Apostasy Update # 13 Is It All About Me? No! It's Not All About Me.

Tom: Welcome to Apostasy Update. I’m T. A. McMahon, and in this program we are addressing biblical eschatology, what the Bible has to say prophetically about the last days prior to the return of Jesus Christ. My partner in this discussion is Carl Teichrib. He’s the author of Game of Gods: The Temple of Man in the Age of Re-enchantment.

Carl, welcome back, and thanks for joining me in our ongoing discussions of where the world and Christendom are headed according to the Scriptures as history draws to a close.

Carl: Tom, it’s good to be back with you, and I’m excited to see where this show goes. I think the subject matter is going to wallop a few people.

Tom: I hope that it really ministers, and, well, we’ll see how it goes. “Shake up” would not be a term that I would run away from in this, but whatever it takes for those who certainly have tuned into this. And we want to edify, and we want to give them information perhaps they haven’t had before.

Much of the information that we’ve been presenting in this series is taken from four books: your book, Carl, Game of Gods; America, the Sorcerer’s New Apprentice; Christianity and Anti-Christianity in Their Final Conflict; and most importantly, the Bible, which is God’s direct communication to mankind.

Last week, as you alluded to, we may have shocked some of our viewers by stating that America for the most part has turned from traditional Christianity to Eastern mysticism. Now, that would be—that would only be a shock to those who have been in a spiritual coma regarding what’s taking place around them. They have clearly missed what has been hidden in plain sight. 

To bring that astounding charge into focus, we went back more than a hundred years ago to the writings of Samuel Andrews, who documented the then-religious beliefs here in America. He noted that the highly regarded philosophers of our day—of his day were nearly all atheists turned pantheists. Their beliefs filtered down through education and the literary crowd, the popular writers of the day, to seminaries, to local churches, and eventually to the men on the streets. 

Cults such as Christian Science and Religious Science along with New Thought and Transcendentalism added their own variety of pantheism. Spiritualism was rampant with well-known figures of the day communicating—who were communicating with spirit entities. Religious ecumenism was much sought after through events such as the Parliament of World Religions, which you addressed numerous times, Carl. The belief that the different religions were simply different roads that lead to the same God was greeted with great enthusiasm by all—all, that is, except by biblical Christians. 

The teachings of God’s Word, well, they’re diametrically opposed to all the religions of the world, yet their basic beliefs are prophesied in Scripture and condemned. They are foretold as works-salvation—that is, man can achieve or merit his own salvation either in part or wholly without God. And from a pantheistic assessment, that [mankind] is God and is accomplishing his own salvation through self-realization, meaning realizing that he is God. Those were the times of Samuel Andrews. He identified pantheism as the foundational religion of the Antichrist as well as the major preparation for humanity to accept its own godhood. That was then, yet there is much more to come. 

Even so—well, before we get to that, Carl, have you—there’s some things that…well, plenty that we haven’t addressed. Nevertheless, some thoughts come to mind about going back to Samuel Andrews?

Carl: Well, you had mentioned the Parliament of World Religions and we have touched on that a number of times. I think as we’re going forward in our conversation, I know we’ll be talking about Carl Jung. It’s important for people to recognize that Carl Jung himself was influenced by some of the happenings of that period, specifically the influence of Swami Vivekananda, who was really the first Eastern voice that came West and received such acceptance because of the parliament experience. 

And so people need to recognize that what we’re talking about in the here and the now, right here in 2020, it has its roots going back a long ways. The shift in our Western culture isn’t something that took place over the course of a weekend. It isn’t something that just sprung up. It’s been an ongoing process for at least 120 years, if not more. 

Tom: The other thing, there was a dilemma in all of this. You see, as I said earlier, that was then, yet there’s much more to come. Even so, there’s a huge problem that had to be overcome, which we’re going to talk about in this session. Many were put off by religious concepts and were still clinging to science in the hopes that science was going to solve all of mankind’s problems. The solution to that, I believe, was demonically ingenious: it was to give the impression of science without any scientific basis. That came about primarily through an enterprise that poses as science but is clearly not science. And that enterprise, as you alluded to with Carl Jung, is psychology, and its main program is psychotherapy. 

You know, that’s the world of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and a host of others. Freud and Jung were psychiatrists. They had medical degrees, but what they practiced had nothing to do with medical science. Their concepts, which they made up, were devices that addressed nonphysical or spiritual things and explained them in scientific-sounding terminology, such as the “collective unconscious” and “psychoanalysis.” 

Carl, one last point on this, and we’re going to talk a lot about it: again, the fraud was one—in my view, the fraud was one of Satan’s masterpieces of deception. 

So let’s pick on Carl Jung, for example. If there was anybody that I’ve read about, not through Christian publications, but if there’s anybody that I’ve read about who’s more demonically possessed, it was this man. His whole history…folks, if you think I’m pushing the envelope here, read his biography. Read some of the later books dealing with what he was into. As I understand it, his degree, the thesis for his degree, had to do with occultism, had to do with seances, had to do with demons that were in his home. And his relatives were all into that kind of stuff. 

You remember he later admitted in his life—and this is an important point—he later admitted in his life that the idea of the collective unconscious came to him from his spirit guide Philemon. Of course, you know, he also referred to Philemon (as Dave Hunt would call him, Philemon the Demon) as a projection from this unconscious. Why would he do that? Because he had to keep his credibility in the science community. So all occult manifestations—ghosts, poltergeists, psychic phenomena, and communications (we’re talking about seances, channeling, Ouija boards, UFO contacts)—they were expounded as having their basis in the psyche, or the subconscious. Yet none of them can tell you what the psyche was, or what the subconscious was. 

You know, again (and I’ll finish with this and you can go for it, Carl), I call psychotherapy, again, the masterpiece of the ultimate deceiver, the god of this world, because—excuse me—psychotherapists sold it, and the whole world bought it. That myth was quickly and directly tied in with Eastern mysticism for the Western world, which we’re going to talk about.

Carl: It’s important for people to recognize that Carl Jung, as you just talked about, had this real interest in psychic phenomena, Eastern philosophy, the occult mind, esoteric ideas…. One of his books is The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, and that right there demonstrates that there was an interest that he held that was very close to him as he was contemplating…the unconscious, what mind was all about. And the point of psychology is it’s supposed to be a science of the mind or the science of our consciousness, but there’s no basis behind it outside of the searching for the self and understanding of who I am, and it becomes an inward-focused direction. In fact, that is the point. It is inward focusing. That’s the great problem: it only focuses, really, on the self. There may be other externals like your environment, but really it is about “Do I esteem myself? How do I express myself? Who is this person? How do I embrace myself?” 

I had this conversation a number of years ago, and I believe I may have shared it with you, Tom. I was attending a meeting—it was a global governments meeting. Had nothing to do with psychology, had nothing to with what we’re talking about right now, except one of the speakers in a conversation that I was having with, he said something to this effect—he said, “My problem isn’t that I think too lowly of myself, my problem isn’t that I think too highly of myself, my problem is that the only person I think about is myself.” 

Now, he wasn’t a Christian! He wasn’t a Christian, he was a secular thinker, and he recognized that problem inherent within psychology: it’s about me. It’s really just about me. And so it focuses away from what God does, focuses away from what your Creator does, and it says you’re the one who fixes your problem. 

Tom: And that’s the only way they can go. If you’ve eliminated God…and I’ve said this before: you’ve got God or self. You turn away from God, you’re left with self. Now self has to fix all your problems. And the delusion here, an incredible delusion, is that if self is our solution, then I’ve got to be “God,” because I’m in charge of making this work. And we’ve talked a lot about some different things that affect that, but again, it’s the deification of self. That’s why psychology is all about. All the things that you’ve mentioned, except for the wisdom from this man that you just articulated, all the things have to do with no evidence! It’s subjective, it’s experiential, it’s feelings-oriented, it’s all of these things, which cannot come to a right conclusion. How often has this been going on? Self began, I think, in Genesis 3…

Carl: Absolutely!

Tom: …after…go ahead!

Carl: And now it’s a growth industry. It’s where we turn to. 

One of the things I like to do is I like to go to used book stores, and one of my favorite bookstore chains in the US is Half Price Books, which is found across the US Midwest, and I’ll go poke around in the Christian section. Tom, you know this, most of your listeners probably know this: most of the books that are in the Christian section—not most, but a large percentage—you can just move over to the self-help section, to the psychology section. You can move it from there right into the New Age section, because it’s ultimately pointing to you. You fix yourself. It’s about you. It’s all about me. No, it’s not all about me! But that’s what we’ve been sold. And you’re right, we’ve been sold that since Genesis 3. What will Eve achieve? Well, one of the things she will achieve is illumination and the knowledge of good and evil, and it’s about her rising up—and not just her, it’s Adam, as well, the two together. 

Tom: Well, what happened? After sin came in, who did Adam blame? Himself? No, it was “the woman,” okay?

Carl: Right!

Tom: So then who did the woman blame? “It wasn’t me, it was this serpent that came in,” and so on. Self reared its ugly head there and has been growing—well, where’s it going? Folks, that’s what this program is about. We will tell you that the Antichrist, the man of lawlessness who appears just before the return of Jesus, who’s going to rule the world, you know—check it out and read the Book of Revelation and so on. It’s all about self. He sets himself up in the temple of God to be worshipped as “god.” This is, and we need to talk about this next: how did…well, let me finish my point here. These—these things have to do with self-idolatry, self-deification, and so on, and we see it clearly in Scripture. 

But again, going back to the point I was making that the problem was how do we—not we, but how does the world accept these kinds of things, and how this transition happened from “science,” so-called—pseudoscience, psychology—to Eastern mysticism? 

Let me give you a quote from the Jacob Neilman, who’s a professor at the University of California. He writes, “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, the numerous gurus and spiritual teachers now in the West are reformulating and adapting the traditional systems according to the language and atmosphere of modern psychology.”

There’s one last…well, not one last thing. We can talk a lot about this, but there was an article in Psychology Today a while ago that noted that Eastern philosophies “seem to be making gradual headway in the West as psychologies, not as religions.” So godhood is now easier to accept wrapped in packages of the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, his collective unconscious, or the New Age human higher potential beliefs and its self-improvement seminars in the business world.

So East has not only come West, it has overwhelmed the West. 

Carl: And you know, it’s interesting: even if you just look at this from a secular point of view, without bringing the Eastern side into it, it’s inescapable—it ends up becoming what’s called a “horizontal heresy.” The idea of the divine self does not reflect the one above, it only reflects a divinity this way. It only reflects a divinity in that you, that man, now has that divine spark within him. It doesn’t point upward to the One who is divine. When the Eastern spirituality is added to the mix, then you see techniques to try to explore and expound on this horizontal heresy, that there is a spirituality wrapped within it. It’s science, secularism, and spirituality. It’s a type of mystical materialism where all that we find—all we can find is meaning and purpose in what we’re experiencing or feeling in the now. 

And where I see, Tom, the collision point or…maybe a better way of saying it, the mixing bowl of both the Eastern spiritual worldview and psychology was on the West Coast of California, the Esalen Institute. Because there you saw men like Carl Rogers, whom you just mentioned; you see people like Stanislav Grof, leading thinkers in the cutting edge of psychology coming to have spiritual experiences, mixing both Eastern religion, Eastern philosophy with psychedelics, with now the new Human Potential movement. And Esalen sold it as a new way forward: this is mankind now experiencing progressive transformation. “We’re going to find our own divinity; we’re going to find our higher selves.” And we ate it! We bought it! It was a place where not just simply psychologists would go, but maverick theologians, leaders within academia. And so it was this melting pot of both psychology and Eastern spirituality, and after that the floodgates opened, Tom. 

Tom: Well, as we talked about this last week, there were a number of other things. We’ve talked about scientific materialism, the idea that there’s nothing but matter. But there’s another materialism that helped introduce this, if not ushered it in, and that was straight materialism. People couldn’t find meaning, people couldn’t find purpose. Yes, they had all the goodies, all the things, and so on, so what did they do? They went off to India, you know? 

Here is something that’s just mind-boggling: why would you go to India? What has the religion of Hinduism done for that country? It’s one of the poorest countries with the most superstitious things. It’s horrendous! But now we’ve got a new spin on it: it’s going to solve all our problems. And these people that went to Esalen, they were not stupid, okay? But it just shows you, whether it’s a bondage, whether it’s a pride thing, whatever it might be, it made them the spokesmen for solving the problems of the world.

Carl, have they solved any of the problems? I mean, Esalen goes back, you know, the ‘60s and so on. What’s been accomplished here?

Carl: Well, we sure haven’t solved anybody’s problems, have we? We seem to have more problems than ever. 

Tom: Right.

Carl: Esalen’s been around since 1962. In its 50^th anniversary, I believe that they had announced roughly 900,000 people had gone through the Esalen courses and the Esalen experience. That’s a lot of people! That’s a lot of people who become your educators, they become the leaders of business, they take positions in government, certainly academia, and even within the field of theology. And since then, all we have been doing is…well, in the last 50 years, the postmodern world, when we strip away any authority, when we strip away the authority of God’s Word, and we also strip away the idea that materialism offers authority, what’s left? Well, no wonder the self comes in roaring like a lion, because that’s the only thing we have that’s left—that and the earth itself, which ends up having this mystical symbiosis between self and the cosmos, self and the new spirituality. 

I was at—it wasn’t a workshop, it was more like a mockery at Burning Man in 2017. At Burning Man, the Burning Man festival, one of the leading kind of personalities there, his name is Reverend Billy, and he dresses up like a pastor. He’s got the suit and the little clerical collar, all the rest. And I listened to his famous Sunday sermon on the last Sunday of Burning Man, which was a complete mockery of Christianity. And he made the case in his sermon that science has failed us, we no longer believe also in the God who knows all—what do we have left? All we have is the earth and ourselves, so allow the self to embrace the earth, and allow a recognition that this is all there is. Tom, that’s sad, but that’s exactly the—that’s the tone of our day, is it not?

Tom: Right.

Carl: And so if postmodernism gives us no answers, and if we’ve rejected as a culture Christianity, well then, of course the self is going to come roaring in.

Tom: And it’s hopeless, and we’re seeing the manifestations of that hopelessness across the board. I’m here in Oregon; we not only have to deal with Covid, now we have to deal with fires that are burning much of this incredibly beautiful state.

Carl: Yes.

Tom: So people are reacting to that, and there is a hopelessness because they’ve turned from the God of hope, the God of all hope.

You know, as we’ve been talking about the world and Esalen and the delusion involved in that—actually, the stupidity from men who, in many areas, are brilliant, but it’s an utter stupidity, because it’s rejected the God of truth and His way of dealing with what’s going on. 

Now, what about the church? Now, Carl, we don’t have a lot of time left in this program, but nevertheless, how did the church fall into this? You know, I could go back to the ‘70s when psychology was introduced, counseling was introduced, psychological counseling was introduced, and what became the chief doctrine? Self-esteem, self-love, the selfisms that the Bible condemns, all right? 

Second Timothy 3:1-2: “Mark my words, in the last days there will be perilous times. Men will be lovers of themselves….” What about that verse, you who are promoting self-love, self-esteem, and all of that? And that became, again, a major part of Christianity, evangelical Christianity, certainly not biblical Christianity, because Jesus said, “Unless a man does not deny self and take up the cross and follow Me,” there’s the antithesis to that whole mentality and that view. Have you seen that within Canada with the—your churches there?

Carl: It’s everywhere, Tom. It is everywhere. We cannot get away from this. This is, for me, something that’s disturbing in that, instead of being separate from the world (that of course implies that we also know what is happening in the world), we’ve embraced what the world has said. We are no longer different that way, and so our theology gets wrapped up in world systems. 

What I find striking is as you were talking about the problem of self from a biblical point of view, I’m holding in my hand right now Carl Jung’s The Red Book. And this is the reader’s edition, because the full edition with his calligraphy and his drawings is massive and very, very expensive. 

Now, as you also talked a little bit earlier about, Carl Jung had a spirit guide. It was—Carl Jung’s phraseology was his “unconscious” coming forward, being projected. But listen to what Philemon is saying—now, this is from The Red Book, and this is Carl Jung giving a commentary of his experiences with Philemon. First of all, he prefaces it by talking about Christians have learned to devour their God, metaphorically speaking about the Eucharist and the Catholic tradition of transubstantiation. That’s the underlying kind of tone as he begins this. This helps set the stage. 

Speaking about Philemon: “You are no Christian.” He says, “You nourish yourself from yourself and force men to do the same. You are no light that shines in the darkness, no savior who establishes an eternal truth and thus extinguishes the nocturnal light of human understanding. No, you tend the flowers in your own garden. I praise you, O Philemon, your lack of acting like a savior. You are no shepherd who runs after stray sheep.” He says, “You believe in the dignity of man.”

Tom: So, to back that up a little bit, you know, Carl Jung waffled on that a bit. Earlier he had set Philemon up as an extension out of his own subconscious, and so on, but he did that for credibility with the science community. But basically, later he talked about, “No, this was somebody, not me. This was someone else.” 

Hopefully in the next…maybe our next session we’ll deal with two other aspects that are important for our discussions here, and that is sorcery, shamanism, spirit entities—who and what are they? Are they projections of our subconscious, or are they real entities? That’s important, because people, as I mentioned earlier, were communing, communicating with these spirit entities back in Samuel Andrews’ time, but how much more today? So that needs to be addressed, and I think we could do some—give some interesting insights into that.

The other thing is going back to self, if the God of the Bible is rejected, then humanity, as we’ve been talking about this, must deify self. And that relates back to the scripture that I just quoted, 2 Timothy:3:1-2 [1] This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. [2] For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy,
See All..., but also other verses in chapter 3 that talk about “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.”

Folks, again, this is about, to a great degree, about prophecy—what the Word of God says is going to take place, where the world is headed, and where the church is headed. And we are seeing the manifestations of that, the evidences of that daily, and we’re seeing what it has produced: chaos. Anarchy. All these things, which is a part of what happens when you become your own god. 

I remember Dave Hunt used to say, “The problem is that there are 7 billion gods running around in this world today, and they each have their own answers, or their own views, their own opinions, their own truths.” Now, this is relativism gone amok, just what happens through all these things is being manifested today.

So, Carl, we’ve got about three or four minutes. Isn’t this where the world is heading, where the church—not the true church, but the false church… And sadly, many who are true believers who have got their eschatology mixed up at best, and they are participating in that, not unwittingly… I would say it this way: unwittingly, they’re helping to contribute to the religion and the kingdom of the Antichrist, unwittingly. 

Carl: For myself, Tom, I have to make this personal, because this should be a challenge to me as much as it is to anybody else. It forces—when you look at a discussion like this and you look at a topic like psychology and the direction our world is going, it should force us to pause and to self-reflect, asking that question: Who ultimately is it that I trust? In whom do I trust? Do I trust in the wisdom of man, or do I trust in the wisdom of God? Do I trust in the God who is outside of time, space, and matter, the One who reveals Himself in His Word, the One who reveals Himself in Scripture? Or do I trust in the scriptures of man, the holy works, the sacred waters of Jung, and Freud, and Rogers, and Stanislav Grof, and whatever new psychological fad, spiritual fad is that’s coming along right now? Ultimately, where do I place my trust? Is it in myself, or is it in God? 

Tom: That’s, again, a question we have to ask ourselves. Maybe this is a little bit off from what you’ve said, but maybe not: we’re going through some sad times here in the state of Oregon. Most of our beautiful land is being burned up. People have lost houses, they’ve lost everything. And although, you know, I haven’t, and we haven’t as a family, been subjected to that, when I was a teenager, our house caught on fire, so I have a little sense of the loss. But, Carl, it comes down to this: what am I clinging to? Better yet, who am I clinging to?

Carl: Mm-hmm.

Tom: Now, I can’t put myself in the place of somebody who’s had their house completely destroyed, but the same question has to be asked by them as well as by me: who am I clinging to, and what is the, you know, what’s the situation with regard to going on from there? Am I clinging to Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and what He has for me, or to the temporal things?

You know, again, I almost weep inside that I even have to bring this up, because I’m not personally going through that, but there are people that I know and people who are dealing with that.

So again, it comes back to self. It comes back to are my “self” issues related to my things, what I have, what I treasure? Well, now remember, the Scripture talks about my treasure is in heaven with Him. Again, easy for me to—not easy, because it grieves me, but it’s not the same for me, although I would hope it would be for those who are dealing with those issues, that they are clinging to Jesus and the eternal life that He has given me. And I think He’s soon to come. All this stuff we’re talking about, it converges to a point in time. 

Well, that’s my cry out to—for prayer, not only for the two of us, but prayer for those people who are recognizing what’s going on. Maybe not for them personally, but brothers and sisters in Christ that we are—we grieve when they grieve, and we rejoice when they rejoice. 

So anyway, brother, time’s out, and—did I say “out?” I think that was a Canadian…[laughs]

Carl: That’s Ontario! I’m from Western Canada. [laughs]

Tom: Okay, anyway, good program. Thank you for your wisdom, your insights, and, Lord willing, we’ll be back again next week with—dealing with some things that need to be addressed in Jesus’ name. Amen?

Carl: Amen.