About a year and a half ago, I took a brief spiritual journey into Eastern Philosophy with the aim of understanding Meditation and it’s value in our spiritual lives.
In short, my conclusion about meditation is that is is a lost art among Christians, and is very valuable and badly needed. For me, prayer flows out of it, but meditation is really the art of “listening”.
My meditation instructor was my uncle, a well-known Eastern Philosophy instructor in the southeast US. During more than a few long and deep discussions he taught that:
- Christianity is OK, it will get you “further down the path in the right direction”
- Eastern Philosophy is all-encompassing. It includes Christianity, but goes much deeper, was around longer, and has essentially the same (but older) teachings.
- The duality of God (something I frankly can’t recall clearly at the moment): Including ideas such as: although god is a separate force from us, we consist of god-substance, bit being ultimately humble and in very substance the same as god, it is not a self-elevation, but a self-realization, and to be fully-realized seems to be the ultimate goal (or maybe there is something beyond) since there seemed to be something beyond god…. obviously, I was not the best student.
I read all the material I was sent, including the Geeta, Knowing Oneself, and other writings about meditation and philosophy. I struggled, frankly, with the similarity to the teachings of Christ and the belief that these same sort of teachings came from an earlier source than the One True Way of Jesus.
As I prayed (and meditated) on my confusion, and discerned obvious discrepancies between the Bible and the “Gospel of the Lord Shri Krishna”, I came back to my uncle with the question, “Who was the last avatar?” With avatar meaning “an incarnation in human form” and more specifically, a human embodiment of God.
His answer stunned me. You see, he had spent many hours telling me that Jesus was a prophet, that there were many prophets who embodied God and brought God’s truth to the Earth. The answer” “Jesus”.
End of confusion:
John 10:8 says that all who came before Jesus were “thieves and robbers”, and 1Timothy 2 says that “there is one God and one mediator so that human beings can reach God. That way is through Christ Jesus, who is himself human. 6 He gave himself as a payment to free all people. He is proof that came at the right time.”
History Lesson:
So at this point in time I believe that as a third of the heavenly host (angels) opposed God and became demons, they took upon themselves the task of deceiving man in an effort to keep Man from God, thus winning their souls.
These demons lived in heaven with God (before the fall), and intimately knew the character of Jesus, and therefore knew how to look like Him, smell like Him, act like Him and talk like Him. They were free to roam the earth and deceive man for a time. A whole lot of truth with a little bit of lie thrown in (my definition of a cult) is all it takes to keep people from Jesus.
Jesus is simply God incarnate. It was God stepping in after humanity had taken enough wrong turns that it needed to be corrected. Jesus differentiated himself from demons in his many statements about “a house divided against itself” and also by his actions in casting out demons afflicting many who were sick and possessed.
Satan’s fall was, and man’s fall continues to be, thinking that equality with God is something that can be grasped, or to be honest, the desire to BE God–to control our own destinies and have no one else to answer to. Beware the philosophies that leave you anywhere “above” being at the mercy of a loving God. God is sovereign, he is the author and finisher of all life and faith, and He alone gets to define who we are and become.