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Dr. Irwin "Rocky" Freeman
Hinduism is enormous. It is massive and only a determined, determined, determined student would ever be able to go through all the material. And in addition to that canonical literature they have, the Vedas, all their canonical literature is called the Vedas.
All of that, there is a large commentary on the Vedas which is usually called the Vedantic literature, the Vedantic literature. And it's a commentary and it would take you ages to go through. That's why these kids always go beyond and sit and they want to study.
And they just sit and do nothing but study. Today you read about the monks and Kung Fu and all the stuff where they go under the master and they sit and they just study from the time they're a little child until they become a young man.
And then they're sent out in the world supposedly with all the mystic powers which may or may not be, it's just a matter of where they get their power from. But much of this literature is devoted to the personal incarnations of Brahman and the bhakti devotion to these incarnations.
Now one of the most influential books in this field of thought is the Bhagavad Gita. And I didn't have room to write that up there. I'll give the spelling if you want to write it down. It is capital B as in boy, H-A-G-A-V-A-D, capital G-I-T-A, capital B-H-A-G-A-V-A-D, capital G-I-T-A, two words.
Now this relates the stories of Krishna. Krishna which just simply means incarnation, an incarnation. And where the idea of love for quote God finds a clear expression. And it is one of the most influential books in the field of Eastern thought.
A person may be Hindu and attain enlightenment with no intellectual knowledge of the Vedas. You don't really have to read these. You don't really have to have them to become enlightened. There are those who say you don't have to have the Bible to really be spiritual.
All you got to do is have an experience. You get an experience, you become spiritual. That's not so. That's not so at all. You can't have anything God unless you get it from the Word of God because it is the scripture and it's the Holy Word of God.
Now to be a Christian, one person, one must know something about God and about the way of salvation and ultimately this comes from the Word of God, the Holy Bible, the Holy Scriptures. Now when you deal with prayer and meditation in the contrast, Jesus taught his disciples to pray using words that clearly reflect an interpersonal I and thou relationship between God and me.
He plainly said do it. The Christian must always address God as our Father. You are not authorized in scripture to pray to Jesus. You don't find it anywhere in the Word of God and yet I find people on a dear Jesus, dear Jesus.
I want you to show me that in scripture. Jesus said when you pray you say our Father and yet there are a lot of people, Jesus always pointed people back to the Father, the sovereignty of God. He always said the Father.
When you pray he said our Father. We want to be like Christ? Well he prayed he said our Father, Heavenly Father. I know that thou always hear me. Well what makes us think that we don't? Jesus is our access to God.
There's one meeting between God and man. We go to God through Christ but he always points back to the Father and it bothers me tremendously when I hear people get out of perspective and start doing what they want to do.
You'll find these people live in experiences when they do that and they don't stay with the scripture. Now the Bible knows nothing about us merging with God. You go back to Aristotle and Plato the philosophers and you find the merging of the good and all of this stuff and they give you the cave bit and all that.
When the Bible speaks of meditating it is not letting your mind become passive with no real thoughts about anything objective. It is always in the sense of deeply considering the law of God or the Word of God or the works of God.
You are thinking about something specific. You do not let your mind become passive and every spiritualist medium and we'll see that when we get into education reincarnation, the demons of hell know that in order to get your life or mine involved in the spiritual deception they must deal with a passive mind in some area.
And yet I know many Christians who sit around and just want to meditate. I said what are you meditating on? Oh I just had a great well-known pastor that stood at a conference and said one hour out of every day I just don't let any thoughts come into my mind.
I sit out in a park or on the lake or around a stream and I just keep all the thoughts out of my mind. How foolish. My Bible says bring every thought into subjection to the obedience in Christ. Think upon these things he says.
What so things are pure and honest and true? Think on these things the Bible says. Keep your mind tuned to God. Wow Satan knows that he needs the opposite. He knows as long as you and I doing that he's got problems.
But if he can get that old mind passive, that old saying it's an old adage but it is true. The idle mind's the devil's playground boys. A lot of truth in that isn't it? Sure we know about that. And so this is what they're saying to us.
Now that's what the Bible says. It is contemplating on God in the light of all he has been to us and therefore never without a definite cognitive content. Always there is content and it has a content that we are aware of, that we're cognizant of and that we are learning truth.
And it's always something objective. The Bible teaches that prayer rather than meditation is a normal Christian practice. Prayer is normal not meditation. Now the Buddhist and Hindu prayers to a particular incarnation is always a means towards enlightenment through the grace of the avatar and not real interpersonal relationships with quote God in quote in essence of the word.
The normal Eastern practice is meditation. Meditation. The sin, the aim being, excuse me, the aim being to meditate into his essence. To go back into himself and to sense the oneness with all that there is around him.
Now there are a lot of movements. One predominant movement is the movement of the light. You keep looking inside yourself until you see light. You keep looking and you'll find the light. I had a young couple that came to me for counseling.
He is a pharmacist on several drugstores in our area of the state. Very lovely Christian young man and his wife very lovely Christian young girl and we had had some contact and had gone out to dinner a couple occasions and had reciprocated visits in the home and so forth and they had got caught up in one of these movements and they began to get a passive mind and think of nothing and also they began to visualize two people a man and a woman in their mind and an elevator type atmosphere and these two figures beckoned them to follow them to the light.
He said how can they I'm two intelligent people as rational as rational can be and they began to have this introspection and look in for a light look in for light and their lives became so demonically oppressed and harassed that it took us almost two and a half years of three times a week of constant counseling an hour and a half each shot to get those two kids back to where they could even read the word of God and where they could even pray and where they could even go to church and worship God.
Now dear people when we deal with deception and spiritual things we're in a world where Satan is the second most powerful enemy in the universe and you just can't play games with him. We just can't do it and there are many people who say well I'm a Christian I'm immune to that.
I've got news for you. I've got some news for you. You are not immune and neither am I. Nobody's immune. If we get outside the word of God we're in trouble and that's where most people are living today outside the word of the living God.
Now the normal eastern practice is meditation to get them into this. The individual selfhood is purged out. They get rid of self, any thoughts of self and get all of that out. The Bible says purge yourself.
But they just get it all out and forget it and a oneness is attained where all personality distinctions are obliterated. Their personality just doesn't mean anything anymore. They just get obliterated and as they move through this eastern thought and as they move out into it you find uh uh them just merging out into the oneness becoming totally passive.
When you talk to them they'll become some they're some of the sweetest people to talk to. They're quiet spirited. Huh? You ever heard this? Get a quiet spirit. I hear that today. Oh that's taught in a major institute grown up country now.
You need a quiet spirit. Well sometimes you can be calm when you ought to be afraid. Sometimes you can be calm when you ought to be rebuking. Sometimes you ought to be alerting and alarming somebody instead of sitting around passive and having a quote quiet spirit whatever that means.
My Bible says that Jonah come crying out to sea. John the Baptist came crying out. I wonder why he didn't have a quiet spirit. Well I think the times when you need to be quiet be still and know that I am God.
There are other times when he says move but if you just spend all your time trying to get calm. I believe there's a peace in the middle of the storm. I believe you can have that but you know you can have peace when there isn't a peace.
There is a peace you can have when there isn't a peace right. All right let me just compare. Now let's look at Christianity and quickly compare Christianity in the next 10 minutes to mysticism and we'll start getting a little clear and we'll ask some questions.
I want you to answer. No not really. All mystic groups absolutize as I say mystical experience. Mystical experiences are the most important thing in their lives in such a way as to make it proper and only the only way of coming to quote God.
Now there are many difficulties. These are questions you can ask. How do you interpret a mystical experience? How do you interpret that mystical experience? By nature a mystical experience is totally subjective and non-verbalized.
It's non-verbalizable. You cannot realize it and it's totally subjective. Now a genuine genuine mystical experience may bring about a bona fide conversion to practically any creed, Christianity, Buddhism or fire worship.
It doesn't make any difference. If you have a subjective experience that experience could lead you to anything and it'd be valid and it would be all right according to the experience according to the experience.
Now the mystic philosophy of the guru this guy who leads all these people is an imposition onto the mystical experience. It is not an extraction from it. Now do you grasp what I'm saying there? What I'm saying is that the experience or the information from the guru is something to put you on to the mystical experience.
It is not something that the mystical experience brings you to him. Whereas any experience you have because of result of the word of God brings you to Christ. It brings you to a person. He is not the means of getting you out in there or something else.
He is the Jesus Christ is the end of everything. He is the ultimate. He is the goal. Another question to bring it into focus. Is mystical experience really the ultimate? Is that really what we're looking for?
Behavior and experiences deriving from a drunken or a drugged state have a marked similarity to many mystical experiences resulting from chanting or meditation. You can get a guy drunk or you can see some kid on drugs and they'll be acting exactly like a lot of people act when they chant or when they're having their ecstatic mystical experiences and you don't see any difference.
And I've got case history after case history after case history tape after tape after tape of that very thing. Now how does one know that in walling around in what he calls God whatever that is or God consciousness how does he know he's not hooked on something which in fact is less than God?
And that as a consequent he'll miss out on the real human fulfillment. If you're walling around in God consciousness how do you know that that's not less than God? Let me give you another question. I like to ask them these.
Is inner harmony and peace a real test of truth? Now most people believe that they can get harmony and peace then that makes it truthful. You know the most restful in the world is a corpse. A corpse is totally restful but it's dead.
The fact that a person is rendered more peaceful and free from stress by a mystical experience does not necessarily mean that it has helped him or brought him nearer to God. That is false. That cannot be substantiated with the word of God.
Not at all. It is possible to cry peace when there is no peace. To soothe when we ought to warn or to be calm when we ought to fear. By absolutizing mystical experience, making it the absolute, Eastern philosophy is implying that there is no ultimate significance in human reason or in the sense of moral responsibility.
That's what Eastern philosophy tells us. A man's mind and his individual responsibility then are enemies that he must excise or transcend if he is ever to find peace. You must do away with your individuality.
May there not be peace and a fulfillment which makes sense of man's moral conscience and his rational thinking? Could there not be a peace that uses that? All right now the Christian answer to me is this.
The Christian affirms and asserts that subjective human experiences cannot be the sole ground upon which you build your knowledge of God. You build your knowledge of God from the word of God, not experience.
We do not learn by experience. We learn by precept. There's a big difference. We learn by precept from God's word. We don't learn from experience because experience can be deceitful. It can be deceitful.
For the Christian, mystical experiences are not the ground rock of his relationship with God. A Christian's assurance hinges on his trust in God who has spoken in history. It is recorded for us rather than any personal subjective experience of his own.
The story of Job in the Bible is about a man who lost all sense of the nearness of God yet he remained a man of faith because he trusted God's word. He just took God at his word and knew God couldn't resist his word or God wouldn't vary away from his word and yet he lost all sense of the nearness of God.
He said, oh you got to feel near God. Sometimes I just don't feel near God. Now maybe you do all the time but I don't. There are times and I just I wonder what in the world is going on around me. Why am I even here?
What's going on? I know you don't have problems with those things but every once in a while my mind ventures out in those areas. But I just say the word of God says this is where I stand on. Where I feel it or don't feel it, I care less.
It don't make a difference to me. I might feel it, might not feel it. If you go on your feelings, that's a problem up and down all the time. That's right. You don't look like you feel good now. So I can imagine how I might be later.
Some of the dangers involved in this. Visions of God do not come by works. They never have in the scripture. God does not deal with us in visions. You know that as well as I do. The Bible says in times past in sundry manners God spoke to our fathers by the prophets but in these last days has spoken to us how visions and dreams know in his son.
And it has been recorded. God gives us the Bible. Those people didn't have a Bible. God had to deal with them with different manners and different ways. But now we have scripture. They didn't have scripture.
They were going to write the scripture. Now, this, the Bible teaches that mystical experiences are not to be sought for or worked for. There is not one verse of scripture that substantiates anything else.
God is an omnipotent personal sovereign being who chooses if and when he will ever reveal himself to a man. As I said yesterday morning, if God wanted to zap us all and send us to hell forever he'd be perfectly justified in doing it.
God can do what he wants when he wants and if he wants to reveal himself to us he can. If he doesn't, if he wanted to send us to hell he could. He can do as he pleases. He doesn't answer to anybody. He is just a sovereign God.
A prophet of God is always according to scripture a man called and sent by God. It is never a man who chose and found God by his own ascetic or meditative disciplines. He, God just reached out and chose him and called him.
He doesn't sit out there looking for him. Oh God, will you call me today? Just go and do whatever you're doing and God gets ready to call you, he'll call you. He may not. There are a lot of people I know in the ministry, you know there are 10 ,000 men a year getting out of the ministry in America of all denominations, 10 ,000 a year getting out.
You know what I think about a lot of them? They shouldn't have been there in the first place. Some of them get disillusioned I know and some of them get disgruntled and disappointed and all that and they get out and they're supposed to be in.
But a great number of them got in there by their parents or got in there by a pastor or an evangelist influencing them. Or someone says, oh boy, you'd make a good preacher. Oh I would, huh? Boy, first thing you know he comes down the aisle.
I want to dedicate myself to full-time Christian service. He gets out there and he has nothing but blank walls and gets disillusioned. Next thing you see he's selling used cars or cemetery lots. That's where most of them go, insurance, used cars or cemetery lots.
And they're not saying that's always that, but you can find more preachers than that. You can't almost do anything I know of. And I hate some guy coming I used to be a preacher and he wants to sell me a tombstone, you know.
I don't understand all that, but this is what it is. Now Christ's example is important to us. Jesus never encouraged meditation of the eastern type. He never did, never did. He taught his disciples to pray and he defined love for God in practical and moral terms.
John 14 verses 23 to 24, John 15, 10 and others. Not devotional nor pietistic in its attitude. He warned men of the danger of using vain, heathen repetitions in prayer. Matthew 6, 7 and others. And yet that's exactly what eastern thought says.
Keep repeating, keep chanting, keep meditating on the same thoughts. The prayer he taught was simple, it was rational, and it was short. Simple, rational, and short. All right, Satan's activity, one of the blind spots of eastern mysticism, is that when its methods are assessed in the light of the Bible, we find that it is completely insensitive to the possibility of spiritual deception, that the enemy is on the move.
Jesus and the apostles were constantly warning the people about spiritual deception. Matthew 7, 15, Matthew 24, 11, 2 Peter 2, 1, 2 John 4, verses 2 through 3, 1 Timothy 4, 1 and others. There is no biblical warrant for believing that a meditator is more likely to be granted some true experience of God than any other Christian who never meditates, as they say meditate.
A Christian ought to be more concerned to be living in prayer and obedience to God's word than to be constantly searching for some crazy mystical experience, to pray and stay in God's word. So there is a challenge.
Many people feel that theology is a dangerous and unnecessary encumbrance, and yet when you go to the Colossians, the first chapter, Paul says, I have a desire for you and I have a prayer for you people.
Paul wrote the book of Colossians, although he had never been there. Colossians is about 100 miles east of Ephesus, I think, where Timothy was pastor over in Ephesus. Paul had never visited there. He wrote it while he was in prison.
He wrote it because there were a group of people called the Gnostics were running around saying, we got some more revelation, we got some added information. Yeah, you got information about it, but we got some more, and you need to know what we know.
And so Paul wrote, and he used the word epinosis, which means we have Christ, we have full knowledge. We don't need anything else. Somebody said, you need the truth. You got Christ. He said, I am the truth.
How much more truth could you have than Jesus Christ? How much more power could you have than Christ living in you? And on and on went. So Paul wrote that. And one of the things he prayed for those people, he's around verse 9, he said, but I pray for you.
One of them was that you would increase in the knowledge of God. And ladies and gentlemen, what is theology? Theos, God, ology, knowledge of, study of, study of God. Paul says, I want you to study theology.
Yet you let your pastor or an evangelist or anybody else stand and say, we're going to preach to you a whole week on theology. People get all nervous. Oh, go study that old stuff, dear people. That's what the Bible is all about, God.
Theology. And so it is not unnecessary, it is important, and it's crucial and vital. If we are, however, to meet the Eastern movement in spiritual warfare, we must realize that the root of the conflict is theological.
It is theological. The controversy between Christianity and Eastern mysticism is in the realm of epistemology, the philosophy of knowing. And its theological corollary was how we know God. Epistemology, which is the philosophy of knowing, a theory of knowing, and a theology corollary or parallel with that, or its opposite in theology, is how do we know God?
How do we know God? And so the Bible insists that we come to God as a person to be recognized. And knowledge of God, according to the Bible, is neither empiricist nor mystic. It is personal. It is personal.
The whole doctrine crystallizes around the doctrine of revelation. Revelation. The Bible speaks clearly of revelation in its objective and subjective dimensions. It is the Word of God that's the objective, and the Holy Spirit is the subjective, and the Holy Spirit illuminates your heart and mind by the Word of God, the objective.
He does never take us into subjectivism. He always points to the Word of God. The Bible says that he never teaches of his own. He never bears witness of himself. You start looking, forgetting the Holy Spirit and all that, that's utter foolishness, according to the Word of God.
He always points to the Word of God and to Christ. Always leads back to the Father. Always and ever. You know that as well as I do. Now the Word and the Spirit cannot be separated. Speech cannot be parted from the breath that creates it.
The Word without the Spirit of God to illuminate it is sterile and puzzling to people. If it produces anything, it is only intellectual Christianity like that of the deists. On the other hand, when the Spirit of God illuminates the Word, it can be more than, and if he does it, then it'll be just like incoherent mysticism.
But it'll be more than that, and the incoherent mysticism is practically indistinguishable from dangerous intuitions wrought about by demonic spirits. Let me give you an example. You recall in the book of Acts where there was a young girl who was a soothsayer, and some people were using her for money, and she came upon Paul, and Paul was preaching to these Jews, and the Jews wouldn't believe Paul, right?
The Jews were blaspheming God, and they were cursing God, and mocking God, and attacking the apostles, and here comes a little girl, and she's a soothsayer, and she's being used by these people to make money, and she says, you men of Israel, hear these men, for they preach unto you salvation, and they be of God.
She told exactly the truth. That's what Paul's trying to get across to them, that we are preaching to you men of Israel, we're telling you the truth, we're trying to preach unto you salvation, and we are from God.
What did Paul say? You spirit of divination, come out of her. Paul rebuked a demon that had spoke the truth, a demon communicated to people who were lost, that God was trying to save them, and that these men were of God.
Now that's utterly fantastic, when you think about it, you go check it out for yourself. Demons do speak truth, and they will speak scripture. Why? They're looking out here to the end, they don't care about the means.
They're looking out here, what were they wanting Paul to do? They wanted Paul to make an alliance with them, to sacrifice his doctrinal concepts, and to sacrifice what he believed to really be his calling, to just kind of make some kind of an alliance with this girl.
Don't rebuke her. Mommy, she's just a sweet young girl. She doesn't really know what she's doing. Don't bother her. Now if Satan can't get you to do that, you know what he'll do? He'll become hostile.
What happened to Paul? Paul wouldn't make an alliance with the so what happened? The Jews before he got up, they had Lord Paul over a wall in a basket to get him out of town. Before the Jews said, we're gonna kill that guy.
We'll get him. Satan just stirring up trouble, so much so that as we read Sunday morning, that Paul said, we were pressed out of measure. We were ready to die. The persecution became so great, and that's what Satan always does.
He tries to get you to make an alliance with him, compromise something you believe about the Word of God, and if you won't do that, then he'll unleash it on you, and he'll try to make you miserable. He'll try to attack and assault your life, and he always does that.
But dear people, just because it sounds good, and because it's truth, and it may even be some scripture, you better check it out with the whole Word of God. Check it out with the whole Bible. The Bible is an entity.
It is a book within itself, all right? Now the Bible insists that there must be a cooperation between the external revealed Word of God and the internal spiritual illumination by God. A man must be saved, a person must be a Christian in order to understand the Word of God.
Now there's an approach that we can use. We need to show the agnostics that all men have convictions about many things which they cannot prove logically. Love, beauty. One poet has said, beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
Now haven't you seen, now I know you wouldn't say this, you're sweet and kind people, but haven't you ever seen something, man that guy's ugly as homemade sin. My soul looks like death eating a cracker.
Well it looks like he has to cover himself up and let sleep sneak up on him at night so he can get in there, you know? And things like that, well look at her, ah! You know, and stuff like that. How in the world did she ever get that?
How did that guy ever get a girl like that? And all this stuff. Well, but you see to them they may be the most two, they may be two of the most beautiful people in the world. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.
The heart attitude really makes a difference, doesn't it? Sure it does. And so we, but you can't prove love, you can't put it in a test tube, you can't put beauty in a test tube, you just can't do it.
So, are these things unreal because we can't prove them logically? Of course not. That's foolish. The Christian must challenge these people. You must challenge them concerning the historical dimension of biblical faith.
That it's real history, that it's a real world, there's a real world outside. And you may get off into some mystic experience, but you cannot escape the real world that's around you. It's real out here.
And that in the real world God has revealed himself to man's understanding. There must be an intelligent grasp of the objective word of God and clear evidence of the inward subjective application of that truth by the Holy Spirit.
There has to be faith and repentance. A change of mind and a change of heart. Faith is an attitude of your mind towards God. That's right. Repentance deals with a heart. There's got to be faith and there's got to be repentance.
There has to be a change of mind, says in the renewing of your mind each day, the renewing of your mind each day in Christ Jesus. And there has to be the change of heart. Christians can do better than trying to work up some kind of a mindless ecstasy, for they have a body of revealed truth from God himself, as we said, the word of God, the Bible.
Our God is not a feeling, but he's a real person with a defined and reliable character. Such a God is far more exciting than some psychic experience. All right. Some things that you must not do. You must deal with these people on the basis of a historical Jesus Christ and a historical Bible that God revealed himself in history.
Here's some things you must not do. Never attend one of these meetings. The average Christian should stay away from them. Never go to one out of curiosity. Don't go to seances. Don't go to any of these meetings.
You have no business there. And if you're not schooled in it, you're not learned in it, you will put some of that stuff in your mind and Satan will use it in your life. Oh, they'll never get me. No, they may not get you to follow them, but it'll stay in your mind.
It'll contaminate your thinking. You ought not to go around it. Bible says, know your weaknesses and stay away from them. And you're not supposed to be around them. Next, do not swap spiritual experiences with people.
Don't swap spiritual experiences. You want to give a testimony about what Christ means, do you? Fine. You sit around, start swapping spiritual experiences, dear people, and you begin moving into mysticism.
No matter what the intent, you may have all the good intent in your life. And I find today, you know, most people, what they want to share, they don't want to share their testimony about who Christ is and about their salvation.
Something I've appreciated about Larry, I don't want to embarrass him, is that each time he stands to sing, he always has said something about what Christ means to him and his salvation experience. I appreciate that so much.
Most people want to deal in some mystical experience they've had out here, some experience that they've had out here. Well, get away from your experience and keep the people's thinking back to Jesus Christ, who he is, what he can accomplish, what he does.
Thank you, Brother Don. What we're going to do in these morning services, I'm not so concerned about this morning, and don't you be concerned too much about this morning. It's going to be unfamiliar ground to most.
We're going to deal with Eastern mysticism. We're going to use words that are basically meaningless to the average Christian. I'm more concerned about where we'll be Wednesday. So it's just like making a pie, ladies, just making a cake.
When you get all that junk together, it doesn't look too good. But once you get it laid out in the pan, on the crust, and you get the icing on it or whatever you're going to do, and it comes out of the oven, it looks all right.
So we're going to go this morning and put a lot of junk together. And it won't sound like a whole lot, it won't look like a whole lot, but come Wednesday, it'll all be okay. Because this is going to be kind of general this morning.
We'll talk about Eastern thought. And you're going to walk out here this morning, you're going to say, that is the most confusing stuff I've ever heard in my life. And it is. It's confusing to them. So you imagine what it is to Western mind.
Because you do not think as an Eastern person thinks. Gentiles don't even think like Jews think. It's impossible. And the Eastern world thinks completely different than the Western world. They completely rethink everything.
And everything is subjective. Nothing can be put down in order with the Eastern mind. And so we'll do that. We'll talk about Eastern thought, and then we'll look at some Christian answers to it, a Christian look at mysticism.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about more specifics, and it'll begin to fall into place when we deal with Transcendental Meditation, TEM, the thing that's being taught in high schools and colleges and even the HEW.
The Housing and Education Welfare has authorized funds to be given for the support of Transcendental Meditation. Congress has authorized funds for Transcendental Meditation. Your tax money is being used to teach Eastern mysticism to the people of America.
And it's being funded by the authorization of the Congress, congressmen, and et cetera. And so there are all kinds of this stuff going on. And we'll talk about that. And then we'll talk about one of our sessions will be Edgar Cayce and reincarnation.
I'm utterly astounded and appalled at the number of Christians who believe in reincarnation. They actually believe that the possibility exists that they're going to come back in this world as something else, or that there are planes that you go through.
I was just in one church where the church secretary believed that. And the pastor wasn't too sure about it, and many other people thought it might be so. And so it's real interesting. Then we'll talk about Maharaji, the divine light mission, and then we'll see how we can go with that.
And we'll just go through what we can and just see what we got. We're not going to be able to cover everything that I'd like to cover. It's just impossible. We're talking about weeks and weeks. What I'm going to give you is about five years of study in three days.
We've been on this for some time, so you can't expect just to get it all. But I want to whet your appetite and at least give you some challenges to look at it for yourself and to do some investigation and find out about it.
And if we just give you a concept at all, it'll be okay. And do feel free to just get up and leave when you have to. If all of you get up at once, that bothers me. But if you go one at a time, I would know the difference.
See, if you just get up and ease out one at a time, you could dupe me there a little bit until just me and the pastor left, and then I would begin to wonder what's going on. But this new challenge that has come on the scene is successful for several reasons.
One of the reasons that it's successful is that it is spiritual in its emphasis. It is spiritual in its emphasis. And I might just say to you something you already know. Isn't it strange that all cults and all groups predominantly are women?
Isn't that amazing? It's predominantly women. There's a reason for that, isn't there? A woman basically is an emotional person. Women's live doesn't like that, but she basically is. God made her that way.
A woman is more susceptible to spiritual things. That's why Satan went to Eve, not Adam. It's the very reason. He deceived her. She is easier to be deceived. All cults, all false religions predominantly are women.
That's not to knock the women, but they are. You can win a woman to the Lord quicker than you can win a man. A woman will serve God quicker than a man will. A woman will do more work for God than a man will, basically and generally.
Most churches are supported by women, basically. You find very few men Bible teachers in comparison to women Bible teachers in the church. Men are lazy and won't do it. Men deal with pride and arrogance.
Women deal with deception. So I don't know which one is the worst, but it is a fact. It is a fact that we face, and so this is one of the reasons. Now, because of the loss of the sense of absoluteness, and I want to stay fairly close to my material, but I don't want to read to you because I do want to get this in before some of you have to go, if at all possible, and I don't want to ramble a whole lot, but there are no absolutes in this world anymore.
We have absolutes. We know they are, but the basic thinking is nothing's absolute. It's almost spiritual anarchy. Well, you believe what you believe, and as long as we just love Jesus, that's all that matters.
That's what you hear. It doesn't make a difference about doctrine. Biblical doctrine doesn't mean anything. We're always accused of having Baptist doctrine. Well, I personally believe that Baptist doctrine basically is biblical doctrine, not polity.
See, people can't distinguish between polity and doctrine. Polity is how you run your church, whether you have an order of service or don't have. That's polity, but doctrine means what the Bible teaches, what the Bible teaches, and so I believe that basically Baptist doctrine is biblical doctrine, but people say if you just love Jesus, that's all that matters, and that is not so.
That is a dupe of the enemy, and so we come down to where there's no absolute. You just believe what you want to about the Bible, and I believe what I want to about the Bible, and as long as we agree on two or three little basics, then everything ought to be all right, and because of that, the enemy, Satan, our adversary, Satan, if you want his name properly, has come into the world, and he's brought these truths, and the morality, the great sin of this generation is intolerance.
Intolerance. We must be tolerant of everybody. You're not supposed to be offensive. You're not supposed to say anything that offends somebody else. Just be tolerant of what everybody else believes. Let them believe what they want to believe, and all that.
Whether they have a right to believe what they want to believe, I don't have to sit around and say, okay, you're okay, I'm okay, as Burns and Harris do in their book, that little book that's a bestseller.
I'm okay, you're okay, which is junk, where all products are rerun tapes, and all this junk, which is a whole other story in itself. Now, most Eastern religions, see, it's already confusing, isn't it?
You're giving me blank stares, all right? Most Eastern religions, particularly Hinduism, are able to absorb almost any other religion in the world, and redefine it into Eastern terms, and absorb that religion.
It's utterly fantastic, but it can be done. Hinduism can absorb anything, and just redefine it, change the words a little bit, and fit it right into Hinduism, and they do this with Eastern terminology.
Now, the central focus, watch it, this will be interesting, the central focus or emphasis of every Eastern religion, what do you think it might be? Experience, experience, and mysticism in a new form has hit this country in the guise of Neo-Pentecostalism, which emphasizes the absoluteness of an experience.
If you've got the experience, it has to be from God, and that's exactly where it started over there, the Eastern mysticism. They absolutize experience. Experience is the most important thing in their lives, and that's why it's so successful in this world today.
The reason that there are so many religions in the East is that there are simply different methods, or different ways of achieving the ultimate experience of spiritual enlightenment, each one of them.
So that's why they're tolerant of each other, they make a difference, because they're just different roads that you go down to get to the same place. Isn't that what you hear in America? This is a different road.
Well, you over here and over here, we're going the same direction. I said, I hope we are, I know which direction I'm going, I'm going the way Paul went, down the Bible road, and you can go play with experiences if you want.
Now, Eastern thinking is most antagonistic, and they're very hostile towards methods of scientific inquiry, and any knowledge that's gained by it. They don't care about science. You use any scientific method to find it, they care less about it.
And the knowledge you get from it's unimportant to them, they're looking for an experience. Now, in the Western world, many people sense the exploitation of the animal world. You look out in our world, why animals, I know that we spend more money on dog food every year than we do on education in the United States.
We actually do. More money on dog food than we do on education. But animals are basically treated, you know, nil in America. I mean, you know, they shoot them, kill them, poison them, smoke them, or whatever you do.
You know, animals are really such a lesser being, and it really is. But in the Eastern world, it isn't. In the Eastern world, the animals are valued. Almost all animals are. And they have tremendous value to these people.
In almost every avenue of living, the Eastern world has preserved some values which the Western scientifically oriented world has thrown away that we ought to keep. We have, because of our technological advancements and scientific achievements, we've become so scientifically oriented in our thinking that we throw away a lot of values.
Well, they keep these values over there. One of the reasons they are successful is materialism. In the Eastern religions, there is the emphasis on the need to discover inner contentment totally apart from material things.
Now, in the Western world, young people and old people alike, you and me, have found an emptiness amidst plenty. A man can be the most affluent person in the world. We're having, you've been reading, we're having a big trial over in Fort Worth.
It's being transferred now, change of venue to Amarillo. A multimillionaire that came in, shot his wife, didn't kill her, but killed his 12, 13-year-old stepdaughter. He killed another guy who was there and shot two or three others.
Two or three others ran out of the house. He's on trial for his life now. But a man, a multimillionaire, but totally no content. No content feelings, no content attitude, or anything like this. An emptiness amidst the plenty.
And you and I experience this as we have a job and as we work and we gain things, a home and all these things, but we find that they do not satisfy. We say we know that in churches, but we don't really apply it every day in our lives.
Even Christians are fervently seeking to amass everything they can possibly get their hands on. And that's the driving, consuming force of most Christian lives, is to get this and get that and get that.
And we come in church and we act like materialism isn't really the thing, when in actuality, it really is. It's the thing that drives most of us. To get money and to get this and to be nice and have all the things that everybody else has, and then we guise it in religiosity.
Well, the Eastern world knows that, and people in America have become discontent with it. And all of us know about the ascetics. We all know about the hermits. We all know about these people who've left everything materially and have gone out and just renounced it all to attain the contentment they're searching for.
The world has become increasingly aware of the compromise by many Christians and the hypocrisy that accompanies materialism. And they see it in your life and mine, and it turns them off. The Eastern world offers them a clear genuineness and simplicity, which appeals to Western young people.
They just say, all you got to do is come. That's why the Moonies are so successful. And that's why Hare Krishna and these other groups are successful. They'll say, you don't have to worry about things.
These kids go out and work all day long, and they'll drink one cold drink and eat a little pack of Easter snacks, and that's all they'll have. And they'll stand on a street corner and sell flowers and candy from dawn to dark.
And they'll do it every day. And they'll have one set of clothes. That's all they'll have. They don't care because they are contented and they're satisfied. And parents have offered them things, things, things.
And the Eastern world knows this. Now, Eastern thought is interesting. The key to understanding the Eastern mind is you have to deal with the different theories of knowledge, which is called epistemology.
Epistemology is the study of the different theories of knowledge, how you gain knowledge. The Western world, people like us, we understand things by taking it apart. We take each thing apart, and we try to find a cause, and we give each thing a name.
And we take this microphone, we have this, we take it apart. We have a cord, we have a stand, we have the microphone itself, we have some wire mesh. We name each one of those things. And that's the way that we understand it.
We verbally communicate the knowledge. In that process, we separate ourselves from it, from the thing that's being investigated or researched, and we're able to do that. But Indian and Taoist, spelling Taoist, T-A-O-I-S-T, Taoist is the way it's pronounced, philosophy, they see reality as non-dual, or the word used is non-divided.
You can't separate it like that. The world of conventional knowledge, of analyses, words, and divisions, is regarded as an illusion. And I have the word up here somewhere for you, maya, which means illusion.
It is an illusion to them. The basic goal for the Eastern religion then is to find a release, which is moksha, a release. A release from this, from all the divisions, and then to experience the oneness of the universe with oneself, which is samadhi.
Samadhi. And that is a oneness with the universe and yourself. You get yourself into it. Now, this can be gained through varying paths. You can get this different ways. The basic philosophy, monism, this basic philosophy called monism, influences Eastern ideas about Christian doctrines.
They take creation. Now, God gave names to his creation. Heaven, earth, seas, etc. Now, why is that important? It is important because it teaches that God remains separate from his creation, and in no sense can you actually identify God with his creation.
That's pantheism. God is in the microphone. God's in the tree. No, God made the microphone. God made the tree. God made it all, but he stays separated from it. Now, he is the great I am, Exodus 3 .14.
Jesus referred to the same thing in John the 8th chapter, which indicates his independent existence and self-consciousness. Now, that is the severe contrast with Eastern thought. Eastern thought does not.
In Eastern thought, the Brahman, this word here, you have the Brahman caste, C-A-S-T-E, a person who is born into that is very high up, but the word Brahman in Eastern thought, Brahman, which is the essential unitary reality.
It is the God of the universe. This unitary reality that is there grows into the universe. It grows into the universe. That means we grow into it. We become a part of it. We become enmeshed in it, and it manifests itself in many ways by the method of what is called a divine prank, or a divine play.
A divine play or prank, which is called liya, and it's that word there. There is no essential purpose in Brahman, for self-consciousness is alien to the whole concept of purpose. Now, isn't that confusing?
Isn't that interesting? There is no essential purpose in Brahman, for self-consciousness is alien to the whole concept of purpose. Now, let me illustrate. Time, when you deal with time, T-I-M-E, time, the dismemberment of the one into the many continues forever with Eastern thought.
They just take the one and split it into many, and one kalpa, this word right here, one kalpa, K-A-L-P-A, one kalpa in length is 4 320 million years, one kalpa. Now, many Hindu groups see in these great periods significance in astrological ages.
Astrology and horoscope didn't start with Gene Dixon. It started years ago with the Babylonians, the Sumerians, and the Chaldeans, and the false religions of the false gods. Gene Dixon is a false prophetess.
Bible says if you say anything that doesn't come to pass 100%, stone them to death. Any person who speaks is a prophet of God. So you need to get some rocks, I suppose, whatever you're going to do about that.
Now, due to the precession of the equinoxes, the signs of the zodiac are not perfectly stationary relative to the solar year. So they come up in Eastern thought and say from 200 A .D. to 2300 A .D. is the age of Pisces the fish, and the dominance of Christianity.
The fish. You run around with a little fish on your sign? Well, you play it long enough and you'll run into somebody in Eastern mysticism that'll just be delighted to see it, and they'll wrap your mind into a theological pretzel.
Now, I know that the fish was, but don't major on it because the cross is more important than the fish. You stay with the cross and you blow their mind. You play with the fish and they'll get you because they like that.
They'll say, well, yeah, this is the age of Christianity. I agree with you, sure. Why? But around 2300 A .D. they believe that the age of Aquarius, that song a few years ago, this is the dawning of the age of Aquarius.
The age of Aquarius will come in and there will be peace and harmony. Now, in Eastern philosophy, all time runs in a cycle. Isn't that what the historians say? History repeats itself. Time is all this stuff.
Where do they get it from? Eastern mysticism. Eastern religions is where they get that stuff from. Now, the Bible teaches the opposite. The Bible teaches that time is finite and linear. It is finite and linear.
It moves from the beginning, which is the Greek word arke, from the beginning to the distance, telos. Telos is the Greek word with a specific and definite purpose. That's what the Bible tells us, that God has it moving from one place to a consummating point out there with a particular plan and a particular purpose.
And Eastern mysticism says no. Now, the reason we have it is because the creator, true God, is personal, he is transcendent, and he has a plan for the universe. Ephesians 3 verse 11. Now, sin, when we come to deal with sin in Eastern thought, God made man in his own image.
We know that as a self-conscious personal being who has delegated sovereignty over the creation. Genesis 1 verses 27 to 28 and others, that God gave man dominion over the earth. So man defines his individual ego as separate and distinct from the rest of the creation.
God separated man. He put him over the creation. Man is subject over the rest of the world as God stands subject over the entire creation. The Bible teaches that every man has only one life to live, and at the end of time, he will give an account to a personal God who made him.
Acts 17 verse 31, Hebrews 9 verse 27, and other passages of scripture. Now, in Eastern thought, man is only a part of the oneness of the universal soul, Atman. Atman, the universal soul. And man is just a part of that universal soul.
Now, moral disobedience, which is sin to the Eastern thought, moral disobedience, does not bring alienation from that oneness because it is a oneness of essence, not just of interpersonal relationship.
You can't separate yourself from the oneness because you're a part of the oneness. Now, the Brahman Atman, the Brahman Atman, the universal soul, the Brahman concept, is not a personal transcendent being, so it is incapable of being offended.
This oneness is not personal, therefore you cannot offend it. You are a part of that oneness. Sin for the Eastern religion is actually ignorance that prevents a person from realizing their oneness with everything else.
That's what sin is. So when you start saying, you believe in sin, they'll tell you, yeah, I don't commit sin, but that's not what they're thinking. They don't think what you think. Sin to them is ignorance that prevents a person from realizing their oneness with everything else.
Ignorance is the root of all discontent. That's why you find most people in Eastern mystic thought, you find who? You find your college student. You find somebody who really is a student. I mean, they like to study.
They like to read. Almost all of them do. They enjoy reading things. They enjoy dealing with books. They enjoy debate. They enjoy sitting around and dialoguing because they are interested in learning.
Most of them. There are exceptions to this. So because they believe ignorance is the root of all discontent, which according to Eastern thought is derived from the desire to grasp and to hold on to things, whether they are material, intellectual, or personal, and they're not interested in any of those three.
The overcoming factor is enlightenment, to be enlightened. Failure to attain such a release will condemn a person to a continuing process of rebirths, reincarnation. A continuing process of rebirths into other forms of life, samsara, other forms of life.
You just continue to go through that if you don't attain enlightenment. You just keep doing that on through and on through. Now, salvation for the Eastern religion, this is the experience of the oneness.
You see these kids, you can go out in parks and see kids sitting there with their legs crossed just staring. They're trying to get into that oneness. They're trying to find that oneness that they're talking about of himself with all things.
Now, varying terms are used by the Buddhist and the Hindu, and I have some of them here. We mentioned one. Moksha is one of them. Samadhi is, oh, I got it up here somewhere, I thought. Maybe I didn't.
I don't see it up there, but Samadhi is one of them. Satchitananyam is one, and these are words they use. Satori is one that they use, and these are just words or terms they use to define getting into this oneness.
Now, this experience cannot be verbal. It has to be entered into. You ever heard that? I hear that all the time. It's not called mysticism, it's called something else. There's some quote Christian groups running around, saying you got experience, you got to get into it.
You got to get with it. We can't tell you about it, you just can't talk about it. You got to experience, you got to taste it before you can tell it, and all that stuff, and they throw that at me. And basically that's where it all started, over there in Eastern mysticism.
It is not distanced from any man, for through his innermost soul he shares an essential oneness which underlies the external universe. Salvation to the Eastern religion is realizing what we are rather than becoming what we should be.
That is what salvation is. Just realizing what we are, we are part of the oneness of the universe, rather than getting saved and getting regenerated and becoming what we should be. This requires the loss of personal self-consciousness or ego consciousness.
That's why they just don't worry about themselves. They don't care what you think about them. You see them in their long hair and ponytail or pigtails or bald-headed and wearing robes. They don't care what you say about them, because they don't worry about themselves.
They are not interested in themselves. They are trying to throw it away, so they say. So when a person becomes enlightened, he states, I am Buddha, I am Brahman, I am Brahman, I am Buddha, and he just says that to himself, because then he has become enlightened.
He is a part of this oneness God. Now there are different avenues to enlightenment or union, and these are called yoga. Yoga, I don't care what you see on television, I don't care what, and I know many Christians have think that it's a form of little physical exercise, and so they start getting into yoga.
Yoga is Eastern mysticism, and these are the different forms of yoga, and the little exercise is just one phase of yoga, but it is Eastern mysticism, and it is forbidden to the Christian. If you want to lose weight, push yourself away from the table, and you don't have to worry about bending your leg around your neck, and all of that stuff that they do.
Just get a little discipline. For the intellectual people who want to get into the intellectual part of yoga, there is Yanana, this one here, Yanana, that's the intellectual part of it, and the many subtleties of Zen Buddhism.
You've heard much about Zen, Zen, Zen Buddhism, that is the intellectual form of yoga. Now there is another one for the good works enthusiasts, people who like to do good works, there is karma yoga, karma yoga.
Good karma takes a person near enlightenment. Bad karma results in a step down to the next reincarnation. You might come back as an ant if you're not careful, and have to run for your life all the time, but if you do good, you might come back as an elephant.
You might get stamped on the anus, and so who knows what you might come back as. Now for the religious ritualist, a person who likes to get into religion, and really wants to have these religious thoughts, see they're different ones, there are all kinds of them, and that is krija, krija, yoga, krija, yoga.
Now there's another one that is very predominant, but you don't hear them talk about it. Most people think, when you see yoga, don't you say, boy these are really good clean living people, they're vegetarians, and all the stuff, but there's another one called tantric yoga, and that is sexual.
If you want to get into sexual copulation, and really live it up, then you get into tantric yoga, and it's an eastern mystic, and all they do is sit around and have sexual experiences all the time. A lot of people involved in that, but they don't understand it's yoga.
They call it something else, but that's basically a part of yoga, and that's a part of sexual copulation. It's a discipline, it's a discipline, and that's why they go out, they get onto these guys, and they learn everything they can learn, and they just are just out like dogs, running around the street, wherever they go, that doesn't matter, and that's it.
That's why your colleges have such a problem, because this thought has infiltrated the thinking of the young people, and they are aware of it. Even high school kids are aware of it. Now in the western world, the most significant in the movements is the one called bhakti.
Bhakti, it's down here, you can't hardly see it, yoga. Bhakti, yoga, that is the one that's most significant in ours. It involves a religious devotion, and a service to a spiritual master, a guru, a guru.
Did that tape just pop? Okay, hearing noises already, and so that's what it is, a spiritual character, spiritual, and a devotion to a spiritual master. Now this is as close as eastern thinking ever gets to a personal relationship with what you might call, quote, a god, end quote.
We'll be talking about a couple of those in the next day or so. All of them have one common idea. A person finds his own salvation through a personal discipline, salvation by works, and his own effort, which has nothing to do with moral issues, and that is exactly the opposite of Christian thought, and how any Christian can think that transcendental meditation is something good is beyond me.
They are biblically ignorant. Any Christian, I don't care, and I know a lot of preachers, I know a pastor who was a missionary for years, and I'll be very honest with you, he's been given a position on the foreign mission board, a special position that he's been given, and this guy, when he goes to my dentist, and my dentist said, every time he enters, he says, now before you work on me, let me get into it, and he starts, he lays there, and he starts getting into his thing, and he has to get into it before he'll let the dentist even deal with him.
How foolish, I was going to say, shoot the gas to me, put it on my nose, and I just flung a wrench under, and just let him do anything he wants to do, because that's just medical practice, sitting there using something that is alien to God, and contradicts the Bible and Christianity, and it's amazing to me how many people get involved in it, because they think it's harmless, but it isn't harmless.
Now Jesus Christ, when we deal with him, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Bible teaches that Jesus Christ was absolutely unique. He is the outstanding miracle of all ages, God in the flesh, God incarnate, God became like a little baby, I don't understand that, no one else does, but it is truth.
Now the whole Testament looks forward to him, and the Christians look continually back to him, and also to him presently, and also to him futuristically. Now why is that so? Because he not only taught, but he accomplished salvation, and he was perfect man, and he was also the eternal personal self-expression of the Godhead, the Trinity, John 1 -1, Colossians 1 -15, and others.
Now certain schools of Hinduism, Bhakti Yoga, Bhakti Yoga is one of them, and one school of Buddhism, Mahayana, I wrote it up here, Mahayana, those two particular schools have a central theme in reaching enlightenment, and that is devotion to an avatar, an avatar, a savior, an avatar is a savior, and they have a devotion to him, he is a personal incarnation of God to them, he is to them what Jesus Christ is to Christianity, they believe that Jesus Christ was just one avatar, yes, sure he was a savior, do you believe in a savior, yeah I believe in a savior, what about the guru, he's savior too, he is an incarnation, Mohammed, you got the big movie Mohammed all over, Mohammed was an avatar, he is later revelation, you hear these people today running around, we got some revelation, we got some added information you need, well it's basically the same thought, it's just in a different context, through the grace of one of these avatars, a person can be granted enlightenment, we'll see this when we get into Transcendental Meditation and the chanting of the mantras and things of this nature that are given, now these various incarnations do not accomplish anything to secure salvation, they don't accomplish anything to secure salvation for anyone, they are transmitters of the enlightenment experience, they themselves do not consider themselves to be saviors in the sense that we consider Jesus Christ, they just transmit enlightenment information, they transmit this, they are not unique although it is generally believed that there can be only one true incarnation at any particular time, so we got a problem today don't we, we got several of them, but they themselves teach there can only be one true incarnation at one time, so if Maharaj Ji is an incarnation and then you got all the others, you got the young man who is the guru of Transcendental Meditation, that we'll look at him, he has a name about Anthony Longdahl.