Cultish: Engaging the New Age

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Welcome everyone back to cultish entering the kingdom of the cults. My name is

00:05

Jeremiah Roberts I'm one of the co -hosts here, and I'm excited because we this is the first episode we are doing where we are

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We are filming and I'm excited because we are gonna be on we're gonna be put up on you

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We're gonna be on YouTube and not long after this podcast is released So it's something we'll be doing regularly to kind of get out to a lot more of a broader audience

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So I'm very very excited for that and with me as always is my trusted pastor friend and co -host

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Jeff Durbin. How are you man? What's up? I'm good, man. I'm excited about this particular episode. Yes. I am important.

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Yes. I'm very very excited so we've always wanted to jump into the world of the New Age and the occult and Just because that's a very prominent factor right now in our culture in today's day and age

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It's also has had there as a huge influence in the world of the cults Whether it's Joseph Smith jr

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And his his occultic activity when he tried and convicted for glass -licking those sorts of things You look at the

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Netflix documentary which just came out which it was a huge Huge hit that people talked about all over the culture

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Which was while while country talking about the Rajneesha cult in the late 80s and those aspects and those have those have a large

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New Age aspect so I am very very excited today because a lot of you may be familiar with him

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We have a special guest with us today Stephen Bancars, how are you my friend?

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I'm good. Thanks for having me on good good So I'm I'm excited because you know, the

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New Age is a very very broad It's very it's a very broad field and you know, there's a lot of terminology there

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But I think it's really good to you know, obviously to find definitions and things like that But um, can you just tell everyone we were having you as a guest to talk about that tell everyone about Your experience and what you would say kind of in a sense qualifies you to really talk on this subject at hand that we're going to Discuss right?

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Well in a nutshell I was a elite author on the largest New Age website in the world and I had my own

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New Age website, which was one of the largest in the world getting hundreds of thousands of views a day

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To make a long story really short short. I was actually on Apology a radio you guys released

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Me talking more about my testimony on your YouTube channel Yeah, so I'll make that part a little condensed, but you know,

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I was born and raised in a Christian household It was the topic of aliens Ancient aliens a program on the history channel that led me down a rabbit hole into New Age Philosophy which turned into practice

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And then I started to try and present this stuff to the public I created the Facebook page in November of 2012 to be kind of a hub of my the research

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I'd come across and In January of 2014 after my Facebook page had about 600 ,000 followers

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I launched my website, which was spirit science and metaphysics calm. I was you know Sharing my articles on massive massive

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Facebook pages like spirit science the mind unleashed higher perspective collective evolution

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Millions of eyes were on my articles each week. I was making, you know, forty fifty thousand dollars a month and ad revenue off This website.

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This was my career. It was my passion I could argue circles around anybody including my Christian parents and it reached a point in my life where Long story short my sin started finding me out my brokenness was catching up with me not just my brokenness and sent in the sense of my emotional and psychological incompetence, but my

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Spiritual depravity was making itself really known It was at the forefront of my life The degree to which

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I was failing at being Lord over my own life and the degree to which I felt convicted that I was sinning against people and sinning against God and that was something new that happened near the end of my tenure in The new way to open this conviction that there's a personal

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God who I have I have wronged I have offended and so I said a prayer a prayer of salvation with my mother in a moment of brokenness

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Two weeks passed by nothing really changed Until I had to confess another round of sin in my life and that's when

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I bottomed out That's when I hit rock bottom. I had nothing left. I had no place to turn but But Jesus, you know when

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Jesus turns to his disciples and he says do you want to leave too? I believe it's in John 6. Yeah, and they say Lord, where shall we go?

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You have the word to eternal life. I had nowhere to go and I'm just weeping at his feet Asking for forgiveness telling him

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I need him I it was just all these emotions and expressions all at one time and I was born again.

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He met me there I was made a new creature in Christ in a five -minute encounter in his presence and I was filled with the

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Holy Spirit. I knew it was the Jesus of the New Testament. He's Lord He's the Son of God. I went back into my my house my stupid, you know 4 ,000 square foot house

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I was living in as a 22 year old You know living what I thought was the dream and the New Age movement and I never wrote another

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New Age article moving forward I repented publicly online to hundreds of thousands of people and I've been in full -time ministry the last three years you know have a

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YouTube channel I have a new book out and Yeah, I've been serving the Lord and I guess you could call that apologetics ministry ever since that so I do have kind of a lengthy background in the

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New Age movement and Yeah, it's a joy to be able to expose it now. Yeah, and in fact, it's been a really cool to kind of follow me

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I've been following you almost I think the very first video I saw was right After you had released that first video of you telling your testimony

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And you going into a lot more in -depth about when you saw a creation and and how it was worshipping God And that was and kind of seeing how you how you've have progressed and how you how

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God has used you With them just with the aspect of apologetics So there's a new book that you have co -authored here with Josh Peck.

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I'm gonna hold up here so the people can see it It's called second coming of the New Age So most of the time you've just been you know

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Posting stuff on Facebook and you've been you know, writing out articles, which is very healthy and informative You've done some very good high quality content

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YouTube videos and you've gotten a huge following How many YouTube subscribers do you have right now? As of right now, it's about a hundred and twenty thousand subscribers.

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Okay, and Yeah, but a hundred twenty thousand. Okay. Yeah I mean this was some great videos talking about the imprint the influence of Oprah Winfrey in the

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New Age or you have one talking About we're gonna talk about to You know the experience of astral projection and what that is.

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We'll definitely get into that But what I want to ask you I just have one question. Yeah, so and people hearing about your your testimony

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Steven Can I ask you just this in a personal level because we're gonna the deeper worldview stuff here.

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Yeah, right So what was appealing to you about the New Age because that is such a pop culture phenomenon

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People grabbing hold of this. We have a church plant in the island of Kauai The New Age is massive on the islands of Hawaii And so what was so appealing to you so attractive being raised in a

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Christian home? Knowing what of course the Word of God says about this sort of stuff and knowing I'm sure your parents, you know

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Steer it trying to steer you away from it. What was the what was the carrot like what?

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What was it that it was so attractive to you that it really caused you to sort of fall headlong into it

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There were two carrots, I guess. There's probably a lot of them, but I think the two main ones for me was that there was an appeal and a sense of superiority superiority that would come alongside of the

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Delusion of having secret knowledge and a lot of material that New Age lecturers and talkers and authors will

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Present to people it's stuff that the Christian worldview often doesn't let me phrase it this way

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It can account for most definitely and I didn't know that but but Christian pastors Christian authors

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Christian speakers Don't normally go there because it's a little bit weird. It's a little bit fringe That's why a podcast like this is so important because there are certain topics that I had never heard addressed before by the church

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I thought the New Age interpretation of these issues Was the only game in town and I'm talking about things like I don't know

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The alleged evidence for reincarnation coming through regressive hypnotherapy. I'm talking about things like ancient astronaut theory

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Things like evidence for a relationship between consciousness and the physical world. I thought this stuff precluded

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The Christian worldview and I thought okay, here's stuff that I think You know It made me feel intellectually superior to Christians knowing here's all the secret knowledge.

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I have access to that. They don't And I guess another thing as well is that the supernatural the supernatural interaction ism

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You know, the Bible is very clear when it comes to these practices and I want to go over a couple passages in Scripture here

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You know first Corinthians 10 at verse 20 Paul says I imply that what pagans offer unto idols they offer unto demons

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And he says you can't sit at the table of the Lord in the table of demons You can't drink from the cup of the Lord and from the cup of demons

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Are we gonna provoke the Lord to jealousy? And so what Paul is describing here like an idol has not no intelligence

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No, no volition no sovereignty in and of themselves But the Bible is clear that there's a power

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Behind the idol that is demonic in nature that interacts with mankind if they are yielding themselves unto these idols

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You know Leviticus 17 7 when the children of Israel went apostate and started offering their children Unto the the pagan gods of foreign nations.

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It says that they were offering their children to go demons You know Acts 16 16 the woman's possessed with a spirit of divination or Pythonus and the

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Greek which gets into Greek mythology a Python spirit who would come in and and Possess people and give them the ability to to foretell the future and this woman was possessed with the spirit of divination or Pythonus Who was able to give her some kind of reliable predictability?

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To be able to foretell the future. They obviously can't see into the future but they can predict it with a certain degree of probability and The Bible oftentimes another example would be

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Exodus 7 And Exodus 8 where by their secret arts the magicians in Egypt were able to replicate the first three miracles of Moses and Aaron So there was there is a supernatural interaction ism present in the

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New Age movement If you're gonna go drop five grams of psilocybin mushrooms and try and channel et's for two hours on end

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You're gonna make contact with something plain and simple. Well, that's interesting So even I'm bringing this up, but Jerry and I were talking about this before we actually cut the film on here

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There's a recent discussion between Alex Jones and Joe Rogan. Now Joe Rogan's a professed self -professed atheist, correct?

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Atheist slash agnostic. Yeah atheist So a functional atheist essentially, so and it's interesting if you watch that for our

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Discussion between Alex Jones. He says some things that normally you would think that Joe Rogan would mock and think we're nutty but because he puts it in the context of the secret knowledge is out there people are tapping into and Getting into another dimension through these different drugs and the different means to connect to the other world

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All of a sudden Joe Rogan is like fascinated by it and seems, you know, wow interesting Here's an atheist agnostic, but they can't buy into the

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Christian worldview But all the secret knowledge and all these other dimensions and aliens coming through and all these different things through the drugs and experiences

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That's so appealing. It's so attractive It is yeah, and I guess I would

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I would ask someone like that What do you believe the source in being is for higher spiritual dimensions and metaphysical entities?

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where did they come from because you have to appeal to something beyond nature in order to account for them and Where did the realms beyond nature come from like you need some kind of an explanation there if you continue to push

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People like that you'll eventually reach a place in their psychology where it's you know, textbook

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Romans 1 They're suppressing the truth and unrighteousness They want to get as much as they want to draw from as much of the supernatural world you as they can without having to Confront this, you know impending idea

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That's weighing on their conscience that there must be a personal designer who brought the physical and metaphysical realms into being everything need to first cause

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But yeah, Joe Rogan has been popularizing this stuff Oprah Winfrey has been popularizing this stuff

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Ellen DeGeneres Jim Carrey Russell brand It's very appealing when people at the highest levels of social influence are

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Promoting this type of spirituality. It does it does give it more of a mass appeal because you're thinking here these popular people

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They're in agreement with it. It must not be that that fringe Yeah, and I think it's also important to especially understand from a

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Christian worldview Is that you know the when you hear people like some of the clips we're going to play and in the conversations we're having

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I think Steven you'd agree that a lot of times most Christians will hear about your experience and they're somewhat weirded out by it

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And they almost sort of like disbelieve that until you show them by Scripture when it talks about the different dimensions

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I know the spiritual realm the heavenly places like these are real and these experiences that There people are talking about especially when it comes to things like what we can we'll talk about like astral projection and lucid dreaming and and those

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Experiences and especially when it even when it comes to Demonology and UFOs and aliens those things are real and people are experiencing things and there you have what they perceive to be power

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But just because it's real doesn't necessarily mean it's a good thing That's right.

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Yeah So what's really helpful in discussing with people in the New Age movement is to be able to affirm their worldview as Much as you possibly can in the sense that yeah,

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I do believe that there's entities that exist in a higher dimension I do believe you're making contact with them

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I do believe when you're smoking DMT or drinking ayahuasca or dropping psilocybin mushrooms that you're you're making contact with these entities

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And I do believe they're telling you everything they're telling you now What is our interpretive standard by which we're gonna judge the the validity and the origin of these experiences?

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And when we go to the biblical text, it's very clear that yeah, you know Satan is called the prince of the power of the air There is a demonic air kingdom.

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The Bible calls the spiritual the heavenly places for example in Ephesians 6 and You know

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Astral projection for example, I believe it's 1st Corinthians 12 where Paul talks about how he was taken up into the third heaven and So here's

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Nate. He says he doesn't know whether he was in or out of his body during this experience And so whatever the encounter is when it when it comes to New Age experience a

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New Age practice It is a helpful apologetic not to try and convince these people that they're hallucinating when

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Christians in my life tried to do that It made them seem really unbelievable and really naive and made me think wow

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I know more about the secret nature of things and the true nature of the spirit world than these Christians do

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That they can't possibly have the truth if they're still eating, you know Spiritual baby food and here

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I am leaving my body at will and you know, people are telling me I'm hallucinating it It's like yeah, because you experience these things.

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I experience these things. Yeah, and so it does make it seem unbelievable Can you give just a quick I know we have a lot to go through here

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Even in terms of helping come Christians come to grips with the reality of the

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Spiritual and these things that actually occur because I agree with you. I've made contact in my life through demonic present stuff like me confronting a demon and a girl

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And and and other instances where that this is reality. This stuff is real This isn't just a fairy tale that we're not living out mythology here

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So, can you give everyone sort of an idea of what that was like for you so that you can help us understand?

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Why it was so easy for you to be dismissive to Christians that were just denying. Oh, you're just you're just hallucinating

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That's all in your head. Can you just describe what was that like for you? So that we can all understand how we need to actually approach this with the reality that the

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Bible says that it is Yeah, well my state of consciousness while I was out of body. I had two out -of -body experiences

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It was more vivid than it is now more Literal more real more visceral than it is now because right now our consciousness is being

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Filtered through a physical brain through a physical Organism and so there's you know mental fatigue.

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There's you know pollution in our bloodstream toxins in our bloodstream It's not a pure experience of consciousness of our soul

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And when I was outside of my body, it felt way more real and visceral than it does in the natural

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And I'm able to think just as clearly as I could outside of my body It was me. I was literally I saw my body. I've had so many different experiences.

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I've had I've left my body within lucid dreams. I've had dozens of lucid dreams. I've had false awakenings.

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I you name it I've experienced it in terms of different states of consciousness and so for a Christian to come into my field of research and what

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I believe was my field of expertise and To try and tell me you're not really experiencing those things. It's like, okay

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Well, you don't know the first thing right about the nature of spiritual things I don't care what you have to say about God about the soul about eternal life about the afterlife if You're not able to even meet me with experiences.

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I'm having on a daily basis I would walk around my house feeling more close to the astral realm than I did to the physical realm

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There was just this yoke that was resting on me. And these things are very very real actually I don't want to go to too much off base you guys stay on the new age

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But even even very recently I was involved in some areas of the body of Christ I shouldn't have been that God was telling me now

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He was convicting me on these things and this is important as well Like when it comes to what you could call hyper charismatic phenomenon hyper charismania, if you will

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Yeah, I don't believe that a lot of this is just people acting out in their flesh

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I believe a lot a lot of it is people coming under a different yoke from an imitating spirit that is imitating the

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Holy Spirit is imitating glory is Imitating fire and what you have is people in the body of Christ who are making the supernatural realm the functional

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Lord of their Life Jesus isn't Lord the spiritual is their Lord the Supernatural is their

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Lord and they're using the name of Jesus as a means to get to the end of the spiritual They're prostituting the name of Jesus as a springboard to get to their real

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Lord and Savior Supernatural experience and so when people are going to these, you know conferences if you will these hyper charismatic conferences

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I was listening to people who are in that circuit I was demon oppressed for a week for a week and a half and I was

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Experiencing symptoms that resembled the Kundalini awakening as outlined in the New Age movement and I realized hey

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I've read about these symptoms before I started doing research online. I'm talking sensitivity to light and to sound

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I'm talking about Feeling like I'm gonna have panic attacks panic in my chest. I'm talking about seeing a golden glow

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Everywhere in my waking state and all I did was yield to these teachers I didn't receive impartation not to hold another story

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But but the point is whether we're talking about other Spirits in the body of Christ or outside the body of Christ in secular arenas or in pagan arenas.

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There is a real Contact being made between these people and what the

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Bible will call the spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places And it makes us seem more credible when we affirm that Yeah, one thing

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I want to mention to Stephen just in regards to what you said about because I think I saw a Facebook post You'd made in regards to that and I was going to ask you about that.

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But you already brought it up I was also watching a video similarly of a very hyper charismatic group and there's a lady up on stage and So let me backtrack and say it was about a week ago

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I was having a Bible study with a Jehovah's Witness Sharing the gospel of them and in understanding terminate one thing about Colts to is that there's always a terminology

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There's always a language barrier and you under you always have to define your terms and the reason why we call this the

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New Age cult is because Walter Martin's classic definition of cult is any sort of group or Organization that tries to imitate or be in line with Christianity or essentially say in line with the

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Bible But they distort its fundamental teachings and we're gonna kind of unravel how the New Age movement does that we're now there

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They're using Christian terminology, but the rewrapping and practical pagan philosophy

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So when I was talking with the Jehovah's Witnesses, we were getting on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit And I noticed constantly he would say

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Holy Spirit He wouldn't say the Holy Spirit and then when we got into it the

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Jehovah's Witnesses They believe the Holy Spirit's not God It's not a person but it's an impersonal

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It's Jehovah's impersonal force and it just so happens when this lady was up on stage She was saying the exact same thing.

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She was talking about we need to experience Holy Spirit Like it was this sort of like it was almost like it was this is transcendent force

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But which gives you almost into like an altered state of consciousness, so I definitely would agree with you there So I want to under I want to just jump in here also real quickly

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So as you mentioned you've now been a ministry for about three years and it's been amazing watch you grow But you just co -authored a brand new book with a you co -author with Josh Peck is called second coming of the

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New Age I'll hold up here so you guys can see it Now you've done a lot of video content and you've you've gone around you've done speaking events what prompted you to write this book

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Well, the Holy Spirit did ultimately But what what I saw in the body of Christ was a need for there to be a modern resource

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We can put into the church's hands That will give them kind of a miniature crash course of What the main rebuttals and arguments are that New Agers and New Age teachers put forth a grant against the

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Christian worldview and how to arm ourselves with biblical scientific historical and philosophical responses to the points that they're making and so I wanted to make a

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Resource where it's credible, you know, we have a forward written by a Bible scholar Dr.

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Michael Heiser It's not a sensationalist book. You know, we're not looking for a demon under every rock It's meant to be just an apologetic evangelical response to the

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New Age movement And I didn't really see a modern resource written by people who had actually experienced the very thing that the church could really have access to and dig its teeth into and and I also wrote this because I've had a lot of people who are on the fence

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We often take for granted How few people are actually saved in the

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New Age or sorry in Christianity? Like the perfect the professing church is much different from the actual church

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You have about 4 % of actual Christians who hold to Orthodox Christian theology

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And not everyone who holds to Orthodox Christian theology are saved I don't know how much how many what percentage professing

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Christians are actually saved But a book like this is perfect for those who are on the fence who aren't yet in relationship with Christ Who want to get there?

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and also for New Age New Age New Agers as well to be able to meet them where they're at with the concerns that they're bringing up so when

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I came to Christ and I was trying to tell people Jesus is the Son of God and I was giving historical evidence and You know other types of evidence to suggest that the

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Christian worldview is true this book chapter by chapter Represents rebuttals to the main objections they were giving to me.

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It was the same things over and over and over again So it really does hit at the most urgent issues

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Launched against the Christian worldview from the New Age side of the fence. Awesome. It's definitely an excellent resources I've already read through it.

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There's a couple chapters in particular that I read more than once that definitely caught my attention I'm excited to unpack it So what

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I want to do Steve and I want to really make sure we define our terms of people understand specifically what the

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New Age is and I I was texting you last night and what I was trying to I'll say it now which was talking about last night.

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Is that in your book in a sense? It's almost unintentionally because you had really haven't been a listen to much of Walter Martin's teachings

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But you know the show it is based off of the influence. The show has been influenced by Dr.

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Walter Martin's ministry and he was the first Bible answer man And he had just had he paved ground that people

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Unlike no one else before but not only did he write the book Kingdom of the cults. I'll hold up here He wrote a definitive book

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It's one of the definitive resources on the subject called Kingdom of the occult and in a weird way Your book is almost like a more modern -day abridged version of that And I think it's a very that's also very great resource as well

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But what I want to do is that I've got a couple of clips here Steven from Walter Martin's lectures some of his lectures he gave in the early 80s on the

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New Age and so what I want to do is I'm going to play a clip for him and then you can expand on it because the reason why

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Is because here it is like this clip was done in the early 80s And there's a lot going on back then about there's a big new age and a cult explosion and here

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We're now in our day and age where that's in a sense like that's happening again I think even on a higher level just because of today's culture and age

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So I'm just gonna play this clip and then you can go ahead and just further expand on what dr.

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Walter Martin says here The world of the occult is opposed to him and the world of the occult took form

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Within the 19th century of the Christian era in a way that it had never taken form before Many of the things

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I'm now saying I wrote about and lectured about over the last 35 years But I have lived to see the occult

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Crystallize I have lived to see them form networks I have lived to see them communicate with each other when before they wouldn't even talk to each other or Acknowledge their existence, but there has been literally an occultic explosion which in 1975 took the name the

25:27

New Age Movement, what is the New Age? it is a millennium without God a millennium without God It is the enthronement of man as the sovereign of the universe and the demotion of God Yeah, so Steven if you can just go ahead and expand on what dr.

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Walter Martin said there if you can for us Yeah, yeah, I would say Philosophically speaking that definition would be a little bit too broad and it doesn't it's not exhaustive nor is it narrow enough?

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So, you know scientism and atheism would both also be the a millennium without God and man is sovereign and the demotion of God When we're talking about the

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New Age movement, what we're really talking about here is a compilation of pagan beliefs and practices

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So the word pagan refers to any type of spirituality that deviates From that outlined in scripture

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But what makes the New Age movement different from paganism is you don't just have one set of pagan beliefs and practices

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It's a cumulative worldview a mixing pot of pagan beliefs and practices that draws from the likes of Buddhism Hinduism Kabbalah mysticism you name it and so some examples of New Age beliefs would be things like reincarnation the belief that you know you come back your soul incarnates over and over and over again to alleviate karma from a past life until you reach a state of Ascension or a state of moksha in which case you you now are you've left samsara the cycle of death and rebirth

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You know pantheism is the staple theology of the New Age movement, which I'm sure we'll unpack a little bit later the belief that God and the universe are identical to one another

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There's this and influence and I'm sorry this emphasis on on what are called chakras which are believed to be met metaphysical energy centers in the body that are responsible for Your your physical health and your psychological health

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And so if you have something wrong in your body or in your mind The solution is to cleanse one of these chakras these end of metaphysical energy centers with sage or with the use of crystals or different prayers and so forth another

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New Age idea would be that of the Kundalini which is believed to be this serpent of energy that resides at the base of your spine and Meditation and through yoga this serpentine energy is supposed to crawl up your spine through the energy centers in your body through your chakras and Illuminate your third eye and your third eye is believed to be

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The seat of the soul as Rene Descartes called it the the point where your spirit man and your physical body

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Connect to one another right and when that becomes enlightened and I'm not I'm not I'm not closed off to that idea

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Maybe that is the connection point at which our soul connects to our body but the point is is they believe something can happen to it spiritually where now you have some kind of psychic power and Insight and ability to get to the spirit world in the supernatural world through the opening of your third eye

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Which I just I believe that's just demonic Possession when a demon possesses you you now have special ability to see into the spirit just like act 16 16

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But what I want to what was really interesting to hear Walter Martin comment on I've never heard heard him before by the way but what was really interesting to hear him comment on was back in the

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The 70s and 80s. He's like now we're seeing new agers finally talk to each other They're finally willing to have public discussions about this.

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Yeah, I'm thinking to myself man We are Leaps and bounds beyond that like right now in the country of America, which is outnumber

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Presbyterian Christians Those who I didn't yeah those who identify as witches

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This is from the Pew Research Center in recent years those who identify as witches Is continuing to increased while increased while those who identify as Protestant Christians is has decreased in recent years

29:16

So the witch population is growing larger than the Protestant Christian denomination Yeah, you have about a hundred thousand more self -professed witches than Presbyterian Christians in the country of America and there's many people who are witches by association and by osmosis without self identifying is that you have 40 % of Americans who claim they met who meditate at least once a week you have 27 % of Americans who claim to be spiritual

29:40

But not religious you have yoga 36 million Americans practice yoga you have you know, it's a 10 billion dollar industry the psychic services industry things like palmistry

29:51

Tarot card reading astrology. This is a two billion dollar industry Our new study came out guys.

29:57

This is crazy. This this will tell you how pervasive This movement is in our culture this came out in October of 2018 by the

30:04

Pew Research Center It was a study that found that 62 % of the

30:10

American population holds at least one New Age belief But they only tested for four beliefs

30:17

They only tested for the belief that their spiritual energy and physical things for the belief in astrology

30:23

For the belief in reincarnation and for the belief that there's some kind of that psychics have reliable insight into the future

30:29

There's literally scores upon scores of New Age beliefs. They only tested for four and 62 % of the

30:36

American population holds at least one including 61 % of professing Christians from that study

30:42

Which these are staggering numbers. This is a social crisis. This is a theological crisis

30:48

This is no longer segregated to you know A handful of hippies at Burning Man or a handful of hippies in the 70s are living in Sedona, Arizona this is coming down from the highest levels of mainstream thought and it's now beginning to infiltrate literally every single area of Western culture from our schools to our churches and Statistics show it's growing at a rate never seen before in history and it now occupies the vast majority of mainstream thought and practice

31:16

Yeah, and in fact, I definitely agree with you with an infiltrating culture I mean, I think every single time like we frequent

31:23

Whole Foods and we have a place here called natural grocery Shores, and I think the last two times I've come in there.

31:29

There are just tons of posters for different Yoga meditation clinics and that was just very prominent.

31:34

You saw that in Kauai It was just that whole of the community board, which is full of all sorts of different on new age practices

31:40

Where were some of the things that you saw in Kauai that were like new ways give us some examples of that Jeff Oh goodness gracious. The whole island is covered in the

31:47

New Age Buddhism Taoism all that stuff is like underneath there like just like in terms of like historically rooted stuff and Paganism and all these different weird practices, but like for example one day

32:00

I was out doing tracks with my son yeah, and passed by this occultic shop selling all these different things like, you know that to communicate with the other side and Pendulums and all the stuff that you would need to sort of enter into that arena

32:13

But then as I as I walk past that I pointed out to my son then I pass a woman who was

32:19

Clanging cymbals wearing a night a robe and she's shouting Hare Krishna And then

32:25

I walked down a little bit farther and there's a guy in a Buddhist temple robe And he's you know, sort of bouncing around and doing his thing and you have a lot of sort of mainland

32:34

Americans coming over to the Hawaiian Islands bringing all this new stuff with them. It is absolutely

32:40

Everywhere on the island. Yeah, one thing I want to comment to Stephen is that I don't know if you saw the movie Dr. Strange the

32:46

Marvel movie and It was interesting just because that whole his characters that the evangel the

32:53

Avengers they take care of and they protect the physical realm Dr. Strange's role in his team.

32:59

They deal the paranormal and they're the ones who protect the astral realm and What's fascinating is that you had a video that you released about the dangers of astral projection?

33:09

We're gonna jump into that in a little bit But there's a particular scene they shot this if you've at least have seen the trailer.

33:15

There's a moment where you see You see, dr strange have this out -of -body experience where all of a sudden you see his astral body go out of his physical body and then the late then the his mentor or Or sensei whoever hurt his guru is showing him the these powers she says open your eye and then all of a sudden he starts astral projecting and What I realize is that I remember seeing that movie and then when

33:42

I saw your video when I watched your video and listened to You talk about that. That's the very first time

33:48

I ever heard about what astral projection was from the very first time

33:53

But what's fascinating though? Stevens that my point of reference when you have that video that came out when

33:59

I was watching it was that movie So here's a here's a main character in in Marvel and a hero.

34:05

Yeah, I mean hero That's his whole everything that he does is completely Occult like and I'm not saying that when you go boycott

34:13

Disney or Marvel anything like that But I think it's important to know that this is just that's an example of how in a day of the culture is normalizing and I think it's great to have you on Steven because it's important for people know we have to be able to give

34:26

Answers to these sorts of things because now with it with a main hero in the Marvel lineup

34:31

Who is propagating this ideology that we have to be able to give answers like we're giving now Exactly.

34:37

Yeah, it's been really desensitized. We're kind of used to seeing occult themes in in books and in movies

34:45

Back in maybe the 20s or 30s if that would have been a film in a movie theater It would have been a riot in the town.

34:51

People would have been throwing stuff at the screen There would have been you know in the newspapers, you know demon -oppressed

34:56

Filmmaker or whatever who knows what it'd be some kind of a witch hunt and now it's just you know, it's just normal You know, it makes probably a few people feel uncomfortable

35:04

But for the most part, it's just like oh, that's just astral projection. I have I have Christians I've had Christians who are you know, 10 years old 9 years old asking me about astral projection

35:13

Yeah asking me about the pineal gland. This is what kids are researching right now A lot of this goes back to the spirit science

35:20

YouTube series. It really does You know eight hundred thousand subscribers on this channel it's a cartoon and it makes these things really kind of accessible and kind of you know, almost cutesy to children and Extremely dangerous extremely that was the website

35:34

I was writing for yeah, and I was a part of helping him build his Facebook page and his website and such and Yeah, it's becoming really really pervasive to the point where you know, this is what kids are thinking about on a regular basis

35:46

It's not foreign to them. It would have been foreign to the entire population Even back in the 60s or 70s.

35:52

And now this is that this is the the the conversation pieces of children Yeah and in fact one of the things too when you talk about What Walter Martin was saying and how it is in today's?

36:03

Day and age and culture when talks with the New Age movement is getting organized and one of the way too is like I said

36:08

Through social media. And in fact when I was doing research, there's two people you may be familiar with these names there's a young lady millennial age lady named

36:15

Haley Reese and She does a lot of mediumship and she does a lot of spiritism and she makes it seem very hip and cool

36:22

That's and I realized that she has almost a million YouTube describers subscribers right now

36:27

There's another guy named Phil Goode who's all into astral projection Meditation chakras, he calls it like chakra science and a lot of these terms in terms that we'll go into but I think now he's got about 150 ,000

36:40

Subscribers on it just on his Instagram account. I just started following and just you know So there's there's constantly you see these people who are propagating this stuff and it's new and it's definitely exciting

36:51

So one thing Jeff, did you have anything that you want to say real quickly? No, I'll follow you. Okay So I think it's also important To get into is that so we've kind of explained like what it is

37:03

You have a couple different chapters. I want to talk about so chapter 3 of your book you go into A lot of the origins and history of the of the

37:13

New Age and kind of where it came from and well It will definitely jump into that So it's already interesting because there's been there's like this unholy lineage in a sense to where a lot of these philosophies and worldviews they're not

37:27

They're different but a lot of times they'll combine and they'll build on top of each other In fact, that's yeah, go ahead.

37:34

I was gonna say that's right. Go ahead Yeah, and so we had an episode we did one of our first episodes we did was through Jones colored glasses and what we did is we we really explained the origins and worldviews of Jim Jones and He and he really had he was not

37:50

Christian at all Cloaked Christian terminology But he had this very new age new age new thought and a lot of it came a lot of his ideas came from Theosophy and ultimately from India So there's a lot of on there's almost as an holy alliance of New Age thought that led to that mass suicide in Jonestown Guyana, so even again if you guys haven't checked out those episodes,

38:10

I definitely check it out. They're called three Jones colored glasses I think it's a second and third episode we released But um, what

38:16

I want to do is jumping back into going over the history and you can expound this and again This is a chapter three of your book second coming the

38:23

New Age If you guys want to actually get access to the book, you can purchase it You can go to this link a new age cult

38:29

Calm and you can actually get the book yourself It's definitely going to be a great and thorough resource and Steven you and Josh Peck have done a lot of good work

38:36

Compiling this together definitely a great read but I'm gonna go ahead and just play another clip here

38:42

Steven. I've just Walter Martin kind of summarizing The history and origins of the

38:47

New Age and how they build on top of each other Then I'm gonna kind of give you the ship again to go ahead and expand on The history and origins of the

38:55

New Age so people can understand where these philosophies come from. Here we go Entry a woman arose named

39:03

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. She was a full -blown Russian occultist and Rejected the foundations of Christianity outright

39:12

She chose instead the religion of Mother India and developed the cult which was known as theosophy the love of divine wisdom an innocuous little group of people

39:26

But the seeds of what we see today New Age thinking began to develop with Helena Blavatsky followed by Mary Baker Eddy Followed by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore and followed by a host of others

39:44

Who crystallized the thinking brought it together and began to give it a form?

39:51

It was canonized in the writings of Alice Bailey the daughter of an

39:56

Episcopal minister Who came to the conclusion that Christianity was bankrupt? Redefined all the terms in the light of theosophy and Hinduism which she accepted and Then proceeded to write a series of books in which she set forth what was known as the plan and the plan was a development of occultism and the

40:21

New Age and that has already reached some epidemic proportions throughout the world particularly in the

40:28

United States and What's in the United States unfortunately of an evil nature we have exported to you

40:37

All right, Stephen. So go ahead enough of what dr. Walter Martin said about some of that New Age lineage go ahead expand and tell us what how you how you address this in chapter 3 of your book

40:51

Yeah, yeah, I think The best way to address the the lineage in the history of the New Age movement is really starting in the

40:59

Garden of Eden Because Adam and Eve were the first Gnostics they were the first New Agers They were the ones who first believed they fell for the lie that through some kind of secret knowledge

41:12

Deification would result in a broad sense. That was the lie that was fed to them So this idea that some kind of knowledge of self through knowledge of self or some kind of secret divine

41:22

Contemplative knowledge that this will somehow result in man's deity. This is the first lie that was ever told to mankind

41:28

This is his first trick. This is his final trick This is the Luciferian spirit the Luciferian agenda, which we see throughout universally throughout every single

41:39

Popularizer of the New Age in the in the West they all had some kind of weird fascination With Lucifer and it starts with Helena Blavatsky or Helena Blavatsky Yeah, who really popularized

41:49

Eastern mysticism and occult philosophy in the West back in the late 1800s and in here someone to that, you know

41:56

She was known to be a racist. She was known to be a eugenicist. She said that World War two in Nazi, Germany Was a result of the father doing

42:08

Cleansing of the planet. She believed people with disabilities were a metaphysical Inconvenience because they caused some kind of disturbance on the metaphysical plane.

42:16

Wow, you know, she was pure evil incarnate here Here are some quotes from her. I'm gonna read some quotes from her main work her classic work.

42:23

Okay, here's someone who Professors of religion will call the mud the mother of the

42:29

New Age movement They'll say nobody has had a greater influence on New Age Philosophy and practice in the West then then this woman and here are some quotes of hers from volume 2 of the secret doctrine

42:38

You can check this out in this case It is but natural to view Satan the serpent of Genesis as the real creator and benefit benefactor the father of spiritual mankind

42:48

He can only be regarded in the light of a savior It is Satan who is the god of our planet and the only

42:54

God Satan the enemy of God is in reality the highest divine spirit

43:00

And we could go through another 100 plus quotes exactly like this. She was a Satanist.

43:05

She was a Luciferian She actually started a magazine called Lucifer and this was the Theosophical magazine the type of religion

43:11

She was teaching it was published through this Magazine called Lucifer which has now been renamed

43:16

Lucy's trust and that's their website for the Theosophical Society Lucy's trust and He mentioned

43:22

Alice Bailey Alice Bailey was like a disciple of hers and kind of her successor who channeled all of these materials through the ascended masters

43:30

You know this group of spiritually advanced beings who have ascended past a certain plane of existence to you know

43:36

They're now sixth and seventh ray entities who are bringing this knowledge Through her as a channel as a vehicle for the good of mankind, but if you read her material, she's

43:46

Luciferian as well Aleister Crowley would be another person someone who was called, you know, the most evil man to exist someone who said, you know

43:54

I didn't just want to be a Servant of Satan. I wanted to be his chief of staff Someone who called himself the beast 666 someone whose last words were

44:04

Satan get out Someone who openly admitted to making blood sacrifice to demons and based a lot of his philosophy on an encounter

44:11

He had with some entity named ayahuasca that he channeled in Egypt who just looks like a demon Someone who openly condoned human sacrifice for for magic rituals

44:21

He was a prominent influencer of the New Age movement his secret order called our Gentium Astrum This is the things that you would learn under Aleister Crowley These are things you can go to any bookstore in the

44:32

West and it's the exact same material This is the exact same material coming from Luciferians and Satanists throughout history is being taught to a

44:40

T Spiritual Satanism is New Age ISM Spiritual Satanism is a type of Satanism that's distinct from Levin Satanism, which is more

44:51

It's self -professing atheism But it doesn't check out that way if you actually read the

44:56

Satanic Bible as I did like two weeks after I got saved Which was not a very good idea, but I learned a lot

45:02

Anyway, here's a here's a quote from Anton LaVey just to just to sober people up who are listening Here's what he has to say about the

45:08

New Age movement. This is important He says in the scores of books lining the shelves of New Age bookstores There are instructions instructions for guided meditation creative visualizations out -of -body experiences

45:19

Getting in touch with your spirit guides fortune -telling by cards crystal balls or the stars

45:24

What if Satanists reclaimed reclaimed these for their own dark purposes and integrated them into rituals dedicated to the devil?

45:31

Where they rightfully belong New Agers have freely drawn upon all manner of satanic material adapting it to their own hypocritical purposes

45:39

New Age labeling is trying to play the devil's game without using his infernal infernal name.

45:45

So you know we document in that chapter very clearly a relationship between Satanic philosophy and New Age philosophy and how they have a tie throughout history

45:54

This is once again the exact same lie told by Satan in the Garden of Eden It really goes back to that place.

46:00

But now instead of a say a snake Trying to convince two people this now, it's

46:05

New York Times best -selling authors now, it's Oprah Winfrey now, it's Eckhart Tolle now, it's Deepak Chopra Feeding these lies to mankind and unfortunately, they're still buying it

46:15

I bought it Satan hasn't had to change his game plan in the last 6 ,000 years because it's still effective. Unfortunately.

46:20

Hmm Wow, that's uh, that's really some great insight there Steven. Um, this has been what we're gonna do here

46:27

Is that we've got a lot more to cover We are going to this is going to be the first part of this interview so Steven again

46:35

We thank you again for coming on here. We've got a bit more to cover We're gonna go ahead and knock that out in a part two so if you guys are listening to this on our podcast go ahead and leave us a review on iTunes go ahead and like and share this episode and This is very insight very insightful again.

46:51

If you want to get a hold of Stevens book Second coming of the new age the co -author with Josh Peck go to new age cult

46:58

Calm and you can it'll it'll forward you to Amazon where you can buy that book yourself and it's definitely a great resource