Eastern Meditative Spiritualism
Invades Christendom and The West

By Yip Kok Tho, Residence—Singapore Ex Buddhist, International Lecturer

I am Chinese and grew up in a Taoist Buddhist family. The central feature in our home was the family altar of my father’s deceased ancestors, whose departed souls were venerated with daily offerings of food and incense. Our belief in a deathless soul with attributes of immortality and divinity is the basis for Taoists and virtually all eastern religions to meditate to discover the “Divine” through their personal in-born divinity. I practiced Zen Buddhist meditation from when I was 18 for twenty years until my conversion to Seventh-Day Adventism.

Eastern meditation has garnered a gigantic interest in the west. Today even scientists who believe in evolution meditate to activate their in-born pre-wired neural network of “godconsciousness”. Atheists meditate to tune into their spiritual “true self” within. Christians use Christianized hybrids of eastern meditation as the sure way to come into God’s “presence”, through that which is presumed as already within, often misunderstood diversely as the holy spirit, the image of God and their soul. The pervasive sentiment is that everyone without exception has a higher spiritual-self often regarded as divine which transcends all religion. This is the seductive new spirituality of our age which denies that humanity had fallen since Eden, dismissing the fact that our natural heart is “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”, still claiming that man possess his pre-fall innocence apart from God. Eastern meditation thinks that by silencing the mind of all distractions, man will discover that higher-self already within, without the need for Christ, his blood sacrifice and sanctification.

Father Richard Rohr is an acknowledged leader of Christianized eastern hybrid meditation. In his Daily Meditation of 5th May 2017 he wrote: At the beginning, for both Jesus and us, the soul is already one with God. Just as Jesus is the Son of God, we also are sons or daughters of God from conception. Jesus’ unique and inclusive “sonship” declares us as “coheirs” and “adopted children” in Paul’s theology (Romans 8:14-17). Yet this divine conception is hidden from all of us until we discover.

Neuroscience Explains Eastern Meditative Transcendence

When Dr Andrew Newberg, leading researcher scanned the brains of nuns and Buddhists undergoing mystical experiences, they reported feelings of timelessness, spacelessness, and self-transcendence. Newberg believes a cause of these feelings is the reduced activity he saw in their parietal lobes, the orientation area of the brain responsible for perceiving threedimensional objects in space. A meditator may experience a sense of oneness with all living things or unity because the reduced activity blurs the perceived lines between the meditator and other objects. http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/whathappens-to-brains-during-spiritual-experiences/361882/ .

In Greek, pan means “all” and theos means “god.” Hence pantheism, claims that the universe conceived of as a whole is God and, conversely, that there is no God but the combined substance, forces, and laws that are manifested in the existing universe. According to Dr. Newberg, it is from the deactivation of the parietal lobe that meditators “experience” and infer that everyone collectively is ONE as GOD.

Other research reveal many meditative inducements which usher meditators into increasingly more meditation leading to reduced activity of the parietal lobe – 1] More sleep waves (alpha and theta) in the brain than alert fast beta waves, triggering the relaxation response, inattention and tranquility; 2] More endogenous dopamine in the brain, hence addiction to meditation; 3] a calmed amygdala hence bliss; 4] Reduced cerebral blood flow to frontal cortex hence sleep-like relaxation.

The singular objective of all meditative practices that initiates the above neural inducements is to empty the mind to achieve “silence” and “nothingness”.  Unthinking exclusive focus on mantras, breath prayers, meditating on the flame of a candle, a spot of light, etc. starves the brain, depriving it of all thoughts with the result that frontal lobe is denied all information, taking the frontal lobe “offline” resulting in the deactivation of the parietal lobe and the phenomena of transcendence. What the east called Nirvana, “Buddhahood”, liberation, oneness, unitive consciousness, now Christians doing Christianized eastern meditation are mistakenly claiming their experience as “being in God’s presence” !

Columbia Univ reports that in successful hypnosis, subjects have their anterior cingulate cortex (their will) and lateral frontal cortex (their reality) decoupled. When the frontal lobe is taken “offline” in meditation, both the will and reality functions in the frontal lobe are also deactivated. Hence, many scientists state that meditation is self-hypnosis. This is when the mind accepts the suggestion of the patheistic worldview.

Biblical meditation involves mental activity (not inactivity), to ruminate by drawing widely, deeply and strictly from the word of God. When the mind is so absorbed, and if it is God’s sovereign will, He can interactively relate with the meditator. We can see this process clearly in Psalms 19, the gold standard of Biblical meditation.

King David is meditating in Psalms 19. He perceives the sun as “a bridegroom coming out of his chamber”, a “strong man to run a race” coming forth from heaven, whose heat no one on earth can hide. Then he actively meditates upon the law, the statutes, the commandment, judgments that he may be warned and rewarded. He yielded himself fully, trusting and transparent to God, that the God who sees all things shall reveal and cleanse him from his “secret faults”, which his deceitful heart had hidden from his own sight. And of greater gravity, he pleads to be “kept back” from “presumptuous sins” so as to be “innocent
from the great transgression”. In Psalms 19, the theme revealed to David was the consummation of a spiritual marriage. As Christ’s bride-to-be, David’s deepest desire was to be cleansed thoroughly of his secret faults and presumptuous sins. His overwhelming desire is the major outcome of Biblical meditation. In sharp contrast, the blind-spot of eastern meditation is the presumption of the existence of a higher-self, an immortal in-born divinity within each and every one, awaiting self-discovery and spiritual transformation. Biblical meditation reveals and is insistent of our feeble spiritual condition, of our need for God from outside of us but at the same time confident of victory from Christ’s sacrifice and His work in us.

The Tree Of Knowledge Of Good And Evil
The “union” with “God” offered by many forms of mystical eastern and their Christianized versions are not just theological constructs but “felt experientially”. The presumption of an immortal divine soul has become the common denominator of virtually all religion having penetrated past the obstacles of time, diverse geography, language and sectarian barriers of religious dogma. It has swept past the after effects of the Fall, ignoring that humanity, now tainted with a fallen nature is still somehow divine. Opposing spiritual contradictions are brought together, as if they belong together without differentiation…. fallen as unfallen, life as deathless, man as God, good as evil, …. all these were seductively offered by the serpent to Eve in Eden.

God could not have given Adam and Eve a simpler warning than not to eat of the serpent’s tree. He warned that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil “thou shalt surely die”. The serpent’s lie to Adam and Eve was that God had kept something much better from them, that in eating of the serpent’s tree, “ye shall not surely die”, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”. In one breath, the serpent offered a seductive new enlightened consciousness, that it was needless to differentiate between the trees, between God and the serpent, between God and man, between life and death and between good and evil.

The very first deceptive utterance that man possessed a divine immortal soul was made by the serpent in Eden. The Bible states in 1 Tim 6:16 of God “Who only hath immortality…”. The serpent’s lies were exposed forcibly to Adam and Eve when everything changed after they ate. They were kept from the tree of life so that they will suffer mortality; Gen 3:24. Furthermore, eternal life will not be available to man ever again until the new heaven and new earth when the tree of life is accessible again; Rev 22:2. The foundation of Satan’s deception was laid in Eden and little by little he has developed it into his masterpiece of deception in virtually every religion on earth. Eastern meditation and their Christianized versions are the methods by which this “immortal divine” is to be discovered. These spiritualistic practices turn the serpent’s lie into what is claimed to be experiential “truth”. Be warned, that if God is an essence pervading all nature, then He dwells in all men; and in order to attain holiness, man has only to develop the power that is within him.

A common characteristic among meditators in the east was that they were reclusive, antisocial and some were hermits living in caves. Their philosophy and practices were to renunciate the world. How did something with such a dominant solitary stance become something entirely different in the west? It’s now modern and social, holds center stage in the transformational health movement. Sport coaches and superstars use it. In 2015, Pope Francis in his very first address to US Congress advocated the “contemplative style” of Father Thomas Merton for the grand purpose unity of all peoples and religions. International Yoga Day, now in its fourth year is supported by the United Nations. In the words of India’s Prime Minister, “In the present century, we are observing that Yoga has connected the world”.

Eastern meditation is a powerful manifestation of pantheistic spiritualism in our world today leading and uniting people and religion around the tree of knowledge of good and evil. A deeper understanding of the dangers of eastern meditation and their Christianized hybrids may be found on my website http://www.meditation-mindyourbrain.com/

Many other pantheistic forms of alternative medicine and practices are prevalent today. Acupuncture, reiki, reflexology, martial arts, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, etc. To gain knowledge and to be updated continuously, you are invited to join a newly formed Health and Spirituality Research Network, led by an “advisory group” of 5 individuals comprising:

    1. Dr. Edwin A. Noyes M.D., MPH, family physician, educator, author, speaker.
    2. Will Baron, author of “Deceived by the New Age”, best-seller published and translated in 10 languages.
    3. Eric Wilson and family – Isaiah Ministries – ex combative martial arts Hall Of Fame, ex instructor in the Chinese Internal arts of Tai-chi chuan, Bagua zhang, Qigong, and Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM).
    4. Magna Parks Porterfield, Ph.D. is a psychologist – educator, author, speaker.
    5. Kok Tho Yip, ex Zen meditator, international speaker and researcher of eastern meditation and its many Christianized derivatives.

To read more about this initiative go to the Network’s webpage at http://www.meditationmindyourbrain.com/438305773

Or just send your name to healthandspirituality@yahoo.com.