MORE DOORS TO BE
WARY OF OPENING
There are lots of other occult beliefs out there. And, like we’ve said before, the same pattern emerges over and over again…particularly:
1. We don’t need Jesus to take the punishment for our mistakes.
2. We can become God-like on our own.
3. Jesus Christ was a good teacher, but definitely not God the Son.
Most of these come under the heading of New Age. The ones we’ll take a quick look at are:
• Channeling
• Astrology
• Astral projection
• Yoga
• Meditation
• Crystal power
• Extrasensory perception
• Universalism
CHANNELING
Channeling is nothing new. It’s the same thing spirit mediums have been doing for centuries—giving control of their bodies and minds to unseen entities who speak through them. As we’ve seen these entities sometimes claim to be spirits of the dead, angels, or aliens from advanced civilizations in outer space.
The entities that speak through New Age channelers are only different in that they claim they are ancient spirits who have evolved over thousands of years and who have come back to share their wisdom.
We just mentioned Satan’s three favorite lies. Let’s take a look at a couple of today’s most popular channeled entities and see how their teachings match up. By the way, if you haven’t read chapter 3, now might be a good time to give it a look.
SETH
Seth began speaking through a woman named Jane Roberts in the 1960s. From that time until her death in 1984, Roberts produced a number of books bearing Seth’s name that have sold millions of copies.
Roberts first began to channel “Seth” when she and her husband were writing a book on extrasensory perception. They were using a Ouija board to do research for their book when they began to receive messages from someone who identified himself as Frank Withers. Soon Withers changed his mind about his identity, explaining, “I prefer not to be called Frank Withers. That personality was rather colorless. You may call me whatever you choose. I call myself Seth. It fits the me of me, the personality more clearly approximating the whole self I am, or am trying to be.”1
Seth described himself as “an energy personality essence no longer focused in physical reality.”2
Most of the books “Seth” wrote were dictated through Roberts’ voice while she was in a trance. Writing as Seth she says, “You are given the gift of the gods; you create your reality according to your beliefs; yours is the creative energy that makes your world; there are no limitations to the self except those you believe in.”3
Is it my imagination, or does this sound a lot like, “You have within you the power to become like God”?
RAMTHA
Seth’s books continue to be popular today, but his popularity has been usurped by the new kid in town…Ramtha. He claims to be a 35,000-year-old spirit and calls himself “the enlightened one.” He’s channeled by a woman named J.Z. Knight. Ramtha seems to love the spotlight. He makes numerous public appearances, where he gives convoluted advice to wide-eyed believers who have paid up to $1,000 apiece for the privilege of hearing his wisdom.
Ramtha claims to have lived on Lemuria, an ancient but highly advanced civilization that sank into the Pacific Ocean eons ago. There’s no evidence to prove that Lemuria ever existed, but Ramtha’s devotees completely believe it.
In his book Channeling, author Jon Klimo describes Ramtha’s appearances:
Knight goes into a deep or cataleptic trance, calming her body so that “Ramtha,” a powerful male presence, can enter. “Ramtha” speaks in a somewhat archaic, stylized manner, claiming to have been incarnated 35,000 years ago as a spiritual and political leader known as “The Ram” who came from fabled Lemuria into what is now India....
“Ramtha’s” theme is that we are like gods; part of God, yet unconscious of this identity. Nonetheless, we create our own realities within which to express ourselves, against which to react, from which to learn, and in which to evolve. This is a view that is virtually identical with the “Seth” teachings as well as with many other channeled materials.4
Sound familiar? Like so many others, Ramtha insists we must learn to “worship” ourselves:
The reason that I am here is to tell you how important that you are. Because the only way that one enters into the Kingdom of Heaven, ’tis not through the worship of another but the worship of the All. And the only way you can ever comprehend the All is from your point of view. And your point of view is called God and that is where you find Him. How do you think, my beloved people, that you ever become? By following someone else, by worshiping something you never saw and never understood? You become by worshiping you.5
And, of course, Ramtha also seems to claim a special “god-likeness” for himself:
I choose to come back in this fashion in this embodiment as a woman, not to demonstrate that a man and a woman can live together peacefully—they can—but [to demonstrate] that God is both man and woman, equally and evenly. [I choose to come back in this fashion] to not leave you any images that you could bolt around your neck or put up on your wall or carve into stone, because you have always been notorious for worshiping others.6
Sounds like a little reverse psychology. “Okay, you got me...I’m a god...but don’t worship me. And whatever you do, don’t worship anyone else...except, of course, the god that lies within.”
As we see, there’s nothing at all new about entities such as Ramtha or the messages they bring. Incidentally, Douglas James Mahr, who was once Ramtha’s “chosen scribe” and recorded the words of Ramtha quoted above, has since become a Christian and no longer believes in the message or the power of “the enlightened one.”
ASTROLOGY
Astrology says that our personalities and our lives are governed by the position of the stars and planets. Most people will tell you they don’t put much faith in astrology. But nearly every major daily newspaper in America carries an astrology column and a daily horoscope—and they wouldn’t waste the space if people didn’t read them.
Astrology is a form of fortune-telling that subtly denies the power of God. Boil it down to its basic essence, and it teaches that we’re dependent on the position of the stars and planets rather than the grace and will of God.
God himself mocks the practice of astrology when he says through the prophet Isaiah:
Let your astrologers come forward, those stargazers who make predictions month by month, let them save you from what is coming upon you. Surely they are like stubble; the fire will burn them up. They cannot even save themselves from the power of the flame. (Isaiah 47:13-14)
Besides denying the power of God, astrology isn’t true for several other reasons. The most important of these is that the entire belief system was constructed on the mistaken idea that the stars rotate around the earth. Also there are huge disagreements among astrologers regarding the nature of the signs of the zodiac, which are essential in mapping out an individual’s horoscope. Some astrologers believe there are eight signs of the zodiac, while others insist there are 12, some 14, and still others 24.
Obviously astrology is anything but an exact science.
Some people get hooked on it because it seems to work, at least part of the time. Of course it does. You’d have to be an unbelievably terrible fortune-teller to be wrong all the time. Besides, a lot of events related to astrology may simply be self-fulfilling. Someone gets up in the morning and reads his horoscope. It tells him he’s going to have a rough day. So he goes off to work thinking, I’ll sure be glad when this day is over. He expects the worst, and he makes it happen. He performs sloppily on the job, he thinks others are out to get him, and at the first sign of any trouble, he throws up his hands and says, “I knew today was going to stink!”
But the main reason to avoid astrology is that God is against it when he says:
When you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the LORD your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven. (Deuteronomy 4:19)
ASTRAL PROJECTION
Astral projection, or “soul travel,” is the belief that we as human beings can project our souls out of our bodies at will. There are classes where students are supposedly taught how to do this through controlled breathing, meditation, visualization, and other occult-oriented techniques.
In preparing for this book, I watched an instructional video from one of these classes. The instructor laughed as he told his students that soul travel was such a natural occurrence to him that he often forgot to take his body with him. Just the other night, he said, he had decided to get out of bed and go into the kitchen for a snack. It wasn’t until he reached for the doorknob and it went right through his hand that he realized he had left his body lying on the bed.
His eager, young students all laughed, obviously anxious for the day when they, too, would become adept at astral projection.
But is it really possible to treat my body like an overcoat, putting it on and taking it off at will?
In California a researcher named Dr. Charles Tart achieved mixed results when he conducted experiments with a woman who was supposedly adept at astral projection. She was asked to “travel” into another area to read a number that had been written on a piece of paper.
She was correct only one out of four attempts.7
Not very impressive. Dr. Tart did say, however, on one occasion, the woman seemed able to read a clock that was not visible from where she sat. Now we’re talking two out of five. Forty percent. Still not terribly convincing.
Nothing in the Bible specifically forbids astral projection. But if it’s possible to judge a philosophy by the company it keeps—in this instance, communication with departed spirits and reincarnation—then soul travel isn’t something I’d encourage anyone to try. It’s an occult-type experience that, if sought after, can open the door to other, more clearly dangerous practices.
Whether or not soul travel is actually possible, I certainly believe that our enemy can cause an illusion and make it seem to happen. As a result, people who are seeking after this experience may be seeking something that can be dangerous and deceptive.
Some who believe in astral projection point to occurrences in the Bible where God supernaturally moved people great distances in an instance. For example, in the eighth chapter of Acts is the account of Philip’s conversion of the Ethiopian eunuch. The Bible says that after the eunuch was baptized, “When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again, but went on his way rejoicing. Philip, however, appeared at Azotus, and traveled about, preaching the gospel in all the towns until he reached Caesarea” (Acts 8:39-40).
There is no way this can be construed as soul travel. Philip was in one place, and then the next moment, he was somewhere far away—body, soul, and spirit. It was Philip’s entire being that traveled, not just his soul.
I once heard a man who was a medical missionary to Africa tell about a similar experience. He was in his office, catching up on some paperwork, when some villagers came running in, yelling for him to come quick because one of their friends had suddenly fallen ill. The missionary grabbed his bag and ran out of his office, and the next thing he knew, he was running up to the sick man’s hut. He had instantaneously covered a distance of nearly three miles.
The villagers who had come to enlist his help later told him that they had seen him come running out of his house, but that he had then immediately vanished. The situation was urgent, so God supplied the means of travel.
But again, it wasn’t merely this man’s soul that traveled but all of him. And, he hadn’t sought the experience. God gave it when it was needed.
YOGA
Yoga can be, but isn’t always, another component of the New Age package. Some adherents insist that yoga is simply a series of exercises and meditations designed to keep the body and mind healthy. It’s just a way to stay fit, they say, and what could be wrong with that? On the surface, nothing. And if a person stays at that level, there’s probably little harm. But those who have studied yoga closely say it goes much deeper. Real yoga is more than a way to stay fit. It’s a Hindu form of worship.
The MSN Encarta Online Dictionary says that yoga is “a Hindu discipline that promotes spiritual unity with a supreme being through a system of postures and rituals.”8
Douglas Hunt, in his pro-occult book Exploring the Occult says, “Yoga means much the same word as yoke in English, and it is a system designed to link the human with the source of his being. In other words, it has almost exactly the same meaning as the word religion which also is supposed to yoke man to his Master.”9
One wonders which Master.
He laments the fact that Westerners don’t always see the religious “benefits” yoga has to offer and that we’re “seldom able to look at anything more than the physical or material aspect of anything.”10
But refusing to look at the religious aspects of yoga doesn’t make them go away. If someone says to me, “I know yoga involves worshiping Hindu gods, but I’m not serious about that, so it’s okay for me,” my response is, “You might be right.” Still, if you go deeper and look at the root of the practice, it’s impossible to miss the fact that yoga is directly connected to false gods, and for that reason, it could be potentially dangerous.
For example, one of the most important aspects of yoga is mind-emptying…
MEDITATION
Unlike biblical meditation, where we’re encouraged to fill our minds with God and his Word, Eastern meditation encourages us to empty our minds.
And that’s a huge difference.
Let me tell you about Mark…
Like many of us, he was running as fast as he could, only to get further and further behind. The stress became so bad that he couldn’t sleep more than a few hours at night. He lost his appetite. There was a constant tightness in his chest and a burning sensation in his stomach.
A coworker suggested he try Eastern meditation. His friend told him he had tried it himself, and it had calmed him down, given him a positive outlook, and helped him learn to cope with day-to-day frustrations.
It sounded great. Even though Mark remembered something about this form of meditation involving “mystical” religious practices, it didn’t bother him. He was ready to try anything and figured that meditation had to be better than a daily dose of Prozac.
Mark found that meditation was everything his coworker said it would be. Almost immediately he felt renewed and relaxed. He meditated as often as he could…even at work. He would close the door of his office, recite his mantra, and leave his worries behind. Even though Mark was a dedicated Christian, he wondered how he had ever managed to get by before he had discovered meditation.
At his deepest, most peaceful moments, he felt he had made contact with benevolent spirits from beyond this world—beings that were beautiful, loving, and full of joy and peace.
It got to the point where it was easy for Mark to slip into a dreamlike state. It was almost like a trance.
And that’s when he had the vision.
On a quiet, still evening, all alone in his living room, Mark had an encounter with something evil—something that had been waiting for him in the depths of his meditation experiences.
I said it was a vision. Mark wasn’t so sure. To him the creature was suddenly in the room with him, urging him deeper and deeper into the trance-like state, mocking him and daring him to just try to regain control of his life.
“I was aware,” he told me, “that I was falling into the hands of someone who I didn’t want to even touch me.”
“Was it Satan?” I asked.
“If it wasn’t, it came pretty darn close.”
“Why did the ‘creature’ choose that moment to reveal himself?”
“I have no idea. Maybe they figured I was so far gone that they had me, so they had nothing to lose by revealing themselves to me.”
“Themselves?” I asked.
“The ones who are behind it all,” he said. “Satan and his demons.”
CRYSTAL POWER
This is a fad that comes and goes. Are crystals dangerous?
No more than your average rabbit’s foot or four-leaf clover. But they can be very big in the New Age world and are supposed to attract positive energy, bringing health and luck.
No surprise.
Crystals have been an important part of the occult for centuries. Every self-respecting fortune-teller has traditionally had a crystal ball to “reveal secrets” about the future.
I suppose it’s easy to see why crystals have such attraction.
They’re beautiful. They’re geometrically perfect. They can break white light into a dazzling display of colors. They can convert radio-frequency energy into audio-frequency energy. And they make beautiful drinking glasses.
But they’re not magical.
I’ve been in South American and African countries where the poor have all kinds of charms and good luck pieces they put their hope and trust in. We can call them superstitious. We can call them primitive. But couldn’t these items just as easily be crystals?
Now that still doesn’t say there’s anything wrong with the New Age interest in crystals, does it?
No.
The problem is when someone looks to a crystal to keep him safe, healthy, and prosperous. He has given that crystal the place in his life that God deserves. It’s become a type of idol, and we all have a pretty good idea of how God feels about idols.
ESP AND PSYCHIC RESEARCH
Like the crystals we’ve been talking about, extrasensory perception and psychic research can be judged by the company they keep. They’re usually lumped together with things like fortune-telling and spirit communication. As a result interest in extrasensory perception may invariably lead to an interest in other, more deeply occult matters.
When I was researching my novel, Threshold, I was amazed at the amount of time and money scientists were devoting to the study of ESP. The CIA alone had spent more than $20 million and over 20 years of research. In many instances the results are quite impressive, proving by science what we already know by faith—the existence of a supernatural world.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that more often than not, these well-meaning men and women are entering the world of the occult without even knowing it.
I’ll never forget visiting one of the top psychic research labs in the world as it carried out an extensive ESP experiment. There, at the center of their experiment, sat a Ouija board. (Check out chapter 6).
ESP, psychic research, and other dabblings in the occult—regardless of our intentions or intellect—are risky ventures. And my advice to these folks is the same as to anyone else: Don’t get involved.
If we play with the devil’s fire, we’ll eventually get burned.
UNIVERSALISM
There are lots of other beliefs and practices that fall under the heading of New Age. But the final one I want to discuss is universalism, the belief that all religions ultimately lead to God and that everyone will eventually be saved. People who subscribe to this belief consider traditional Christianity to be narrow-minded and divisive. I understand their position. But if it comes down to me believing in what the latest fad teachings and trends say or in what Jesus Christ himself says, I’m putting my trust in the man who raised himself (and three others) from the dead and who most people claim to be one of the greatest teachers of all time.
And, according to him, there’s only one way to heaven:
I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. (John 14:6)
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life...Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. (John 3:16, 18)
I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. (John 11:25-26)
You can’t get much more clear than that.
So what have we learned about the “New Age”? Simply that there’s nothing new about it.
At best it’s a marketing campaign, an attempt to take some of the oldest tricks in the book and dress them up in shiny new packages. At worst it comes from our enemy, the father of lies, who’s always looking for a new angle to steal, kill, and destroy.