Can Yoga Be Purely Physical?

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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 tune in. Coming up in the next hour in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Book of Acts, and Paul on the Damascus Road . In Religion in the News, Knighthood for Rushdie, we’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question: Do the Jews figure in Bible prophecy? 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 their series of programs based on Dave Hunt’s book , Yoga and the Body of Christ, What Position Should Christians Hold? This week we focus on the question: Can yoga be purely physical? Along with Dave Hunt, here is 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. We want to welcome you to our series dealing with the religion of yoga, and the attempts being made to integrate that religion with Christianity. Dave, I can hear some objections out there right now—What do you mean, the religion of yoga? You don’t know what you’re talking about. Come on—I’m taking classes right now in my Baptist church right in the basement, and certainly our pastor would not allow any false religion to be taught in his church! Well, it’s a pagan religion, folks, and we’ve been explaining that very thing for the last few weeks. If you would like to check out the documentation for what we will be discussing, Gary will tell you later in the program how to order a copy of Yoga and the Body of Christ, by Dave Hunt, subtitle: What Position Should Christians Hold? Dave, let me run by you an analogy, okay, and see if it sheds any light on the religious connection between yoga and religion. You know my background as a Roman Catholic, 30 years a Roman Catholic, now what if I started an exercise program that I wanted you to participate in, and I called it catholicizing? Now, that might raise an eyebrow on your part, but what if I tell you that I separated the religion out from the physical aspects, so I don’t want you to worry? And some of the exercises I had you do included genuflecting, and making the sign of the cross, and then I added some sort of manual dexterity exercise that involves working a string of beads, okay, while repeating, maybe a prayer to Mary or something like that, or not even a prayer, maybe some kind of a mantra, and so on—

Dave:

Just say Mary over and over.

Tom:

Yeah. Now, would you be suspicious that my catholicizing program might perhaps have something to do with Roman Catholicism?

Dave:

Well, Tom, I think I just might just suspect that.

Tom:

Dave, is that an analogy to what’s going on with yoga?

Dave:

Yeah, it’s a very good analogy. But Tom, the chapter you wanted to get into today, chapter 3, we haven’t gotten very far. It’s a small book, which is rare for me, but this chapter is worth ten times the price of the book, it’s an incredible chapter.

Tom:

Well, the title, Dave alone, The Aquarian Conspiracy, I mean, it sounds like something that’s a throwback to the, Age of Aquarius, which it is, which you will explain, but in it you open a whole can of worms. Now, you open a whole can of vipers! You connect yoga to the dangerous energy, spiritual energy, to altered states of consciousness, to drugs, to the occult, to communication with spirit beings, and so forth, and you certainly deal with all the ingredients of a conspiracy, which you believe has to do with the amazing popularity of yoga. So, how does all this fit together?

Dave:

Well, Tom, it is a conspiracy, and I’m not making that up, you’ve known me for enough years to know I’m not a conspiracy buff, and I shy away from that.

Tom:

Right.

Dave:

But we will get to it. I quote from a document which—I was just looking on the internet, and I forget the website, but whose ever it was, was saying, “Wow, I’m ecstatic, I just got a PDF copy of Changing Images of Man , and I’ve been wanting that for years.” Well, I’ve had it for at least 30 years, it was written in 1974, and I don’t want to jump into that right now, Tom, but this was a group of scientists, psychologists at SRI, Stanford Research Institute. They made a study on the computer, Alternate Forms of the Future of Mankind, and How is Mankind Going to Survive? They came to the conclusion that it couldn’t be done without developing psychic powers, non physical powers. And the next question was: How do we do this without everyone knowing? Part of it was going to be through drugs. I talk about the CIA, they flooded our universities with LSD, and I talk about a number of other characters here. But, Changing Images of Man , the whole idea was, how can we change Western man from a scientifically, logically oriented thinking person into an Eastern mystic, who is willing to go by experiences, and then we can guide these experiences.

Tom:

Yeah, by experiences you mean feelings.

Dave:

Right, but more than feelings, Tom, because on LSD, they got some real experiences in the spirit world. Here’s a quote from another scientist involved, not from that study, he says: “In the organization of a civilization of the future we anticipate that the individualistically oriented man will become an anachronism. He will be viewed as a threat to the group organization, as well as to his fellow man. Hence, he, in all likelihood will have few individual expectations.” And they go on to say, There’s going to be a controlled society. But how are you going to control people? You’re going to have to change the way they think, and their whole orientation. Now, we open the chapter with a yoga instructor in Japan who introduced yoga to Japan , named Ken Harakuma, and he’s upset because there are a lot of other people now teaching yoga, but they don’t understand the real purpose. This is to develop a force, this is to get into a state of consciousness where you tap into some psychic powers. And Tom, you were involved in judo, on the judo team, weren’t you?

Tom:

Right, Ohio State , yes. Dave, let me just add to that. When you mentioned Japan and you are talking about spiritual energy, whether it be higher forms of Judo, pretty much physiological up to a point, but we had instructors from the kodecon who were 10 ^th degree, and they all developed the key energy, which is the spiritual energy, you know, the “gee” or “kee” now prevalent in akito, and some of these. So, I could see why somebody teaching yoga, recognizing the spiritual value, the energy value, and then seeing people come along who don’t understand this, because, as he mentions, and you mentioned in the book, yoga took off in Japan, everybody wanted to do it.

Dave:

Right, but it wasn’t the real yoga, according to this man who understood. Okay, so then, I think in the chapter—Tom, this is a fantastic chapter. I hadn’t even thought about it since writing it, and it is worth ten times the price of the book, at least, easily.

Tom:

Well, you’ve got me sold, Dave, I mean, I’m going through it just as you are. We certainly went through it before you wrote it, but to see some of these things again and how they jump out at you, it’s unbelievable.

Dave:

I bring so many things together.

Tom:

Well, to start with, let’s introduce some of these things to our audience.

Dave:

Yeah, first of all, what we have to recognize is, materialism is dead, scientifically.

Tom:

What does that mean? Some people would say, What are you talking about, materialism.

Dave:

Well, there’s a materialistic explanation for everything. When I was in high school, I can remember—well, physics would explain everything including consciousness. Oh, with physics we’ll explain how the brain works and it’s all in the brain cells. No, I quote scientists who say, No, that’s not right. There is something called the mind that is non physical, it is separate from the brain, and it really programs the brain. The brain is the hardware, but you’ve got to have some software running this thing and someone has to be the designer of the software. And in a normal state of consciousness, I quote Sir John Eccles for example, Nobel Prize winner, we’ve quoted him a number of times, he says: “In a normal state of consciousness your spirit operates your brain.” You cannot explain a sense of truth or justice, or real love, self sacrifice, morals and ethics, in terms of protein molecules, brain cells and the electrical reaction between them. That makes no sense at all. Something else is running this, this is the hardware, but something else is behind it, and if anyone’s interested they could get some of the tapes and the talks by Sir John Eccles, but he believes that he found where the spirit makes the connection. He did that through a number of experiments which are fascinating, which we don’t have time to go into. I quote a number of scientists to this effect.

Tom:

Let me mention Walter Penfield, a quote from him. He says the brain is a computer—obviously these are not exact but they give you the idea, they really communicate the idea of what he is saying—the brain is a computer programmed by something outside itself, the mind.

Dave:

It’s programmed by something non physical, and we don’t have time to go into the details, but there is no question that man is a non physical being. I think one of the people I quote in this chapter, which I have quoted elsewhere is Robert Jastrow, a founder and director for many years of the Goddard Space Institute that sent Voyager and Pioneer, and so forth, out there. He is an agnostic, he believes in evolution. He says: When we meet these creatures,— because that’s their goal is to meet these extraterrestrials somehow. Tom, maybe you remember, maybe not, I was one of the speakers at a conference in Washington D. C. sponsored by a government body, and by other foundations and so forth, and it was all about, What are we going to do when we make contact with these beings?

Tom:

How did they ever get hold of you, that’s the thing that I think shocked all of us. How did you end up there, because your message was diametrically opposed to everything they were about?

Dave:

Well, they didn’t like my message, but still they published me in this part of the book, of the papers. It was because of my book, Mind Invaders , I was the author and it’s got quite a bit about mind powers and UFO’s. I give you a new view of UFO’s in this thing that you maybe never thought of. I’m talking to our listeners out there now, I know a friend of ours, a mutual friend who is—well, he’s a top scientist, and he stated, his wife found him at 5:00 in the morning at the kitchen table still reading it, he couldn’t put it down. Anyway, because of what I say about contacting entities and UFO’s in the book Mind Invaders, that was how—

Tom:

That got their attention.

Dave:

Right, and anyway, Tom, we have to understand, first of all, we are not just lumps of protein molecules wired with nerves. Now, we’re not the only minds in the universe, and we document that very thoroughly. But this is what these men at SRI, which was called Stanford Research Institute—

Tom:

It was a private organization near the campus of Stanford University , Willis Harman was the director.

Dave:

I think it started out maybe, a close connection with Stanford, and maybe it got so weird they just dropped the words and left the SRI.

Tom:

It was funded by the Charles Ketering Foundation, so they had big time money.

Dave:

Not SRI totally, this project that we are talking about, changing images of man, and this was all about, how can we do this. Okay, now how are we going to introduce this without letting people know. These are top scientists, they are studying how can we bring about a new civilization? Well, now Willis Harman became the director of Edgar Mitchell’s Institute of Noetic Sciences .

Tom:

Like the former astronaut.

Dave:

Right, and he founded that after he came back from his mission to the moon, because he’s had some amazing experiences, and this was an occult workshop, really what it was, but scientific supposedly, Willis Harman became the director of that. Now, how are we going to introduce this to the American public? Well, Harman had a close friend, Marilyn Ferguson, he gave her the manuscript and said, Couldn’t you write a book, couldn’t you document this, and she did. It was called, The Aquarian Conspiracy, it was a big seller back in those days, and let me just give you—I want to quote what she says at the beginning of this book: “A great shuddering irrevocable shift is overtaking us…a new mind, a turnabout in consciousness (consciousness became the big thing, altered states of consciousness, you had a movie by that title) in critical numbers of individuals, a network powerful enough to bring about radical change in our culture.”

This network—the Aquarian Conspiracy—has already enlisted the minds, hearts and resources of some of our most advanced thinkers, including Nobel laureate scientists, philosophers, statesmen, celebrities…who are working to create a different kind of society… (I mean, there it is, Tom, it’s very plain, this is what the conspiracy is all about) There are legions of conspirators. (This is their words, not my words.) They are in corporations, universities, and hospitals, on the faculties of public schools, in factories and doctors’ offices and state and federal agencies, on city councils, and the White House staff, in state legislatures, in volunteer organizations, in virtually all arenas of policy making in the country.

The Eastern mystical technologies for expanding and transforming personal consciousness, (this is where yoga comes in) once the secret of an elite, (sounds like that recent book, The Secret that we did a special DVD on) are now generating massive change in every cultural institution—medicine, politics, business, education, religion, and the family.” And Tom, we won’t have time to get into it this week, but I give you the fascinating connections to drugs and the people who were involved, involved with the CIA. Because one of the things that LSD did, it puts the imbiber, the person who took acid, “dropped acid” as they would say, it put them into another state of consciousness. Tom, this introduced thousands, maybe millions of our young people who became our scientists later on—

Tom:

Dave, this was my generation.

Dave:

Yes,—into the occult. Look, Tom, here’s a half a dozen—I’ve never gotten into this and I don’t think you did, but I’ve interviewed quite a few people who did. Here’s a half a dozen guys in a room together, they all drop acid together. Suddenly, they are all in the same landscape, they are describing it to one another. They are involved in the same psychedelic adventure. Now, how does that come about? There’s a common source of delusion. And I’ve interviewed channelers all over the world, and channelers, supposedly from a spirit contact, and what do you know, they all come up with the same thing, and it conforms to the lies of the serpent in the garden. We have anthropologists,—one anthropologist, for example, who has traveled all over the world imbibing these, testing these exotic plants on the drugs. He says, They are trying to teach us something—these beings that we make contact with, and of course this is how witch doctors operate, shamans, medicine men, whatever you want to call them, they make contact with their spirit guide. All right, so they are trying to each us something. Indeed, they are, and we have a group of scientists who are going right along with this.

Tom:

So Dave, I have to give you this quote, which you have in the book from, again, Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy , she says: “Ironically, the introduction of major psychedelics like LSD in the 1960s was largely attributable to the Central Intelligence Agency’s investigation into these drugs for possible military use. Experiments on more than eighty college campuses, under various CIA code names, unintentionally popularized LSD. Thousands of graduate students served as guinea pigs. Soon they were synthesizing their own “acid.”

Dave:

Now Tom, what does this have to do with yoga? Well, I think I have mentioned in here already; I’ll never forget a mother talking to me saying: Well, our son was into drugs; but now he is into yoga, thank God he’s off of drugs! And I said, I’m sorry to inform you, drugs, that was the kindergarten, yoga, that’s graduate school! Now you can get into a higher state of consciousness on yoga, and more controlled than you can on drugs, but I’m getting ahead of myself. First of all, we have to establish that we are non physical beings living in a physical body. There is something else, not just the brain cells, there are non physical entities. And so I was quoting Robert Jastrow, he said, When we meet them they could be ten billion years ahead of us on the evolutionary scale. We’ll seem like worms and they will seem like gods to us, they will have all of these powers, we’ll fall at their feet and worship them.

Tom:

So Dave, Jastrow, he’s telling us that evolution, which he believes in, if we just project ahead that there could be entities so far more evolved than we are, and we are going to be like them.

Dave:

And they have no need of bodies anymore, they are now—here are Jastrow’s words: They are what old-fashioned religious people called, spirit beings.”

Tom:

Now tell us who Jastrow is again, so this isn’t some name you’ve picked up. Robert Jastrow was the founder, and for many years, director of the Goddard Space Institute in New York that sent Pioneer, Voyager, and so forth, out into space. An agnostic? It would be very foolish to imagine we are the only minds in the universe. Now, they think that there are extraterrestrial minds out there, and I guess we’ve left yoga just a little bit, but we’ll get back to it. But Tom, can you imagine, now we have serious scientists trying to make psychic contact with non-physical entities. What a set up for Satan, and for his demons! Now, I had better quickly say they are not out there, there are spirit beings, angels, demons, God, Satan and man’s a spirit being living in a non-physical body. Now that another mind can control your mind, and I can tell you that the Russians have tried to do this at a distance, and so has the CIA, and so forth, we can prove that very simply,—hypnotism. We experimented with it when I was in the army. I mean, we could get a guy with just his head on one bunk and his heels on the other, stiff as a board, you could bounce up and down on him, you couldn’t do that physically. So, we could control someone else. Now of course in this experiment they are allowing us to do it, but what about other minds out there? Demonic entities, and not just drugs but yoga is designed to make contact with these entities, and we have to come back and talk about this, Tom. There is too much to cover in one week for this Chapter 3 in the book.