. Those are the things you're not supposed to talk about in polite company.

48:29

Right. Interesting. In America. Right. And they're they're relative. In America, our taboos are money.

48:36

Like you don't ask someone how much they make for a living. Like in Europe, that is not the case. I've had people walk up to me and say, so how much do you make?

48:42

I was like, oh, my gosh, are we going to fight now? Right. It's just a cultural taboo. Oh, I don't know that. Cool. Oh, yeah.

48:47

It was very traveling. It's like, oh, so how much did you make in your job? Like who are you?

48:54

So it took me a second. He had German accent. So some sort of like German, maybe Austrian. So money, race, race is a very difficult thing to talk about and weight.

49:04

We do not talk about weight in America. Now, that's not true in places like Asia. If you've ever met anybody who has like an immigrant

49:12

Asian, like whether it be Vietnamese, Chinese, et cetera, like they come to America and they say, oh, you look like you've put on weight.

49:20

Right. They'll just say that. And it's so shocking because one of my friends, her parents were were

49:25

Thai. And so that when they said that, oh, you look like put on weight. They're like, oh, my gosh. Like and so it's it's a it's a it's culturally relative.

49:33

But talking about weight feels like a moral absolute in America because the taboo is that deep, but it's culturally relative.

49:41

So when you point out to people, hey, you're overweight, that's the polite term. You're fat is another one.

49:46

They get very upset, right, because it's a cultural taboo and everyone can see it.

49:52

Everyone knows it's happening. It's not hidden. It's the sin that you're carrying. And a lot of people do not want to be convicted of their sin.

49:59

And so when you have these young men on Twitter, on X, that are posting these images of church fathers who, yes, of course, it's comic book kind of inflated, you know,

50:08

AI, like big balloon muscles, but saying that, like, hey, as men, God designed us to be strong.

50:14

He designed us to be robust and fit and capable. And we have gotten away from that.

50:19

And we should celebrate the opposite. A lot of people feel convicted of their own sin for decades.

50:25

And it's like, oh, no, that's that's don't do that. You shouldn't do that. That's legalistic.

50:30

There's a lot of that when the reality is, this is the way that America has been living.

50:36

The world has been very much with us. We've been very modernized, very comfortable, very, very comfortable.

50:42

And and this is just a part of it. And when you show people like, yeah, we have to fix that, people react.

50:49

And because Christianity is abdicated on these questions in the in the lieu of the postwar prosperity that we've been enjoying.

50:56

Yeah, well, I guess it's encouraging that there's some younger guys kind of getting back to this and so that's a bonus.

51:03

That's good. So, yeah, meditation. And what was the other one you want to talk about?

51:08

Another one, psychotherapy, like a therapy. OK, so that's the other one Christians could be attracted to. Yes. So psychotherapy is mostly transpersonal, mostly young and now and transpersonal and probably all psychotherapy.

51:21

You go searching for truth. You said it earlier. You go searching for truth inside yourself.

51:27

The answers to all of your questions are within within you. Right. And so. But the one thing that can't be the answer is your sin.

51:37

It can't be because you did anything wrong. It's because something wrong was done to you and you reacted to something that was done wrong.

51:43

You were a victim. And so you go searching within yourself the ways in which you were abandoned or victimized.

51:50

Right. And then you release that and everything's better. But it's never it's always that life writes on you. It's never that you write on life.

51:56

And by ignoring that element of us as people, our guilty consciences, by not addressing sin, it doesn't actually make anything better because the sin keeps coming up and reminds us of that thing that we have to apologize for, of that thing that we did wrong, that we're trying to fight off the consequences in our lives.

52:13

Psychotherapy does not deal with sin. Churches, the scripture deals with sin. And so that is where people should be going to seek their mental health.

52:21

Not is not who do I need to apologize to me? It's the beginning approach should be who do

52:28

I need to go to apologize to? Who do I need to forgive as I've been forgiven? Psychotherapy does not teach that.

52:35

It teaches that the answers are within you. It does not teach that the answers are within scripture and the answers are within scripture for how to lead a godly life, which

52:42

I believe is what people ultimately want. But modernity hasn't given them that. It's given them the opposite for all the reasons we've talked about.

52:49

And so psychotherapy doesn't actually make it better. It ends up being this never ending cycle of digging for more and more trauma because you finally want to be free.

52:57

Oh, there's another thing. Oh, there's another thing. I was like, no, like that's not you're never going to get to the bottom of that.

53:02

Well, but you can rectify your life by fixing the things that you did wrong and confessing your sin and being at peace with God.

53:10

That's the piece that surpasses understanding. And so not to go looking to psychotherapy for that, go looking to a biblical counselor.

53:16

So walk me through what happened with you because you were so deep into this new age stuff and you're a

53:22

Christian now. You're you're Jewish, but somehow you're saying Christ is king. I don't know how that works, but Christ is king. Yeah, so my water bottles got

53:30

Christ as Lord sticker on it as well. Oh, my goodness. So so like were you approached like in an evangelistic encounter or did you just search, start reading the

53:40

Bible? What happened? I love the story. So in August of 2015,

53:45

I went to the Burning Man Festival, which is Burning Man. OK, it starts at Burning Man, the most unlikely place.

53:51

And so this is this is a longer story, but I can just give you the short version. So I was coming off of a breakup and so I went out to Burning Man.

54:00

I was living in the Bay Area. And you can just do that because it's like a like a four or five hour drive. And so I just bought a ticket and went and showed up with some friends.

54:07

And they're like, what are you doing here? I'm like, let's talk about that later. Where can I set up my tent? So the guy that I set up my tent next to,

54:14

I woke up in the morning, started talking with him. He's like, oh, what brings you out here? Like, oh, I'm coming off a breakup. Well, if you're grieving, you should go over to this camp spirit dream.

54:21

They can help you. I saw them yesterday. Perfect. So I go over to this camp spirit dream and I end up in this three hour sort of healing encounter with them, just talking about a lot of stuff from my past that I had to work through, you know.

54:35

And at the end of that healing encounter, I had a vision of Jesus Christ. And there's a lot of the big story.

54:42

There's a big story to all of that that I can I can tell you if you'd like. But the short version is like I saw this and confirmed it with them.

54:51

And they're smiling like, who are you people like? Well, we're we're Christians. We've been running this underground ministry here for 12 years.

54:58

And so what they had, they were more of a charismatic kind of faith. And so they had gotten gotten some guidance, let's say, that they were to go and do evangelism at Burning Man.

55:09

But they knew that they couldn't just set up and start handing out Bibles. So they they went for a couple of years and they explored and they realized, like,

55:16

OK, here are the values of this new country we're in. So how can we offer something to people that speaks their language, but that's still consistent within a

55:24

Christian worldview that brings them in and gives us the chance to minister to them and show them the love of the father? Because it's a charismatic.

55:30

So they tend to focus very much on on the love of God, the father. And what you what they actually found is that a lot of people in this new age world, they have very deep father, father wounds, as Doug Wilson calls it,

55:42

Pastor Doug Wilson calls it, father hunger that's pervasive in our society. And so they discovered that they have

55:48

God, the father's love that they can offer to these thousands of broken people showing up wanting to be loved by a father.

55:55

And so that was that was what they offered, you know, in various. They didn't speak in explicitly

56:00

Christian language. They had developed their own kind of way using biblical words that wouldn't necessarily trigger the the anti -Christian programming as many new age people, myself included.

56:10

And so at the end, I had this sort of vision of Christ. Right. And I was like, who are you people like? We're Christians.

56:15

So like, great. OK, cool. Thanks. Nice to meet you, because I was still in the mindset that all religions were equal paths up the mountain.

56:23

And I had just collected the Christianity Pokemon like, oh, cool. Nice. So I went and I traveled.

56:30

And so that was when I did a lot of those new age practices that I showed you. Now, while I was on the road traveling solo and in third world countries, developed countries, et cetera,

56:40

I became aware that metaphysical evil was a real thing because in the new age world where all is one and this is explicitly stated,

56:47

I think in Buddhism, evil is considered relative to your perception. So if you see something evil happening, if all is one and all is

56:55

God, then that's God, too. And it's just your limited perception that leads you to see it as evil. And I the things that I saw and the things that I did,

57:03

I was like, I can't get down with that idea. I can't get down with the idea that these poor, suffering, starving, struggling people,

57:11

I can't look them in the eye and say, sorry, kid, that's just your karma. I just couldn't do that, you know, and what really what really convicted me was when

57:21

I discovered like Jeffrey Epstein. I think that's just public knowledge who that guy was and what he was doing. It's like I couldn't bring myself to say to a child being sex trafficked.

57:30

Hey, kid, that's just your karma or the sex trafficker. Like that must be your karma to persecute this kid.

57:35

It shattered my paradigms. And so I would talk to people in the new age world like, hey, I want to talk about evil.

57:41

I want to talk about this. Like this is happening. Like is that is that God? Is that am

57:47

I supposed to believe that? And I couldn't get anyone to talk to me about it. Like they just would change the subject. Oh, you don't you just don't understand love and light.

57:54

And they would dust over it. And it really troubled me. And so when I got back to the United States in March and February of 2020, so as COVID was starting to happen, these same friends that I met at Burning Man, that ministry group sent me a book,

58:07

Simply Christian by N .T. Wright. And so I started reading this book as COVID was happening. And so I was like, what perfect timing.

58:15

Right. And in this book, he there's a scene, I think halfway through the book where he talks about Christ up on the cross and Christ being up on the cross.

58:22

This giant wave of evil was going to come and crash over him and through his death and sacrifice and resurrection, he drove back the wave of evil forever.

58:30

And I got it. It's like, here's here's a faith, a religion, a person, people that are finally willing to talk about something that's out there.

58:39

And so from that, I started reading Mere Christianity by C .S. Lewis and the Screwtape Letters. And it was like it was the first time

58:46

I've said this many times. It's the first time anyone had talked to me about Christianity like I was an adult. And it was like, oh, this is what it's about.

58:53

And so then I contacted my friends from the camp at Burning Man who live up in Idaho Camp Spirit Dream. They were on my podcast as well.

59:00

And I went up to visit them and asked them to baptize me. And they baptized me in the corridor in the Spokane River.

59:05

Labor Day weekend, 2020. Wow. Oh, man, there's so much to that.

59:14

So I guess the obvious thing, you saw Jesus. Yeah. I mean, do you when you look back at that, do you think that you saw

59:22

Jesus or do you think that it was like something else was going on and like,

59:27

I don't know, it just it's interesting. God seemed to work through that experience to bring you to where you are. But I think especially on a podcast talking about the new age movement, there's probably all kinds of alarm bells going off in people's minds.

59:39

Like if you saw a vision of Jesus. Sure. Yeah. Well, let me tell you. Let me tell you what it was. I don't I haven't landed on what on what happened, but I'll tell you what it was.

59:48

And I'll let the listeners decide for themselves. I'm not making any theological claims or anything like that.

59:54

I'll just tell you. Right. OK. So at the end of this encounter, as I was talking with this, it was three people,

01:00:00

Barb, Katie and Larry. Right. Older, they were all they were in front of me. So at the end of this three and a half hour encounter,

01:00:07

Katie, who's still a friend of mine, was standing behind me and in her head, hands next to my head. And she was sounds like she was praying.

01:00:14

And so with my eyes closed, I had my eyes closed with my eyes closed. This is what I saw. Right. So with my eyes closed,

01:00:20

I could see the streets of Burning Man. Right. Flags blowing in the wind. People with their bikes riding by.

01:00:26

Right. Just as if I was there. And in this vision, a man walked up to me. Right.

01:00:31

And I recognized he had goggles on, you know, they had because Burning Man's very dusty.

01:00:38

And so you wear ski goggles to keep the dust out of your eyes. And so he walked up to me and I recognized, you know, I could see the shape of his head and his face and hair and stuff.

01:00:46

And just just walks up with the goggles on. I'm like, OK. And then the face seemed to insist, no, look like,

01:00:53

OK, I see you. I see the shape of everything. Cool. OK. So then my then

01:00:58

I open my eyes and then Katie says to me, there's someone I want you to meet. And it's like,

01:01:03

OK, so I follow her to the other side of the tent. Like and so it was near the entrance, but it was on the side of a pillar that I could not have seen when

01:01:11

I walked in. I walked in, I turned to go sit down with them. And it was on the other side of this pillar. She turns around, she leaves me.

01:01:17

She shows me the pillar and painted up on the pillar was the face that I had just seen minus the goggles.

01:01:24

Right. Right. And so that was the it was the same face as the Akiane Portrait of Christ. Right.

01:01:30

If you've seen if you've seen that, she was a famous painter. A number of probably have. Yeah. So I can send it to you.

01:01:36

Right. And or you can I can I can send you a link if you want to show the viewers. Gotcha.

01:01:41

Gotcha. Right. So it was it was to put more accurately, I suppose. You had a vision or you saw when you closed your eyes, the painting, the person in the painting.

01:01:52

Yes. But but the but the person depicting Jesus. Well, so yeah, so the painting was depicting

01:01:58

Jesus. I saw the same face. But with my eyes closed, the face had goggle Burning Man goggles on.

01:02:05

Right. So it wasn't the face that it wasn't just the face appeared like. Right. Right. Look, I don't know what to make of that. Yeah, I don't know either.

01:02:11

I don't either. And I've never known like I don't want to simply assume it's what it sounds like it is. And so I'm not ever probably going to land at an answer.

01:02:19

You know, maybe some, you know, in glory, I'll ask like, hey, what was that? Right. But I can tell you that like it it it bonded me to these people.

01:02:28

And it was like, you're Christians. What are you doing here? And then they became the like I went to go visit them for Christmas that year.

01:02:34

And it wasn't so much that experience of on the on the playa that made such a big difference at the festival.

01:02:41

It was going to spend Christmas with them and seeing them joyful and loving and singing songs.

01:02:47

They're hunters. They served me bare. It was like they were everything. They were everything that I had ever like kind of intuited somehow that Christians were meant to be.

01:02:56

But I had never met Christians like them before. Right. They truly embodied the faith with everything they did.

01:03:01

I never felt chastised or lectured. There was never a moment where I felt like, you know, I was being actively evangelized or anything like that.

01:03:09

It was just like, no, just come, let us love on you. And we'll just show you the way that we live. And so their life was their evangelism.

01:03:15

And so that, to me, was more was more powerful than anything. I've told them that, that that that Christmas was more powerful.

01:03:22

And so I kept in touch with them while I was traveling. They were praying for me constantly, which I'm really glad.

01:03:28

So because I needed it. And so when I got back, you know, it was it was the book that they gave me, simply

01:03:34

Christian, that they gave me. That was that was my doorway in. So what happened? Yeah, praise

01:03:39

God. Absolutely. So I'm not going to say that objectively, I know for sure.

01:03:45

Like I'm not again, I hope your listeners don't hear me saying that I received any private revelation because I don't think that's the case.

01:03:50

But I saw what I saw and what it means. I'll never know. But that's what happened. Yeah, no, that's that is a fascinating.

01:03:59

And it just the fact that they're doing this operating this ministry at Burning Man, I'm pretty impressed by that, too. That's like innovative to go to where so much darkness and sin is and be able to communicate in a way that the people who are there, it's on their level.

01:04:14

So final question, then you said that the New Age stuff that you pursued for years, it didn't have any lasting peace or satisfaction.

01:04:24

What do you say about Christianity? I'm so glad you asked. So. Over over 20 years of all those practices that I did,

01:04:36

I spent a lot of money and a lot of energy and a lot of time.

01:04:42

I describe it as like turning myself inside out to try and heal or grow.

01:04:48

You know, it was a big part of my life. The amount of growth that I experienced relative to the things

01:04:56

I did was. Very small in comparison to what I've experienced in sanctification of the

01:05:02

Holy Spirit in just three and a half years. I don't have to pay a praise.

01:05:07

Yeah, I have to pray, pay a therapist or go to a retreat or drink a magic potion or do any of any of that.

01:05:14

Like the sanctification process is is is real. And it's a it's a profound gift.

01:05:21

And and I'm very, very grateful to God for it. And so I talk about the things that I do now.

01:05:27

So I let people inside the New Age and inside Christianity know that that will get you nowhere. The difference is like a

01:05:33

McDonald's, a small McDonald's hamburger compared to like the steak, like the steak that you've always wanted.

01:05:40

It's and I think ultimately what people are seeking in the New Ages is the healing that's available to them in Christ through sanctification, through sin and confession and repentance and prayer and scripture reading.

01:05:52

All these things are very real. They've transformed me and transformed my life. So that's good. Yeah. Thank you.

01:05:58

So if people want to reach out, because I'm sure some people who are in these various New Age movements will see the video or listen to the podcast and they might want to talk to you.

01:06:10

How can they go about doing that? Yeah, so you can find you can find my podcast at Ren of Men dot com slash links.

01:06:18

You can find the audio and you can find the YouTube there. You can also find my Twitter and Instagram. You can

01:06:23

DM me on Instagram or Twitter at Ren of Men. And and you can email me also at info at Ren of Men dot com.

01:06:30

And I'm happy to share all my wisdom in the ways that I can for anything you and your loved ones might be going through.

01:06:36

Praise God. Well, thank you, Will. I appreciate it. That was a really good conversation and I think it'll bear fruit.