- My involvement in contemplative spirituality actually began in high school. As a student, I had a lot of stress, I had a lot of phobias and fears and anxieties, and I turned to self-help psychology books to try to deal with some of the problems that I have. From psychology, I then gravitated over into seeking a psychic for psychic counseling. I thought a psychic perhaps could help me with some of the challenges that I was facing in my life. That particular psychic was the founder and director of a New Age center. This is now in the
early 1980s when New Age spirituality was very popular. I then started to practice transcendental meditation, started to practice and study yoga, started to get involved in the occult. I had a personal spirit guide that appeared to me in an incredible visionary experience one morning, and this spirit guide completely took over my life. I thought this spirit guide was someone that was one of God's agents on planet earth. I believe that the ministry that I was involved in at the time was something that was from God that was divine. From that New Age occultism, I then
gravitated over it into New Age Christianity. And I believed that I was a follower of the Jesus Christ of the Bible. I actually believed that I was a born again Christian, but in reality, I was a deceived person, a slave of demonic spirits, evil angels from Satan that were masquerading as Jesus Christ. And I became a total slave to these evil spirits, with a mission of infiltrating regular Christian churches, to try to bring the pastors and church members to be involved in contemplative spirituality and to practice what I called Christian meditation, which in reality was
nothing other than transcendental Eastern Hindu meditation that was given a Christian packaging. Thank God though, that I was rescued from that terrible deception and came to know the real Jesus Christ of the Bible. It is a reality that to just sit in church and listen to sermons is not gonna protect you from the deception. You have to be a student of the Bible. You have to know the word of God, and you have to be aware that there is a tempter out there. Satan and his evil angels are constantly putting temptations into our minds. They're
to some extent, even manipulating our emotions. And unless you are aware of this strategy by Satan to deceive and to ensnare, then you are going to be a victim of their deception, you're gonna succumb. You have to have a sound strong knowledge of the gospel and the teachings of the Bible in order to be protected from this terrible deception of contemplative spirituality. When I was deeply involved in New Age spirituality and the occult we believed that when you died, your consciousness did not cease, you didn't blank out. That at the moment of death, you would
be possessed of all sensory faculties and you would then enter into a soul or spirit existence, and that you would then move off into the spirit plains and exist there for some time before returning back to planet earth, where you would have a new incarnation into a newly born baby. We actually taught that when a newly born baby makes its first cry, this is when a pre-incarnate soul then fuses with this newly born baby to produce a new lifetime. We followed the traditional Hindu teachings of reincarnation, the idea that we will have many lives in
the future and that we would have had many past lives. The goal of our spirituality though, was to bring this cycle of reincarnation, the cycle of birth and death and rebirth to an end so that we would not need to reincarnate, but we would eventually exist immortal in our flesh and blood bodies. The people that are involved in the occult in Eastern mysticism and in contemplative spirituality, they are no longer calling their involvement by that term, New Age, perhaps they might use the expression new spirituality or just spiritual or spirituality, but the actual term New
Age is now gone out of fashion, and it is not used by the people who would at one time have been called and labeled New Agers. People like myself that are rescued from that deception and have written books to expose the deception are now a threat to the integrity of Satan, trying to maintain that this spirituality is coming from God. So as more and more books are written exposing New Age spirituality, I believe it was necessary for Satan to move away from that term because that term had been discredited. And so Satan and his evil
angels introduce new vocabulary such as simply new spirituality or spirituality or contemplative spirituality. These terms are actually describing the same occult process and the same occult religious practices, but they are just giving them a more benign name. Even though I was brought up in a conservative Christian family as a child I did not study the Bible. To be honest, I just did not have any interest in it. I seemed to have an interest in science and engineering, interest in cars and all the things that children are invariably interested in. And I just did not have
an interest in studying the Bible. So even though I attended church each week for many years, my knowledge of Christian doctrine and especially theology was very limited. And so when I started to read New Age books, started to absorb New Age ideas, I was really not equipped with a sound biblical knowledge to know that this New Age was a deception. And so I was basically had no defense against the New Age occult teachings. When I started to study the New Age occult books, and I was primarily a student of the Alice Bailey teachings, one of
the statements I read in an Alice Bailey book that really impressed me was the statement that Satan did not exist. That Satan was simply a figment of the imagination of conservative Christianity. And there was no devil on planet earth. There was no great Lord and prince of evil. The New Age books were teaching that evil within us is simply a matter of our own personal ignorance. And that what we needed to do was replace that ignorance with the light of the New Age teachings. Every kind of message that I received from the spirit guides, from
what we called the ascended masters that we believed were God's agents on planet earth, every experience I had had to be from God, because there was no other source of any kind of mystical or spiritual experience. If the devil doesn't exist, then everything that you're experiencing and that you're involved in must be from God. This makes it extremely difficult to escape from the New Age deception, because once you are involved in these occult practices, once you have had mystical visions and mystical experiences, there is really no escape because there is nowhere to escape to. It
seemed to me, at least initially that New Age spirituality offered a better way of life than just living a regular secular life and hanging out in bars and going to parties. I lived in Hollywood, I was part of the Hollywood party scene, that became a very unfulfilling lifestyle. The core teaching of meditation is that you enter into a state of relaxation, perhaps sitting on the floor in the traditional Hindu yoga posture, the Lotus position, or you could even practice it sitting in a chair, but you will close your eyes, you will go into a state
of relaxation. You will be involved in deep breathing exercises to try to bring about the relaxation, what is called the stilling of the mind. And you could then have mantras or phrases that you could repeat in your mind to try to achieve this stilling of the mind. The goal is that eventually you will empty your mind, you will bring it into a state of silence so that you can then listen to the higher self within you. This is claim to be the God Self or the divinity within you. And as you're practicing this meditation, you
might start hearing voices in your mind speaking to, like your voice of conscience. But initially New Age teachers will typically tell you, this is simply the voice of your Higher Self. It can give you wisdom that you are normally not accessing. You don't normally have access to this higher level of consciousness. As you are involved more deeply in this contemplative spirituality, you then are taught that this voice that you're listening to can actually be the voice of the Holy Spirit or the voice of Jesus Christ could be speaking to you as you're practicing this meditation.
Now I personally was on the path of the Ascended Masters in my New Age spirituality, Madam Blavatsky was the founder of the Theosophical Society, which in a sense was the very first New Age organization. Alice Bailey started to read the book Secret Doctrine and in Alice Bailey's own autobiography, she makes the statement that the more she read Secret Doctrine, the less she studied her Bible. Alice Bailey became captivated by the Theosophical Society teachings and eventually left her husband and joined the Theosophical Society that had a large commune in Hollywood, it was called Crotona. That was
their main international headquarters. And it was at Crotona in the 1920s that Alice Bailey started to become a channeler or a medium for one of the so-called ascended masters. It was the ascended master Djwal Khul, the ascended master that appeared to me in an incredible visionary experience in 1981. So Alice Bailey is having visions and messages from this spirit guide called Djwal Khul. And these messages then were written down and eventually were published in a series of books called the Alice Bailey books. It was these books that I started to study as a student at
the Lighted Way, New Age center. And I was fascinated by the books, I had read many, many books on psychology, books on philosophy, and I was immediately convinced that these books could not have been written by a human being. The language that was used in the books, the philosophical concepts were so advanced that I believe no human could write this material. This had to come from the divine realm. Being a person that didn't believe in the existence of Satan, there was no other realm that it could come from. I had no comprehension that this could
be a deception, that this was coming from Satan and his evil angels, which of course are highly-evolved spirit beings. They have incredible, great intelligence. They have the ability to produce books like what Alice Bailey channeled and could write. But because I didn't believe in the existence of Satan, by default, I accepted the Alice Bailey books as divine revelation from God. As a student at the Lighted Way New Age Center, it was mandatory that you practiced meditation each morning. We're talking now about the Eastern transcendental meditation. One morning as I was trying to meditate, I was
sitting on the floor in the typical cross-legged posture of yoga, but it was difficult for me to me meditate that morning because my back was hurting. As a young child of maybe 11 or 12 I had a accident and I hurt my spine. And periodically that would give me some pain. So this particular morning, I'm in a lot of discomfort with my back and I wanted to just quit that meditation, but there was a voice speaking inside my mind that was prompting me and saying, "Will, just persist, just continue." And so I was sitting there
on the floor and I was doing the rhythmatic breathing, and I was endeavoring to still my mind of all conflicting thoughts and ideas to try to bring your mind into a state of emptiness. As I was sat there, suddenly is it was as if someone would switch on an electric light bulb inside my head, maybe like a 60 or a hundred watt light bulb. And this was very tranquil, soothing energy. And this light seemed to flood throughout the whole of my body. And it felt like I was maybe sitting on the beach at Malibu in
the sunshine, it felt very tranquil, very peaceful. The New Ager would call this a mystical experience. And I was enjoying this tranquility, and the pain in my back seemed to disappear, I was no longer in any kind of discomfort. And as I was sitting there enjoying this soothing, warm energy, suddenly this person stood in front of me. And when I first saw him, I thought, wow, it's Jesus Christ. This person looked just like the way artists have traditionally painted Jesus Christ to look. He had long golden hair that was resting on his shoulders and he
was wearing a long white robe. As I look down at his feet, I noticed that his feet were glowing, like burnish bronze and radiating this intense light, almost like the description given of the appearance of Jesus in the book of Revelation in that first chapter there. I noticed the face of this person that was in front of me was also glowing, this golden white light. Let me say that this was a visionary experience, my eyes were closed, but it was as if this person had really appeared there in front of me, it was a real
life experience. This spirit guide that appeared to me then communicated to me using telepathy. I could see that his mouth was not moving, but in my own mind, I could clearly hear the words as clearly as what anyone listening to this audio could hear me speak. And he told me that he was not Jesus Christ, that he was the master Djwal Khul Now I was familiar with that name, Djwal Khul. The Alice Bailey books clearly described that on planet earth there are 49 of these Ascended Masters. The Alice Bailey books teach that these are God's
representatives on planet earth, they are human beings that have highly evolved themselves through strenuous practice of yoga and transcendental meditation and other occult techniques. And that they have now become immortal in their flesh and blood bodies. New Age teaches that they live as recluses, usually in the Himalayan mountains, but in other reclusive parts of planet earth. New Age teaches that Jesus Christ is one of these 49 ascended masters. And that this Djwal Khul is also one of these ascended masters that he lives in the Himalayan mountains. He was the former Abbot of a Buddhist Lamasery
in Tibet, and that he has mystical powers and that he can appear in either visionary form to prospective disciples, or he can even appear sometimes in a flesh and blood visible body when he wants to appear to some disciple for some special purpose. So this lighted being appeared to me and he told me that he had appeared to let me know that I had been selected to be one of his personal disciples. And should I accept this discipleship relationship, he would then train me to be more deeply involved in the New Age movement that I
would eventually be involved in leadership positions and that I would work for the United Nations organization. That was the long term goal. This lighted being, this ascended master Djwal Khul stood there silently for several more seconds. He then invited me to ask him a personal question. I asked him a question about my health. He told me not to worry about it. He then for several more seconds stood there silently, and then in an instant, he vanished, he was gone, he disappeared. And where he had been stood, there was left behind a blazing sphere of white
light, about two yards in diameter. This sphere of light gradually started to dissipate. And as it did, I took a deep, big breath, throughout this visionary experience I had not been breathing at all. But thereafter, he would communicate to me, initially through the practice of transcendental meditation. I would hear this voice and it was actually in a sense, the voice of conscience, the ascended master or spirit guide would speak through your voice of conscience and he would give me specific instructions as to how I needed to change my life in order to be one of
his disciples. I became a disciple of this spirit guide. Later, as I became more attuned and better equipped and skilled at being able to discern this inner voice, he could then communicate to me at any time, not just in the practice of transcendental or Eastern meditation, I could be driving my car down one of the Los Angeles freeways and all of a sudden he would speak to me and he'd say, "Will, I need you to take the next exit ramp. I need you to go somewhere else and do something different than what you would originally
planned to do." As I began to become more skilled at practicing Eastern meditation This voice from the Higher Self started to give me more and more specific instructions as to how I needed to change my life. It was not always discernible, whether it was the voice of the Higher Self speaking to you or the voice of the ascended masters, the spirit guides, but I would just hear this voice that would speak as if it was a person that was external to me and would be speaking to me. And it started to tell me to make
changes in my life. And one day the spirit guidance clearly told me that I needed to get rid of my girlfriend. This was difficult for me, how do you tell your girlfriend that your spirit guide has ordered you to sever that relationship? My spirit guidance told me that my girlfriend was not spiritual, that I was wasting my time with her and that I needed to devote more of my time to the practice of Eastern meditation. I needed to devote more time to studying the Alice Bailey books and other occult books. And I couldn't do this
if I was going on dates with my girlfriend. So with some difficulty I had to tell my girlfriend, I'm very sorry, but we have to split up. I need to do other things in my life. I was committed to following this spiritual path, 'cause I believed that my life was going to be blessed through it. I believed that I was living in obedience to God's will. One evening at the Lighted Way, the New Age Center, where I'd now become the senior board member, we had a class, I can't remember if it was an astrology class
or it was a discipleship training class or a yoga class, I can't remember now, but at the beginning of the class, the founder and director of our center, the well known Los Angeles, psychic Muriel Isis, she stood up and she said that she had a very important announcement to make, and that our message had to be got to more and more people. And that we were going to have a new advertising campaign that we were gonna put advertisements in local newspapers, such as the LA Weekly and the LA Reader. And it was gonna take $7,000.
And she invited us as disciples of that center to make donations. I had recently returned back from the United Kingdom where I spent a one year spiritual pilgrimage, primarily being a member of the Findhorn New Age Center in Northern Scotland. And I had exhausted all of my financial resources. So I had very little money. I figured with my paycheck going into the bank, that I could afford $500. So I wrote out a check for $500 and mailed it to Muriel at the Lighted Way. Well, two or three days later in my morning meditation, my personal
spirit guide Djwal Khul congratulated me on sending that money, but he said that money is not enough. You need to now send another donation, but you need to now send a thousand dollars. I could actually have a two-way telepathic mind to mind communication with my spirit guide. And I responded to him "Master, where am I going to get the money from? I don't have any more money." He said, "use your MasterCard." That's exactly what he said. This was a very strange instruction to go into debt. I'd always believed that the New Age was all about
prosperity and not going into debt. I decided that this must not have been my master. Surely he's not gonna ask me to go into debt and I just ignored the instruction. But by mid-morning the voice from the spirit guide is now speaking to me and telling me, "yes, this is your master Djwal Khul speaking to you, you have to send this money. You agreed to become a disciple of the Ascended Masters. You agreed to turn your will over to the the will of God. Quit that rebellion immediately. You have to send this money." So this
voice is now becoming very demanding and the more demanding it became, the more rebellious I became. Emotionally, I started to feel very depressed. The master then started speaking to me and told me that I was feeling depressed because I was feeling the emptiness of life without the spirit of God within me, I had grieved the Holy Spirit. I felt more and more depressed. And by the end of the day, I decided that my rebellion was foolishness. Why should I experience this depression? I just needed to be obedient and trust, have faith in my spirit guide
that my finances would all work out. So after work, I went home, I wrote out a check for a thousand dollars, put it in an envelope, drove to the nearest mailbox to mail this to Muriel, the founder of the Lighted Way. As soon as the envelope with the check was deposited in that mailbox, the depression lifted instantly. Only problem was about three days later, practicing my morning meditation, the voice of the spirit guide came back, he congratulated me on my obedience, but he then said, "Will that $1,000 check is not enough. This time you need
to send another check, but for $2,000." When I heard that instruction to send now $2,000, a shiver of fear penetrated me and I was now very afraid. I immediately quit that meditation. When I got to my job, I sat down in my office. I could not work at all. The voice of the spirit guide is now speaking to me again and demanding that I send this money. He is actually scolding me and calling me a coward. By midafternoon I was feeling so bad. I felt I had only two choices. Either I commit suicide to put
myself out of this terrible misery or I needed to be obedient. After work, I drove home, got out the credit card checks, wrote out a check for $2,000, drove to the mailbox. The instant that that check was deposited in the mailbox, the depression lifted from me and the nauseous feeling also lifted from me. What I had now entered is what I call the New Age nightmare. My ascended master spirit guide Djwal Khul is not one of God's angels or agents as he claims to be. He was one of Satan's angels, masquerading as an angel of
light. And they had now taken complete control over me. They could manipulate my emotions. They could manipulate my sense of health and wellbeing. No one knew that I was a slave of demonic spirits. No one knew that I was a disciple of the ascended master spirit guide Djwal Khul. I was told, don't tell anyone. May I add that about three or four days later, the voice of the ascended master came back again. This time he told me that I needed to send another check for $3,000. By now I had realized that rebelling was futile. All
I could do was be obedient. I was now incidentally at the limit of my line of credit on that credit card. And I had some peace for several more weeks, but then later the ascended master told me to get another credit card. The last two years of my involvement in New Age spirituality was actually as a disciple of a new spirit guide that came into my life who claimed to be Jesus Christ. We became a counterfeit Christian Church. We called ourselves New Age Christians. We were now holding Sunday morning worship services, during the midweek, we
would have Bible study classes. We had what is called an esoteric or a hidden or secret understanding of scripture. Yes, we did have Bible study classes, but we were reinterpreting the Bible according to the occult esoteric understanding, the mystical understanding of Scripture. The idea that Scripture had to be mystically understood to grasp its truth and its full meaning. We believed in the second coming of Jesus, but we clearly taught do not look up into the clouds of the sky for Jesus to come because he is not going to come that way. Jesus is gonna come
and appear in the world as a man with great dignity, charisma, power, and authority. He's gonna be speaking to the United Nations organization. He's gonna appear on those podiums as a man with great power, but there will be vaporous mist that will surround his feet and that is what is meant by appearing in the clouds. So we would twist Scripture. We would put a spin on Scripture to give it what appeared to the ignorant of the Bible to be some kind of biblical teaching, but it really wasn't. We were following a counterfeit Jesus, not the
real Jesus of the Bible. The apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians chapter 11 talks about another Jesus, the other Jesus, the counterfeit Jesus. And so I was now experiencing a deepening of the deception where I actually thought I was a born again Christian. As a New Age Christian, my new spirit guide who called himself Jesus Christ instructed me to start attending regular Christian churches. I was given the specific mission to infiltrate fundamentalist Christian churches, as we call them, to introduce Christian meditation in these churches. I was actually motivated to write an article as a handout, as
part of the beach ministry that I had down at Venice beach. I wanted a handout to promote meditation, especially amongst Christians. And as I started the task of using the Bible to teach transcendental meditation, I realized that all the references to meditation in the Bible were definitely not references to transcendental meditation. Meditation taught in the Bible was simply the study of Scripture and thinking about what you were studying. So I was aware that what I was teaching in my beach ministry and that what I was trying to witness to amongst Christians in regularly Christian churches,
I knew there was an incompatibility between the teachings of the Bible and what I was teaching as a New Age Christian. I remember going to some evangelism meetings by the German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke. And there was a lady sat next to me. And as Reinhard Bonnke was preaching about the shed blood of Jesus, I was extremely agitated. As a New Age Christian, we believe that Jesus was crucified. We believe that was a historical fact, but we believed he felt no pain that he was a master of yoga. And after the end of that meeting, she
asked me, she said, "Are you a Christian?" I said, "Well, not in the way you guys are." And she said, well, "Would you like me to pray for you?" And I thought, well, I believed in prayer. So that was fine. So this lady prayed for me and she said, "Dear heavenly father, I know that my brother here is not involved in regular Christianity, he has some kind of beliefs, but I just pray that you'll lead and guide him into truth. And that you'll deliver him from any kind of deception." Well, the Lord did intercede. The
Lord answered that prayer and rescued me from that terrible deception just a few weeks later. And a moment came in my life where God gave me a true enlightenment where I realized that this New Age was satanic and that my personal spirit guide Djwal Khul, that appeared to me in the early 1980s, I just knew that he was one of Satan's angels masquerading as an angel of light. I just knew that my new spirit guide who claimed to be Jesus was not the real Jesus of the Bible. I knew that the whole New Age spirituality
movement was designed to prepare the whole world to accept the final antichrist as being the second coming of Jesus. Even though I had been rescued by the truth of the gospel, I still had to face a lot of demonic harassment. These demonic spirits would still speak into my mind and they would try to manipulate my thinking. They would sometimes scold me. They would tell me that there was no hope for me, that they were going to get me, they were going to kill me. "We are going to kill you. We are going to kill you,
one way or another, we are going to kill you." And this hounding voice would be in my mind periodically. So it took about five years before I really was free of their demonic harassment. People asked me, what is the difference in your life now compared to what it was when you were a follower of the counterfeit Jesus, the New Age Jesus, I will tell them my life is tremendously different. Being a disciple of the false Jesus was a nightmare of slavery to demonic spirits that were tormenting me and hounding me and forcing me to do
things against my own natural will. Being a Christian, most of the time I have inner peace without the practice of meditation to try to achieve peace. There are many times when I have joy, but I don't always have joy. I struggle in life just like other people struggle, but I have a Savior. I have a Friend in Jesus that I can go to in prayer for help, to my challenges and problems. And I have purpose in life, true purpose. I believe that I am a disciple of Jesus, of the real Jesus. That's what the gospel
commission is. Go make disciples of all nations. And I think it is the best lifestyle I have ever experienced. I was never personally involved in Freemasonry, but I do recall one evening going to a lecture by a guru from India that was presented in a Masonic lodge, the very lodge, huge Masonic temple on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. And I was curious to wander around that Masonic temple. And I read a lot of the things that were displayed in that temple. And it was almost identical to the teachings from the Alice Bailey books, their language,
the vocabulary, for example, accepted disciple and apprentice was all very similar to the language of Alice Bailey. So yes, there's an absolute connection between masonry and traditional theological New Age spirituality. There is also a connection between the occult manifesting in Wicca or witchcraft and traditional Alice Bailey type New Age occultism. There was a man called Gerald Gardener that was the founder of the modern Wicca movement, he was a student of Theosophy. He was a student of the Alice Bailey teachings, and he incorporated a lot of Theosophy and the Alice Bailey teachings into his materials that
promoted this neo-pagan witchcraft that we call Wicca. As part of my New Age discipleship training, I visited many other New Age centers. I was a member of the Findhorn community in Northern Scotland. I used to go to the Self Realization Fellowship meetings, which was an organization founded by the guru Paramahansa Yogananda, so I was involved in Hinduism. Visited many other New Age centers. It was my personal discovery that most of the Western New Age leaders have been students of the Alice Bailey teachings, most of them. Perhaps not all, but many of them certainly were. So
in a sense, the Alice Bailey teachings are the foundation of the New Age movement. And Alice Bailey herself was a theosophist, and so her line of teaching is basically simply a development of the Theosophical Society teachings. The goal of Theosophy is to produce a new world religion based upon the synthesis of the existing world religions. The ideal is to focus on what we have in common. So the teachings of Christianity and the teachings of occultism, the teachings of ceremonial magic, the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism and Islam are all to be joined together, to be
merged, to focus on what we believe in common to produce this new world religion. But the goal is that all world religions ultimately teach the same thing, but fundamentalist conservative Christianity could never accept. The sentiment within New Age Christianity, sentiments that I felt and that I saw in others is that our main enemy was fundamentalist conservative Christianity. And that our main target was to infiltrate those types of Christian circles to bring about transformation, to bring about the practice of Christian meditation so that those that were pastors of such churches would start listening to this inner
voice believing it was the voice of Jesus and they would then move away from their fundamentalist biblical worldview. Christians today can become involved in contemplative spirituality, which can lead to having the hearing of voices that you think is the voice of Jesus of the Holy Spirit. You can be led into this through a whole variety of popular books that are out there in Christian bookstores. This was one of the early books that was drawing people into contemplative spirituality. It's a book titled a Celebration of Discipline written by Richard Foster. I believe that Richard Foster is
very sincere. He is a Quaker. He believes that he is leading people into a closer intimacy with God. The chapter on meditation in this book in the very first printing was a very New Age type of meditation. A lot of Christians protested about that. Subsequent additions of the book had a reworked chapter on meditation to make it more biblical, but it is still promoting this idea that you can go into the silence and sort of listen to God's voice in the silence of meditation. There are many other Christian authors that have promoted the idea of
contemplative spirituality, the idea that you can go into the silence and listen to the voice of God. This is another author, Thomas Keaton. He wrote a book called Intimacy With God, an Introduction to Centering Prayer. Centering Prayer is very similar to Eastern type meditation. The idea of going into the silence and trying to listen to the voice of God speaking to you. This is another mystic Thomas Merton, he wrote a book called Contemplative Prayer. Whilst this is called contemplative prayer, it is in essence, a type of Eastern meditation, but just given a Christian packaging and
it is called prayer. May I say that these books will often reference Hindu sources in the bibliographic section, Hindu or Buddhist sources. Another popular book and author Henri Nouwen who wrote a book called Spiritual Formation, again promoting the idea of meditation as a means of listening to God's voice. These authors will often refer to this book, the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. Ignatius Loyola was founder of the Jesuit Order. And he practiced some contemplation techniques that have similarities to New Age Eastern meditation. It's not exactly the same, but it it's somewhat similar. And someone could
be practicing the spiritual exercises of Ignatius Loyola, and then migrate into the more intense type of meditation that New Agers would practice. This is another book that promotes contemplative spirituality written by Dallas Willard. And it's titled Hearing God. All of these books on contemplative spirituality are promoting the idea that you can practice some kind of ritual or technique in order to listen to God's voice. However, when you read the Bible itself, every one of God's prophets, either communicated with God through dreams or visions, or they directly heard the voice of God. For example, the young
boy, Samuel, he was being trained by Eli, the priest. And one day Samuel hears this voice and he thinks it's Eli speaking to him. So he goes to Eli and says, "Yes, Eli, what do you want?" And Eli realizes is that it must be God speaking to Samuel. The account in the Bible, doesn't tell us that Samuel was sitting on the end of his bed with his eyes closed, and he was practicing deep rhythmatic breathing techniques, he was trying to still his mind and then in the silence of the stilled mind, he heard a voice
speak to him. No, the Bible does not teach that. If God wants to speak to you, He will do it through dreams and visions. I believe God can impress you, but I do not believe that God is going to communicate with you through the practice of a pagan meditation ritual. He is not going to speak through occult meditation, but these authors are claiming to promote techniques that will enable you to listen to the voice of God. And when you evaluate the bibliography in these books, you will find they all trace back to the Hindu religion
and to the New Age. In biblical spirituality, God takes the initiative to reach out to men. God has communicated His truth in the Holy Scriptures. Yes, God can give you inspiration, He can give you motivation and passion, but I do not believe that God will ever communicate with genuine Christians if they practice an Eastern pagan occult technique or ritual, and these books are basically promoting occult meditation, calling it Christian meditation, calling it centering prayer, calling it contemplative prayer or spiritual exercises. But by just calling it something Christian does not make it Christian. There is nothing
in the Bible that tells us that in prayer, we can listen to God's voice and receive direct communication from God as if we are prophets. These are very modern books now written by Tildon Edwards, titled Living In The Presence, spiritual exercises to open our lives to the awareness of God. It would actually be wonderful if these exercises could enable you to communicate with God. But the reality is this is paganism. This is another book published by a conservative publishing house, promoting these Eastern meditation techniques for the Christian. This book was written in the 1970s. It
was probably one of the first books to promote this concept of Christian meditation. If you look into this bibliography section of the book, you'll find this book references Buddhism, it references Hinduism. I would have to say 80% of this book is based on New Age Hindu transcendental meditation techniques that have been adapted. I did not personally use any of these books in order to practice what I later called Christian meditation. I was taught mainstream Hindu mystical meditation. The transcendental occult meditation practiced by Hindu gurus, that is what I was taught. I never changed my meditation
techniques when I simply recalled it Christian meditation. There are books that are published by Christian publishing houses and sold in Christian bookstores that promote yoga. This is a sample it's titled Holy Yoga, exercises for the Christian body and soul written by Brooke Boone. I believe this lady is very sincere. She is practicing yoga and has experienced the benefits of yoga. Yoga is a form of physical exercise. Physical exercise is gonna make you feel better. The danger with these books is that in yoga, typically the end of the exercise session is followed by the practice of
meditation for relaxation. So you go to a yoga class in your regular fitness center, like here in Los Angeles, you've got LA fitness and many other of these fitness centers they will often teach yoga. So you take a yoga class and at the end of the class, the teacher could be a New Ager or could even be a Christian. And they will then have you relax and practice meditation. And the danger is you can start hearing these voices in your mind and you think it's the voice of Jesus, the voice of the Holy Spirit or
the voice of God. And you can be terribly deceived through the practice of yoga. Yoga is very dangerous spiritually. Yoga is part of the Hindu religion. It's promoted in the west in the version we call Hatha yoga, the physical exercises, but in India itself, yoga is just one aspect of a much broader spectrum of yoga. The very word yoga is related to the English word yoke, and it means to yoke yourself to the gods of Hinduism, the pagan gods of Hinduism, such as Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Kali, Durga, you are in danger. These books are promoting
Christian yoga. These exercises are completely part of the Hindu religion. This is a Christianized version of pagan mystical practice. The word yoga is related to the English word yoke, it means union, to be joined together. The goal of New Age and Hindu yoga is that you will be joined together with the gods of Hinduism. True Christian yoga is the teaching of Jesus when he said that we should be yoke to Him because His yoke is light and His burden is easy. So true Christian yoga is to be yoked to Jesus through the study of the
Bible, through learning who Jesus is, through becoming a follower of Jesus, becoming a disciple of Jesus. There was an organization that I used to attend, their worship services and their meditation practices. The organization was a Hindu organization called Self Realization Fellowship founded by the guru Paramahansa Yogananda. Paramahansa Yogananda wrote a book titled the Yoga of Jesus, and it has on the front cover a picture of what is purported to be Jesus in the Hindu yoga Lotus position. This cross leg position used for transcendental meditation. On the top of the book, it says "Behold the kingdom
of God is within you." This is the classic New Age spirituality and Hindu mantra that in meditation you turn to the God within you. Now Paramahansa Yogananda also wrote another book, very similar titled the Yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is all about Arjuna, and he was a Hindu. You can see the similarity between these two books. Here you've got the core mainstream Hindu version. The yoga of the Bhagavad Gita. The Bhagavad Gita is of course, one of the Hindu scriptures. It was studied by the Beatles, George Harrison has one of his songs
that ends in Hare Hare Krishna, Hare Hare Krishna And the Bhagavad Gita is the main Hindu scripture that describes the experiences of Lord Krishna. I was a member of the Findhorn New Age community, and actually worked for Findhorn Press, a publisher of New Age materials. Eileen Caddy, and her husband, Peter founded Findhorn based upon inspiration that Eileen received during the practice of transcendental meditation. And her main motto or mantra or focus came from Scripture. It was "Be still and know that I am God." When Eileen Caddy was practicing meditation, she heard this voice speak to
her, "Be still and know that I am God." And Eileen Caddy believed this was the voice of God speaking to her. And this voice then gave her the instructions and all the information that eventually resulted in the building of this massive New Age commune in Northern Scotland, which has been described as the Vatican city of the New Age movement. This is another typical New Age book written by the, in a sense, the founder of the New Age, Helena Blavatsky. This is titled The Voice Of The Silence. And you can see how Blavatsky, this hardcore occultist,
this follower of the Hindu and Buddhist religions, this lady that had as her ministry goal to merge Christianity with the religions of the East, this Blavatsky clearly promoting the idea that the voice of God is within you. The voice in the silence of the practice of meditation. Here is the nonfiction reality, this is Gerald Gardner's book witchcraft today. Gerald Gardner was the person that basically introduced neo-pagan witchcraft to Western contemporary society. A lot of children could start with the fiction with Harry Potter and then gravitate to the real witchcraft Wicca. I was looking for power
to overcome sickness, to overcome my claustrophobia and anxiety and tension. I was looking for power to be successful in life. I became deeply involved in the occult, primarily through reading books written by the author Carlos Castaneda, who was an occultist and combined his occult knowledge with his anthropology knowledge of Mexican Indian shamanism. As I did not have the ability to go and try to find some of these brujos that supposedly were practicing their craft in Sonora, in Northern Mexico, I didn't have the ability, I didn't speak Spanish. I thought the next best thing would be
to visit with a new age psychic, and that is what I did. And I found power. My personal close friend, Steve saw these books lying around in the house where we were living and started reading them, became fascinated by them. And eventually started exploring the world of ceremonial magic started reading material from Aleister Crowley, started practicing ceremonial magic. He was also intrigued by the fact that Aleister Crowley took drugs, so my friend Steve started taking drugs. He almost worshiped Aleister Crowley, and Steve became totally addicted to drugs. And eventually basically became a person with mental
disease conditions, it's tragic. He's dead now, we understand he died in some sort of accident, but I feel so bad that people can start reading fiction, occult books, such as the books, Harry Potter, and they can eventually migrate over to the real occult to the real ceremonial magic, the real Wicca religion, and become demonized, become controlled and enslaved by demonic spirits, it's tragic. It was so bad that I just cannot conceive what would've happened to me if I'd have stayed in any longer. Let me give you an example of observation. When my book was a
best selling book, I would be flying all over the United States. And I remember walking down the concourse at Los Angeles International Airport. And in those days, the early 1990s, you had the Hare Krishna people that would be stood at the side of the concourse with a pile of books, and they would be offering to sell or give these books to passers by. And I remember walking down that concourse and seeing the Hare Krishna lady there and I had no reason to move out of her way and sure enough, she approached me and wanted to
try to get me interested in this book. And she was holding this particular book in front of me. And I noticed that all the skin around her fingernails had been bitten away and it was red, raw, partially bleeding on every one of her fingers. I was hit by deep sorrow when I saw those fingers, because that is how my fingers look like during the last two years of total slavery to the demonic spirit masquerading as Jesus Christ. The nervous tension, the stress of that demonic power and slavery were so intense in me that I was
gnawing away at my fingers in nervous tension so that they were bleeding. That was my reality. This lady through the practice of her transcendental meditation had been controlled by demonic spirits and was living a nightmare. Even though they claimed to preach and teach peace and tranquility, it was a deceptive lie. The mind can lie, you can be deluded and deceived, but invariably, the body will tell the truth. Alice Bailey set up a publishing house to publish these books. These books that basically the main theology and teaching of the contemporary New Age movement is based on
these books. She was a theosophist, she had been a follower a member of the theosophical society. Alice Bailey set up a publishing house to publish these books that were channeled from her spirit guide, the so-called ascended master Djwal Khul. Now the current publications of these books is published by a company called Lucis Publishing Company. What most New Agers are not aware of though, that when these books were originally published they were published by a publishing house that Alice Bailey set up and her spirit guide told her exactly what name to call this publishing house. And
it was called Lucifer Publishing Company. That is the very name of that publishing, Lucifer Publishing Company. So we know where these books are coming from. You know, when I was a New Ager and I discovered that was the original name, I was mad. I phoned Lucis Press up, and they put me through to the president of Lucis Press, that's in this United Nations building. And I told him, I said, "I am shocked at this," and he said, "Oh, don't worry, don't panic." He said, "Lucifer is not Satan as what is believed in mythical Christianity. Lucifer
was an angel, a great angel, and yeah, he fell, but he learnt from his mistake and he's now an elevated being." that's what the guy told me. I kind of believed it. Well, what could I do? I was enslaved by that spirit. Satan has such a big ego. He thought that these books were so complex, so deep, so profound. He thought he could get away with even calling the publisher Lucifer Publishing Company, but the books were not successful, nobody wanted to buy them. So after two years, the spirit guide, the satanic angel, Djwal Khul told
Alice Bailey, we gotta change the name. And it was changed to Lucis Publishing Company or also known as Lucis Press. Well, Lucis actually is a Latin name, it's a cognate of Lucifer, but most people don't know that. This is what Satan tells us about the existence of Satan, he writes here, "What do we mean by the phrase forces of evil? Not the armies of unrighteousness and sinfulness organized under that figment of the imagination, the devil or some Supreme antichrist for such an army does not exist. The forces of evil are in the last analysis, only
the entrenched ancient ideals and habits of thought, which have served their purpose in bringing the rest to its present point of development. But which must now disappear if the New Age is to be ushered in." So it's very clear - Theosophy, the Alice Bailey teachings and many other New Age organizations that are offshoots of the Alice Bailey movement, they don't believe in the existence of Satan. They regard Satan to be simply a figment of the imagination. I was deceived by this teaching, but boy, I learned that Satan is real, he exists. His evil angels are
invisible, but they are at work. And they endeavor initially to communicate with people through this practice of transcendental meditation. And then later, of course, people listen to these inner voices and believe it to be the voice of God speaking to them, the voice of the Holy Spirit, those people that practice Spiritual Formation and contemplative prayer, believe that God is speaking to them through these practices, even though these practices can trace their heritage right back to the Hindu religion and to the occultism and to material like this.