Is Psychology Connected To Eastern Religion?

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Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call featuring Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could join us. Coming up in today’s broadcast in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Book of Acts, and “Did Paul raise Eyuticus from the dead?” In Religion in the News, “A more positive approach to sexuality.” We’ll take a look at that story and examine the question: “Do Preterists believe in the Rapture?” We hope you can stay with us. Our ministry, The Berean Call, offers a wide variety of teaching materials, including books, tracts, audio and video disks, and copies of our weekly broadcast on compact disk or DVD. You may also subscribe to our monthly Newsletter, which we offer free of charge. We’ll let you know how to order later in the program.

Now, this week’s Cover Article. Tom and Dave continue our series of programs based on their book, Psychology and the Church: Critical Questions, Crucial Answers . This week we focus on the question, “Does psychology have a connection to Eastern religions?” Along with Dave Hunt, here’s T. A. McMahon.

Tom:

Thanks, Gary . You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. Our topic is psychology and the Church and today we’re going to discuss the relationship between psychotherapeutic or psychological counseling

Concepts and Eastern religions. Now, Dave, that might sound like a stretch to some who are listening or watching our program, but that observation is hardly unique to Biblical Christians like us who are critical of psychotherapy, in fact it’s almost common knowledge among the researchers as well as many of the practitioners. But, before we get that, a couple of weeks ago when we were discussing the DSM , that is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , the latest version, which includes around 370 some mental disorders, for those who are not familiar with the DSM , it’s the handbook used by nearly all psychotherapists for the purposes of recognizing the symptoms of certain disorders and then because a disorder is listed in the DSM , that then becomes a basis for billing a counselee’s insurance company. So it has some practical value. There are 374 alleged mental disorders that are included in the DSM and they are there on the basis of rigorous science? No, Dave, as you know, a vote. One such disorder which we talked about, ODD, right? That’s oppositional defiant disorder, which is defined as, I’m quoting, “hostile behavior toward authority figures, the symptoms include losing one’s temper,” now, Dave, see if you fit into any of this, where you’ve had any children that fit into this, “losing one’s temper, arguing with adults, deliberately doing things that will annoy other people.” I have five children. The boys annoy the girls? No, they never did that, Dave. “Or blaming others for his or her own mistakes or misbehavior.”

Dave:

Now Tom, before you get into that, you mentioned a vote. It’s not a unanimous vote, sometimes it’s pretty close as to whether it falls into the category of mental disorder or not. This is not science, they should understand.

Tom:

And in this day of political correctness, you know, it just shows you how weak and how—no, absurd, that really is.

Dave:

And they should understand that there are what? I don’t know, several hundred psychotherapeutic techniques many of which conflict with the others.

Tom:
Yeah, there’s 500 different approaches and more then 10,000 variations on that, techniques and so forth.

Dave:

So, the psychiatrist or the psychologist they do not agree with one another! So, take your pick, do you want a heart transplant, or would you like your kidney transplanted? Now which do you want, let’s vote on it. It’s like a cafeteria.

Tom:

Dave, the reason I’m going back to the DSM , we talked about it a couple of weeks ago and if anybody is interested in hearing what we had to say about it, which we document, they can go to our website and listen to those programs, which are archived. The reason I wanted to go back to that is that you made a statement a couple of weeks ago about psychology and religion, some spiritual ideas, you talked about transpersonal psychology, which mostly has to do with the spiritual realm, and you asked the question: What do they learn in school about spirituality? Well, let me quote to you from the DSM , the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders , under the section called, other conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention, it’s Code V62.89, and it has to do with religious or spiritual problems, that’s the way it’s identified. Examples include distressing experiences that involve loss or questioning of faith, problems associated with conversion to a new faith, or questioning of spiritual values.

Dave:

Now Tom, let me interrupt you again.

Tom:

No, you can pick it up right from there, what do these guys know about spirituality, what did they learn about spirituality?

Dave:

Most of them are atheists. If you want to take a poll. Now they are going to advise you. You know, it’s like the people who counsel you on dying, they don’t believe in God, they don’t believe on an after life.

Tom:

Well, Elizabeth Kubler Ross would be a name.

Dave:

Yes, I had a little debate with her of sorts on TV. She was very unhappy with me. She said she would not want me to counsel any of the dying because I was a fundamentalist. I said Jesus Christ is the only way, and she really had nothing to offer, she was a psychotherapist, psychiatrist.

Tom:

Dave, let me qualify on thing that you said. You said most of them are atheists. Well, like a Buddhist is an atheist. In other words many of them most of them you would say are atheists, but really most of them are New Agers, which we are going to get into, the whole thrust of psychotherapy toward Eastern mysticism. But she had séances at her ashram, her retreat center down in San Diego . They were investigated by the district attorney down at San Diego .

Dave:

Of course, and Tom when you say, New Agers—a New Ager says: I’m spiritual but I’m not religious. What they mean is they want to be space cadets out there somewhere being spiritual, hugging trees, or who knows what, but no rules, no doctrine. And of course, Paul told Timothy, 2 Timothy chapter 4, The day will come when they will not endure sound doctrine. And unfortunately, it’s not even endured in many churches today, doctrine is boring, let’s get into something a little more—

Tom:

Psychotherapy is all based on feelings, how you feel about something. So you certainly wouldn’t want rules with regard to feelings, because my feelings may be offended by the rules.

Dave:

Yeah, well okay. So, the AHP, Tom, Association for Humanistic Psychology. Now if anyone wants to check up on this, why don’t you go back and look at the schedule of speakers, workshops for some of their past or present conventions. I don’t think I ever told this story. See, I’ve been writing about this, talking about it for years, and here was a couple, they’ve got a ministry, I won’t name them, and they lived in the Indianapolis area, and they are not quite sure that I might be exaggerating. So, they went to a convention being held in Indianapolis, and they haven’t registered, they haven’t paid anything, but they are picking up free literature, and then some people are filing into a room so they just decide to follow them. They go in there and everybody thinks they are part of the crowd, and what are they going to do? They are making little animal masks. I’m not kidding you! Now these are PhD’s, these are medical doctors and professors, they are making them—some want to be a cat or a mouse or falcon, or whatever, and so they go right along with it, and they pretend like they are drawing a face too and that they are going to put this on, hold it in front of themselves. And then they start going around the room— they lower the lights. Now Tom, this is the Association for Humanistic Psychology and they are really into religion, all right. The even have séances at some of these—well, this was getting into a séance. “I am just getting from the North Pole, I’m very cold up there, but I’m feeling much better down here” some little bird from this lady is speaking through her now, she thinks. They are channeling these animals, and they go around the room, and these people are getting rather uncomfortable. It’s getting weirder and weirder, and then it comes to them. Well, the husband is a bit of a—well, he’s not quite as bold, the wife is very bold and she stands up in the middle of the room, and she starts reciting John:3:16For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.. Wow! did that agitate these animals! I mean, it’s getting really wild in there and the snake is hissing at them and sticking out its tongue, and so forth. The husband said, Let’s get out of here! Now Tom, I’m not kidding, this is the Association for Humanistic Psychology at one of there conventions, okay, and a workshop with PhD’s, medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists.

Tom:

Dave, you remind of Jean Houston. So you have a workshop here, but we have a woman who is gathering together some of the leaders in Washington and taking them through this same kind of process.

Dave:

Well, she’s got them on the ground pretending to be different animals and they are going back, and they’re not just regressing into the human past but back into when they were animals. They are going back in their memory—And Tom, in Washington D. C. politicians seriously doing this. But the Bible—No, no, we couldn’t go for that. Because I know what some people are thinking out there, I’m not psychic but I know what they’re thinking out there.

Tom:

We get enough letters to know what they are thinking.

Dave:

Right. What does this have to do with Christian psychology? We don’t have Christians going into this stuff. Well, how do you peel this off of psychology? This is what psychology is, this is where it came from. Let me remind our listeners again, go into any library look into the index of any psychology textbook or reference manual, you will not find a reference for Christian psychology. Why? Because there is no Christian who is the founder of the school of psychology known as Christian psychology. So, what is Christian psychology? What are they trying to do? They are trying to integrate, they have gone to the wisdom of the world, the godless anti-Christians, in fact, we could name them but we won’t do that, and then they are trying to take something out of that to improve the Bible, because of course the Bible doesn’t have all we need for our modern problems and how to counsel people, and so forth. Tom, it’s wicked!

Tom:

So, whatever comes along, those who are trying to integrate, they call themselves Christian psychologists, psychotherapists, whatever comes along they are attempting to integrate that into their belief system. And they say, Well, we’re biblical, but this other thing we feel is helpful, and so on. Now, I started out by talking about the connection between psychology and Eastern mysticism. Dave, what you describe, this story that you gave of these people, they observed it personally. We’ve been writing about it, talking about it, we have observed these things personally so it’s our observation, but wait a minute, you know, we may have a bias here, and some maybe our listeners or viewers are saying, Well, you know, come on you guys, let’s get some objective input here. I’m going to quote psychologist Daniel Goleman, he’s writing in Christianity Today, he says: Eastern philosophies seem to be making gradual headway in the West as psychologies not as religion. Let me give you another one. This is San Francisco State University Professor of Philosophy Jacob Needleman, who is a consultant, very bright guy, consultant to the field of psychology. He wrote: A large and growing number of psychotherapists are now convinced that the Eastern religions offer an understanding of the mind far more complete than anything yet envisioned by Western science. At the same time the leaders of the new religions themselves, then numerous gurus and spiritual teachers now in the West are reformulating an adapting the traditional systems according to the language and atmosphere of modern psychology. These are not Bible believers, not fundamentalists, okay.

Dave:

I’m sure, Tom, you have these things right there in front of you in print. I have them in my brain, but my brain gets fouled up sometimes.

Tom:

I wish I had your memory.

Dave:

Give us the quote from Laurence Wishon. Lawrence Wishon, at one time, was the president, and I think he had that office when he made this statement, was the president of the Association for Humanistic Psychology, the AHP.

Tom:

He explains: The basic model of man that led to the development of Eastern meditational techniques is the same model that led to humanistic psychotherapy. He didn’t say that, Dave, I didn’t say that, but we can see it. What would it take to understand that by looking, as you mentioned, there are 10,000 techniques. Many of them are so religious, so Eastern mystical it just makes your hair stand on end—if you have some hair, Dave.

Dave:

So, the person who is listening says, Yeah, but I wouldn’t go to those kind of people. Well, but this is all part of the same bag. How would you distinguish, I mean, and why would you distinguish, because they are following the same rules, they took the same tests, they took the same courses, they had to give the same answers to get their license. They have a license as psychotherapists, or psychiatrists from the state, whatever state you live in. And then you find some of this a bit weird? Where does it come from? It doesn’t come from outer space, it comes from psychology itself, exactly as Lawrence Wishon said.

Tom:

Dave, you wrote a book, Yoga and the Body of Christ , and why did you write that book, except Christians by the hundreds, by the thousands—

Dave:

Right.

Tom:

—not only getting into Yoga, we now have dozens of books on Christian yoga. So, what’s the point I’m making here? If somebody says, Oh, I would never go to a psychotherapist who taught Eastern beliefs, and so on, yet on the other hand Christians by the hundreds, by the thousands are being led to, or going to so-called Christian yoga.

Dave:

Tom, let me go back a few years. I can’t even remember how many years, but it’s got to be at least thirty, so this has been going on for a long time now. I helped Robbie Maharaja write a book, The Death of a Guru . He was a guru, one time worshipped as god, and became a Christian. It’s the only guru that I ever heard of who became a Christian. Okay, and we had originally given that book to a secular publisher because we wanted to get this message out into the secular world, and they got bought out—Anyway it ended up in the hands of the Sunday school board of the Southern Baptist Church. The Sunday School Board, probably most people never heard of that, but anyway they published a lot of books, and I was to have a meeting with one of the bigwigs there, I had never met them before, and now they’ve got this book. I went to Nashville , I went to the high rise building, quite impressive headquarters, and then what do you know? They’ve got a huge Christian bookstore right out there along with the offices, so I went in there to see what there might be. Of course, I was looking to see, Death of a Guru , surely, I mean, this is their book, it’s the only testimony you’ve got of a former guru, they would surely have that, I couldn’t find it! I did find, Every Day Yoga for Christians . I did find a few books like that, but the testimony of a former guru who will tell you what is wrong with this? No, it wasn’t on the shelf. So, I’m just kind of playing dumb, which I am anyway, I can do it really well, and I said: You know, I was looking for a book called, Death of a Guru , you think you might be able to find a copy of that, I mean, find out who the publisher is, and so forth, so that I could order a copy? And so the manager dug around in a catalog of books in print, and she came back to me rather surprised. She said: Oh, that’s one of our books! Now Tom, we took it away from them, and what is the point? You have all kinds of books by pastors telling their testimony, but nothing that would really meet the need. So anyway, that’s the situation, Tom.

Tom:

Dave, as you’ve been really refreshing your mind, we’re working on a book. I’ll tell our audience we’re working on a book putting together a collection of our articles, things that you’ve written, that I’ve written on psychology. It was interesting for me to go back over the years of writing about these things and just having it brought to mind again, and I wonder as you’ve been going through the articles that you’ve written, even materials that you’ve taken from some of your books where you have written about psychology, has anything hit you that you haven’t thought about in a while with regard to this subject?

Dave:

Well, probably a lot of things. Tom, the main thing would be is that this hasn’t gotten better, its gotten worse, it has gotten a stronger grip on the church. I don’t remember whether we mentioned this but it was Norman Vincent Peale who brought this in, and he’s had—I think we did mention it, from Smiley Blanton.

Tom:

A psychiatrist.

Dave:

A psychiatrist, in the basement of his church there in New York. It was withstood, and I can give you the quote and the reference by his biographer who said it was withstood by the entire Christian church for, he said seventy years. I don’t think it was withstood that long, but decades. Now imagine, you know who Norman Vincent Peale is. Norman Vincent Peale on national television said: “It’s not necessary to be born again, you’ve got your way to God, I’ve got my way. I found eternal peace in a Shinto shrine” and so forth. He’s the one who brought Christian psychology into the church and the entire evangelical church was against it for decades! Today they are all for it.

Tom:

Let me add something about Norman Vincent Peale’s background. You read a biography of him and you find that he has more to do with religious science, with mind science—

Dave:

Of course.

Tom:

—than with anything biblical. Yet, he was Guidepost Magazine, you’re talking millions the readership of that, millions per year, even today.

Dave:

Tom, it makes us a little frustrated and almost discouraged, but we just trust the Lord. His publication, his monthly publication, his various magazines, he’s got several of them out there still going after his death, I think to about 16 million a month. That’s four times as many readers has ever—well, I don’t know how many readers have read it, but four times as many copies as all of my books put together over a period of 20 some years. So, here we are, we’re like a mosquito on an elephant, but we have to keep doing it. And Tom, as you know, we have so many letters of encouragement from people who have been delivered from this sort of thing through what we have written.