Yoga's Conquest Of The West

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Welcome to Search the Scriptures Daily, a radio ministry of The Berean Call with Dave Hunt and T. A. McMahon. I’m Gary Carmichael, we’re glad you could join us. Coming up in today’s program in our Understanding the Scriptures segment, Dave and Tom will continue their in-depth study of the Book of Acts, and How did Ananias heal Paul? In Religion in the News, Faith Based Toys, we’ll take a look at that story, and examine the question: What is the church’s future? We hope you can stay tuned. 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 Yoga’s conquest of the West. Along with Dave Hunt, here is T. A. McMahon:

Tom:

Thanks, Gary . You are 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 are currently doing a series based upon Dave Hunt’s book, Yoga and the Body of Christ, What Position Should Christians Hold? And although yoga’s popularity within Christendom is our primary focus, I hope our audience, Dave and I think you agree, we hope our audience can see that this is just one more area of discernment among Christians that is lacking, to put it mildly. So, for those of you who are already convinced that yoga is a religion diametrically opposed to Christianity, perhaps we can explain a few things that you can pass on to others. Now Dave, last week we went over The Aquarian Conspiracy, which you title Chapter 3 of your book, and the gist of it being the different ways and means of producing altered states of consciousness from drugs to meditation, and all of those things leading to contact with spirit entities. You titled Chapter 4, The Conquest of the West, and you state, “Had Western intellectuals and hippies not gotten involved in LSD and other psychedelic drugs, the New Age movement would not have occurred and yoga would not have become so popular.” And then you say, “Eastern mysticism has now penetrated every area of today’s Western society.” In what ways?
Dave:

Well, Tom, today’s university professors, psychiatrists, medical doctors, and so forth were once into the drug movement, a lot of them were hippies at one time.
Tom:
Dave, my hair was down to my shoulders, with a beard, but we weren’t into drugs. It’s a really interesting difference, although that was the culture of the time.
Dave:
It was a drug culture. It opened the door—well, in this state of consciousness, altered states they begin to—and remember, our last program I think we talked about the deliberate inducement, or leading the West deliberately into this.
Tom:
Again, the Aquarian Conspiracy, and there was a conspiracy involved, and we’re not making that up, we’re not just saying, Well, there is this or that. It was the name of Marilyn Ferguson’s book, which was the bible that introduced what was going on.
Dave:
And Tom, it was deliberate. I still have—I’ve been tempted to throw it out at times, but I still have one of the original mimeographed copies of—well, it became a book, but it was titled: Changing Images of Man . This was a study by scientists SRI, Stanford Research Institute, they now call it SRI, and it was a study, how can we deliberately turn a Western rational thinking person into an Eastern mystical type of a person, and why did they want to do this? They felt this was the only hope to rescue the West from destruction. And that was back in the 70’s I believe that they did this. So, Changing Images of Man , they deliberately intended to do this. And we also mentioned how the CIA introduced—I mean, they were into LSD. I think they had 80 million doses that they got out there, and mostly on university campuses. So, we’ve got guys “tripping out” as they would say, into higher states, they thought it was higher, actually they were being deluded, and this opened a new vista. Wait a minute! This physical material world is not the only reality! And they found themselves actually experiencing things, and meeting people, meeting gurus, meeting spirit beings, and this became a way of life. Tom, I don’t remember who you have talked to, but I have talked to some of these guys. Some amazing—one young man on an LSD trip, the universe appeared to him, as a beautiful woman enticing him to have sex with her. I mean, this is hard to imagine, but one of the things that they began to feel was, everything is one. I’m a rock, I’m a tree, I’m everything, all is one. Well, this, of course, is Hinduism.
Tom:
Sure, it’s pantheism, it’s really a religious view, and it’s diametrically opposed to what the scriptures teach.
Dave:
Absolutely. So, if everything is one, there are no categories, which is ridiculous, and then God—well, god is all, you’re god, I’m god, everything is god, well then, nothing is god. Tom, I wouldn’t trust you to be God.
Tom:
I would be right on your side, Dave, I wouldn’t trust me either.
Dave:
I wouldn’t trust myself. I mean, that’s absurd.
Tom:
Well, we can see the results, we’ve got about 6 billion gods running around doing their own thing, and look what it has brought about.
Dave:
Right. So let me quote—we’re talking about, The Conquest of the West —now this opened the door, this is on drugs, opened the door to predisposition to receive, welcome these gurus, and they knew it, and here they came. And one of them, we began this book with it, Yogi Bhajan. Our Congress, the Senate honored him. They got a holiday for him, and praised him and what his type of yoga has done for the West. Incredible, how deluded they can be! Now, here’s just a brief statement by a young lady. Remember, his organization still is 3HO (Healthy, Happy, Holy), that’s the cult.
Tom:
Sounds good to me, Dave, what’s wrong with that?
Dave:
She discovered, she became part of this cult as many of his followers. Instead of being this pure, man with these lofty ideals that he preached.
Tom:
These holy men from the East.
Dave:
Right, they are all the same, Tom, there may be an exception here and there, but I would question it. Here’s how she described him: He is, or was in fact, because he has died, “he was, in fact, a coldly calculating charlatan addicted to money, power, and sex.” She tells how she got introduced to this: “The very first time as a young teenage hippie I took LSD was the day I learned that there are many, many different states of consciousness and I committed myself to exploring my own mysterious inner capabilities as a human being. Soon after that, I began writing down and studying my dreams, meditating, and I began searching for a teacher. I was attracted to Eastern Mysticism and Yoga because it provided a blueprint for what I was already involved in—( let me say that again, I said drugs opened it)—I was attracted to Eastern Mysticism and yoga because it provided a blueprint for what I was already involved in and it gave me a methodology for inner exploration that was not dependent on drugs…” I don’t know whether I mentioned on this program, Tom, I may have, but I will never forget this mother coming to me, after a meeting, and saying: Well, you know, my son used to be involved in drugs and it just worried me so much, how are we going to get him out of drugs, But then he got into yoga and he’s off the drugs, and I’m just thanking the Lord. I don’t know what this yoga thing is but a least he’s off of drugs. I said, I am sorry to inform you, drugs, that was the kindergarten, yoga, that’s the graduate school, he’s gone deeper. …She says, “It is, of course, perfectly natural to turn to people who are more experienced than we are, and apprentice ourselves as their students.” So that’s how she got tied in with Yogi Bhajan, but there are dozens of them out there.
Tom:
Well, 150 miles from here, Dave, as you well know, Bagwan Sri Rashneesh, opens up his Ashram, 66,000 acres, and what was it all about? Drugs, meditation, his form, and sex was the gist of it, and worse, because most of them were, well, I won’t say most of them, but the leadership was put in jail and he was, basically, thrown out of the country.
Dave:
Actually Tom, Ruth and I were traveling in Germany, and you know, we don’t go into fancy hotels, we stay in homes, bed and breakfasts, like in England, and so forth. But here there was a beautiful home, and there was nobody staying in it at all. The owner lived across the street. He had built it for to be a bed and breakfast place, so we had the whole place to ourselves. This is where Mahenau de Shelia got arrested, he told us about it. Wow, suddenly the police show up! She had, I think, 25 followers there.
Tom:
For our audience’s sake, Sheila was Rashneesh’s spokeswoman.
Dave:
Right, and she fleeced him, I mean she stole millions.
Tom:
One person robbing the other, I mean, was what it was all about. There’s many, many who have been through that.
Dave:
So anyway, that was where they arrested her. The TV cameras arrived, and I don’t know all that happened because I didn’t follow that. Okay, so Tom, this is what happened, and here they came and the West had been opened to them. Now it was a deliberate program. But Tom, we already had our kids, our children were already being prepared. They have been hooked in school. They are teaching meditation, and you mentioned meditation. We need to explain that meditation in the West was always it meant meditating on the Word of God, Psalm 1, “—and in His law doth he meditate day and night.”
Tom:
Thinking it through, rolling it through your mind.
Dave:
Contemplation.
Tom:
Exactly.
Dave:
But meditation in the East is the opposite, you tune it out, you try to empty your mind and reach a passive, but alert state, where you can receive something, and what you receive is demonic, and we document that. So they have—what were some of the programs, or movies? Dark Crystal , Thunder Cats , She-ra .
Tom:
Dave, let me back up just a little bit. These were developed—first of all we had two classes. We had the Beatles with their music. We had George Harrison singing, “My Sweet Lord.” It was not about the Lord Jesus Christ, it was about Krishna , who is the lord of yoga, the god of yoga. We had Star Wars, we had Yoda in Star Wars, Yoda the little, actually a little yogi who taught Luke how to use his mind to control the Force.
Dave:
Well, you just change the “d” to a “g” and you’ve got yoga.
Tom:
Well, there was no doubt that’s who he was or what he was. So Dave, these were all prior to that. Back in your age and my age, you know, you had Superman, you had certain individuals with powers and so on. But these were myths, we knew it, there was no reality connected with it, but you can’t say the same today.
Dave:
Well, you have, not only She-ra, what was she, Princess of power, or something of power.
Tom:
Well, that’s what all these characters were.
Dave:
I remember a Sunday school teacher asking his kids in his class, hoping for the right answer: When you pray who do you look to for doing a problem? Who would you look to to rescue you? And one of the boys said: He Man, he’ll do it! So, as you said, look, we’ve got Karate Kid, Masters of the Universe, Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles, and so forth. You see, when I grew up, Tom, a little while ago, that was before Superman, we had Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, and nobody took that seriously. It was like the Fables of Aesop the Slave, it was just fantasy, but it was prophecy. So now we are moving into something, and where is this going to come? Well, these powers, this “force” that’s out there, and that’s what you develop in yoga. Now, Tom, you understand that, as you know, maybe people listening—I’ve been in yoga for 20 years and I never got into this stuff. Well, that could be true, I’m sure it is true if you say so, but that was not what yoga is all about. Yoga was based on, well, it’s a Hindu practice how to get in touch with the demonic entities, they would call them their gods, and actually it’s a technique for dying, to leave this universe of sense, time and the elements, and reach moksha, the state of consciousness where you are everything, you have achieved oneness. As the Buddhist would say, “Like a drop of water falling into the ocean, you can’t tell the difference anymore, it’s all the same.
Tom:
Well Dave, let me go back to where we mentioned yoda, and I hope our audience can understand this. You’re looking at a movie, it’s an incredible movie, okay, production wise and every which way, and you see Luke learning these powers from a yoga type character. Right now, when you have Harvard, when you have these research institutes and they are studying these yogis, and they are able to demonstrate certain things that seem extraordinary—well, again, our point here is that our kids today are looking at these characters that have been developed, so-called fictional characters but there seems to be a reality behind what they are able to do. We never had that, growing up.
Dave:
Well Tom, they’ve documented it in the laboratory, and I think I mentioned Herbert Benson, Harvard professor, and he took a group of these monks, I think, where did they start out? abut 16,000 feet elevation up in the Himalayas , and they are dressed in sandals, no socks, and just cotton robes pulled around them, and they hike up to—we talked about this, Tom, before. But these are scientists documenting this, they’ve got the TV cameras there and so forth, and the TV crew are freezing to death with their parkas. These guys go into a meditative state and they sit on their haunches, you know. They took their sandals off, in fact, and there’s a light snow falling on them. They are in this state most of the night, and then in the morning they shake the snow off of their robes, get up and put their sandals back on and walk back down. And the TV crew can’t understand it. There is a power, Tom—
Tom:
Well, that’s what I wanted to ask you, Dave, is this legit? Obviously, scientists are recognizing that this is actually happening.
Dave:
They call it mind over matter, but it actually isn’t. Now, Solomon did say, “A merry heart doeth good like a medicine,” so it is true that there is a connection between the mind and the body. If you are just depressed it can weigh you down physically, but it’s not going to do miracles like this, there are limitations to it. No, it is a demonic power, you remember—
Tom:
You don’t really mean miracles?
Dave:
No, they think they are miracles, they seem like miracles, but you remember the demoniac? and he had legions and the other who bound him with metal chains and he snapped them like thread, it says. Nobody could bind him. There was a supernatural power and he didn’t develop it by working out in a gymnasium, or using bar bells, or whatever. I remember, you know Rabi Maharaj, we mentioned him in this book, Death of a Guru , and he tells, in that book we tell the story, he is meditating, he’s doing yoga, he’s a yogi. He did yoga hour after hour during the day meditating upon Krishna trying to get peace. And he came out of—he was living in a communal home, his aunt was in charge, Aunt Ravati, I’ve met her,—his aunt was in charge and she met him down on a patio and insulted his father. His father, you remember, he never spoke a word after Rabi’s birth. Rabi never heard his father’s voice, he was in yoga all the time meditating on the Hindu scriptures, and his hair grew and grew and grew and when the health authorities decided, you can’t even wash this any longer, it was down to his waist, they came by force and they cut his hair for sanitary reasons and the moment the scissors touched his hair he was dead! Now this is a spiritual power, okay. So, Rabi is a very small young man, a man now, he was very small as a young man, not a weight lifter. One of his uncles was a weight lifter, here’s a set of bar bells, I don’t know whether they had 100 pounds, 200 or whatever on them, and when his aunt insulted him, Rabi flew into a rage. He found out that some spirits, what he thought were the gods, were demonic and they were out to destroy him. He had been meditating on Krishna , practicing yoga, get this calm state and so forth, never for developing physically. But anyway, suddenly a blind rage swept over him. He reached down the patio, he picked up the bar bells from the end, not in the middle, from one end and he swung those over his head to kill his aunt. And one of her sons, Krishna was his name, they called him Kristor now, and actually he has a Ph.D in philosophy or religion from Harvard. He had a tough time getting it because they tried to turn him away from being a follower of Christ, but he was there and he grabbed it. That broke the spell, it smashed the cement, and Rabi went off sobbing to his room. What was getting into him?
Tom:
Dave, for some of our listeners or our viewers who are thinking, Well, this is an outrageous story, all they have to do is go to any police department, okay, and find records from the 60s-70s about individuals who are on so-called “angel dust” and it would take 5 or 6 policemen to hold down a teenager, a thin teenager, that’s what we are talking about here. A power that’s not physiological, okay, it comes from spirit entities, there’s no doubt about it.
Dave:
By the way, Sirhan D. Sirhan, that’s getting off on something else, but it’s very related. There’s a book out there called, Robert F. Kennedy , or RFK Must Die . He was into this sort of thing, meditation, yoga, etc. and developing powers. When Sirhan D. Sirhan shot RFK, he had put down the date that he would do it in his journal, the police found this afterwards. And Rosie Greer, huge football player, Rayford Johnson, a decathlon guy, perfectly, physically fit, they told me that this guy was spaced out. Little guy, Sirhan D. Sirhan, they couldn’t handle him! It was like he didn’t know what he was doing, he had this demonic look in his eye, and he had a supernormal strength that was too much for them. It took them—it was very difficult to wrestle him to the ground and get that gun away from him. Again, we’re confronted with a demonic power, a power not of this world, but again, invade our physical realm, and not everybody gets it, but this is what yoga is aiming for, this is what the yogis want, it’s what they demonstrate in laboratory experiments, and I think you ought to stay away from it.