East and West, Part 1

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You can find out more about Ravi Zacharias and the team at www.rzim.org. When you think of the naturalistic worldview, unanswered questions, how does something come from nothing? How does life come from non-life?

How does a non-moral beginning through an amoral process end up with moral reasoning? You have pretty big questions. You think Dawkins will ever address them?

No. The divide between Eastern religions and Christianity is wide. So why are so many Christians in the West looking to those spiritual beliefs for answers? Hello and welcome to Let My People Think with Ravi Zacharias. The West's fascination with Eastern mysticism didn't happen overnight.

It's been years in the making. But it's a trend that Ravi has been following and has a unique perspective on how it gained such a foothold. Is there common ground between Christianity and the religions of the East? Is there something those beliefs can teach us? This week, Ravi takes us through a historical look at the beliefs of the East and what they mean to Christianity. Here's Ravi. Who would have ever thought that at this part of Western history, you'd be listening to terms like karma, mantra, chakra, and all this kind of stuff.

And all these Eastern esoteric sounding words have become such common fare. Who would have ever thought that when we are talking about spiritual reality, a man like Deepak Chopra would become an authority on these things. Now I can say that quite boldly because he's really not qualified to address some of the issues he claims to address on the hermeneutics or the homiletics of the Old and the New Testament. He knows very little about that subject and it tells by the way he has written his book, The Third Jesus. His whole treatment on the book on the Third Jesus arises out of this prejudice and presupposition.

That's what he said. The Jesus of history we know absolutely nothing about. That's his sweeping statement. We know nothing about the Jesus of history. Tells you how little he actually knows about documentation and historic narrative and how close you can get to historic events at which point documents are considered authentic and authoritative.

But that's a sweeping statement. Then his Second Jesus is the Jesus manufactured, says he, by the early church. It's not really the historic Jesus. We don't know the historic Jesus was. The Second is a manufactured Jesus by the early church. So I'll tell you who the real Jesus was and he proceeds to elaborate on his thesis that Jesus was nothing more than a holy man and a Sadhu or a guru type personality who in his pilgrimage ultimately found Nirvana. How does Chopra know this? By quoting from the New Testament which he has already said is not historical.

Quoting hundreds of passages from it, hundreds of it, he goes into Gnostic writings and some of which in my book I've pointed out he is totally misquoted and misrepresented. So now let me take a backward step and give you a little bit of a humorous note or two and then I shall proceed with the heart of what I want to say to you tonight. Holmes and Watson were out on a camping trip enjoying some liquid refreshment. And after indulging quite a bit of it, Holmes wakes up in the middle of the night and he looks up into the night sky and he wakes up Watson and he says, Watson, look up into the sky. What do you see? He says, I see stars and stars and more stars. He said, what does that tell you? He said, well, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies astronomically and potentially billions of planets. Astrologically it tells me that Saturn is in Leo. Meteorologically it tells me that tomorrow will probably be a good day. And theologically it tells me that God is sovereign and we are just a minute speck in this vast universe. Why? What does it tell you, Holmes?

He said, Watson, you idiot, somebody has stolen our tent. It is amazing to read the sophisticated use of language by naturalists or spiritualists and you end up at the final juncture to realize they've really taken everything away from you for definition and then they start redefining everything. They end up telling you, you're really it.

You're God. So many times we in our churches have sounded forth things like that. We've gone and spoken and done our bit, sung our songs and done our preaching. At the end of it, the people say, I don't have a clue what that was all about. And if you open up the sachet of naturalism, it's hollow at the beginning as well. When you think of the naturalistic worldview, unanswered questions, how does something come from nothing?

How does life come from non-life? How does a non-moral beginning through an amoral process end up with moral reasoning? You have pretty big questions. You think Dawkins will ever address them? No, it's truly the fact that the emperor has no clothes with the naturalistic worldview. And in Christianity, sometimes they sure got the clothes, but when they start disrobing that they find out they don't know what this is all about. So what did humanity do in the West? They began to see in the 1980s, the commercialization of the gospel. I remember thinking in the 1980s, what we were going through at that time and thinking to myself, will we ever survive this? Will we ever get the gospel back because of what we have seen happen in the mass media? And I remember seeing some big mega churches thriving at that time with all that we were doing to lure the young in and bring them in to packed audiences. At the end of it, if you ask them some of the most basic questions about the Bible, they could not even answer them.

There's a sense of relaxation in spirituality, but if spirituality is used as a seductive force, it could be the most destructive thing you have ever entered into because it actually gives you the feeling of being in contact with God when all you have ended up doing is defying yourself. See, when you deal with apologetics, there are three tests we put for truth. Normally, logical consistency, empirical adequacy, experiential relevance.

What does that mean? We're looking for this to be logically consistent. We're looking for the adequateness of an empirical point of reference. The Bible is not a self-referencing book. The Bible is a book about history and geography and events that can be tested from outside the Bible itself, unlike the Quran, which is a self-referencing book.

What do I mean by that? How do you know the Quran is the word of God? Muhammad says so. How do you know Muhammad is right? Because the Quran says so. That's what you call by a self-referencing authority.

The Bible is not thus. It has points of verification or the capacity to be falsified if it is not right from sources outside itself. Logically consistent, empirically adequate and experientially relevant.

It makes a difference in how you feel and think and act. There is an existential aspect to it, even if not central, there is an entailment. It follows naturally. But then what do we do? We take logical consistency, empirical adequacy, experiential relevance. What do we put that test to? To the four questions of origin, meaning morality and destiny. But what are the subjects? The subjects are God, reality, knowledge, morality and humankind, which is theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and anthropology.

Big words. Three, four, five. Three tests, four questions, five disciplines.

That's been the apologetic I have followed in my entire ministry. The three tests for truth, the four questions that have to be answered, the five disciplines that have to be understood. What happened in the 1960s goes back actually to the latter part of the 19th century. In 1893, there was a man by the name of Vivekananda who came in to America and began to speak at that time to the American audiences. When Vivekananda started to speak, for the first time, people were sort of in a state of shock.

It was the parliament of world religions and there it was in 1886, I guess it was. And he was an uninvited speaker, but he was a brilliant man, a brilliant Indian scholar. He was knowledgeable in western philosophers, eastern philosophers he'd read people like Kant and Hume and all of them and he had understood the early days of Darwinian thinking. He would quote these things right, left and center. He walked up to the platform and as he began to speak, his opening words captured the audience there in Chicago.

All kinds of scholars had presented what they had done and then Vivekananda walked up and he began with these words. Brothers and sisters, we who come from the east have sat here on the platform day after day and have been told in a patronizing way that we ought to accept Christianity because Christian nations are the most prosperous. But we look about and we see England, the most prosperous Christian nation in the world with her foot on the neck of 250 million Asiatics.

We look back into history and see that the prosperity began with the invasion of Mexico. Christianity wins its prosperity by cutting the throats of its fellow men. At such a price the Hindu will not have prosperity.

I have sat here today and I've heard the height of intolerance from you. I've heard the creeds of the Muslims applauded when today the Muslim sword is carrying destruction into India. Blood and sword is not for the Hindu whose religion is based on the laws of love. Western spirituality arrived with that speech. Western apologetic with an Eastern worldview.

I call it a Western apologetic. The university doors opened wide to Swami Vivekananda. The fascinating thing about what I just read for you is this. Vivekananda used clever logic. He looked at Christianity in the way it was abused, looked at Hinduism without any abuse and talked about one as being pristine and the other as being horrific. If I had asked Vivekananda, what do you think of Graham Staines and his boys in a van in our day now as kerosene is doused on their van in the state of Orissa and the match is lit and the van is burning and the boys inside screaming and the father with his two sons and nobody is stopping to help because the Hindu radical is burning them to death. What do you have to say about that Vivekananda?

Do you know what he would say? That's not Hinduism. Then why did you take Christianity with its abuse and call it Christianity?

Very clever, very clever logic. But Vivekananda stormed our universities and in the late 1800s, America's academics were so swayed by him. Go back and see the articles that followed as a result of Vivekananda's talk and he did the rounds all over.

He was a brilliant guy. He knew exactly what he was doing and then he discipled a handful of people. After Vivekananda came a man who was a contemporary of his, Yogananda. Yogananda had nice curly locked hair, had very angelic looking features and Vivekananda took this one step beyond Vivekananda. What did Yogananda do? He basically made religion syncretistic that we're all teaching the same thing. He wore an ample cross over his chest, carried on Hindu metaphysics but would refer to Christ in very patronizing and kind terms and started to actually say we're all really teaching the same thing.

Attack, synchronizing it all in one way or the other. 1960s was ready for Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The hippie movement had begun. The resistance movement to culture had begun. The Vietnam war was in full sway. Racism was taking its toll. Political authority was being lambasted.

Young people had nothing to anchor themselves to and take hold. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came and gave answers of starting to meditate and do all these things in the name of finding a peaceful transcendence that will overcome your soul and take complete control of your life. One of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's disciples was Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra followed him as he was a medical doctor. He was not living a good life.

He'd gotten messed up in his own private life and then ultimately gave up his full time medical practice and started his own yogic disciplines and his breathing disciplines and all this. Even today he's in the news debating quantum physicists and all of that. So much of it is really vacuous stuff. In quantum theory they tell you about the subatomic world. If you don't know where it is, you don't know what it's doing.

If you know what it's doing, you don't know where it is. That's a very good description for Deepak Chopra's metaphysic. If you know what he's saying, you don't know what he means.

If you know what he means, you really don't know what he's trying to say. You'll deny it. Here's the tale that ultimately is told. If you were to take carefully what it is that the world view of spirituality then built itself on, it's very simple and very detailed in the way it ultimately gives you the answers to what it is they actually believe. I would like to read for you a couple of pages of what it is they actually believe. The new spiritualists tell you they're trying to blend the mind, the heart, and the body, and the soul.

Then Elizabeth Lesser, a leading authority in this says this. Spirituality is an attitude of fearlessness, a sense of adventure. It is a way of speaking boldly at the life we have been given here and now on earth as this human being. Who am I? How should I live my life? What happens when I die? Spirituality is nothing more than a brave search for the truth about existence. Nothing more.

But nothing less as well. The Buddhist defines spirituality as shamatha or a tranquil abiding. And here is one of the ways she recommends. Sit quietly where you are and close your eyes. Feel yourself breathing. Follow the breath on its journey into and out of your body. Sit feeling yourself breathe for a few minutes. Place your hand over your heart. Then put your hand or fingertips lightly on the spot in the center of your rib cage to the right of your physical heart. It is the spot where you can feel and where you are startled and draw your breath sharply inward. Move your hand gently and breathe slowly and softly into that spot until you're focusing intently on what many traditions call the spiritual heart or the heart center. Imagine that spot you are touching is the top of a deep, deep well. Follow your breath into the journey into the spacious interior of your own heart.

Breathe slowly in and out. Let yourself be pulled ever more deeply into the well of your own heart. As you meet throughout that thoughts and emotions on the journey, do not push them out. They are part of you, but not all of you. Greet what you find and move on ever deeper and deeper into the well of your spiritual heart.

Sit in the state, letting yourself be pulled by your longing into the well of your heart, observing your breath for as long as you feel comfortable and then slowly remove your hand, return to normal breathing and then open your eyes. How nice. You know, I have a friend in Bombay.

He told me his brother is a skeptic and his brother one day said to him, Gul, I've got a perfect plan for you to become a millionaire. Just let your hair grow long. Look like a nice guru. Wear a nice clean kurta pajama.

Sit in the Lotus position. I will bring nine friends. 10 of us will sit in front of you and you just mutter one sentence at a time and we'll go beautiful. This is just beautiful.

How amazing, how amazing this is. And then next day we each one will bring 10 others and you mutter a few other one liners and we'll all say, Oh wow, keep going like this Gul within a year you will become a millionaire. Have you ever read the writings of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar? He's a billionaire. Have you seen his one liners? One of his one liners is your head must be empty and your hand must be full.

And he's proved it. Again and again. Do you know the people from around the world that go to hear Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for this kind of stuff? The Singapore Straits Times had a whole page on his one liners. Most of it was esoteric nonsense.

And the newspaper reporter never heard stuff like this. I sit there and I say to myself, thank God I didn't listen to this when I was on the verge of suicide, I would have jumped off. I said, this is all there is to it. Now you think that's all? Listen, they don't just solve the problem for you. And Marianne Williamson in one of her books says, we can solve this world of terrorism problem also.

She says, do this. For a minimum of five minutes every day, meditate the following way. Pray that anyone thinking of committing a terrorist act anywhere in the world will be surrounded by a huge golden egg. The egg shell is made of the spiritual equivalent of titanium. It is impenetrable. Any malevolent, hateful or violent thought that emanates from the mind of the terrorists cannot get past the confines of the egg shell. Before the violent thought can turn into violent action, it is stopped by the force of this meditative field. Energetically the terrorist is quarantined.

On the inside of the egg, see a shower of golden light pouring from the egg shell into the heart and mind of the terrorist. Pray for your lost brother. To whom? To whom? And then she goes on to say this, see him or her healed by the force of divine love, divine who?

Wrapped in the arms of angels, reminded of who he truly is. Do this five minutes every day and tell everyone, you know, to do the same thing. We'll quarantine terrorism.

My goodness. I don't know why the Mossad and the FBI and the CIA didn't just take an egg shell around and get this whole problem solved. You know how this all actually ultimately ends? It ends very simply with these particular words that I want to read for you and tell you why I think this actually happens. I wrote it out in my book this way.

As I say that in the end, what really happens is you end up becoming a divine being yourself, but it turns you into that point ultimately of believing that in the beginning you wanted God to be who you wanted him to be, but you didn't like who God really was. You wanted to turn on this in a hurry and imagine somebody else in this place and you kept moving and moving and moving till here's what it sounds like. The tale would go something like this, I said. In the beginning, God, God spoke, but that was a long time ago. We wanted certainty. We wanted it now for this only reason and rationalism would do, but that was not enough. We wanted to see. So we went into the senses and found the empirical, but that's not what we really meant by seeing. We really meant we wanted to feel.

So we found a way to generate feeling into the picture. Truth was framed into a scene, but the scene was left open to interpretations because scenes are not absolute. So the story was told as an art form, but the reader still didn't like it because he was not the author. So he read the story while he sat in a reconstructed, a deconstructed cubicle to make of the story whatever he wished.

But what does one do with the long reach of the empirical? The best way was to find a blend between the empirical and the satirical and end up with God again. The only difference was that God could not be the storyteller and we still needed God. So we became God.

That's the trail. If you add to this the Buddhist link, add to this the Taoist link, add to this the Hindu and the Greek link and so on, what you really end up with is no absolute truth. Morality is relative. There's no purpose and meaning. Language will ever shift and be redefined by the definer who wants to do the defining.

So you end up with a postmodern mindset of no truth, no meaning, no certainty. What do we do as Christians? How does Christ come into all of this? In a Libyan desert, there was a certain stone found and this is what it said. I, the captain of the Legion of Rome, serving in the desert of Libya have learned and pondered this truth in life.

Listen very carefully. I, the captain of the Legion of Rome, serving in the desert of Libya have learned and pondered this truth in life. There are two things to be sought, love and power. No one has both. When Gaddafi was finally cornered and in that pathetic sign as his body was denuded, what we are told is that he was begging for mercy, that they would not kill him. Love and power.

No one has both. He had the power with no love. Now he was pleading for love when somebody else had the power and it did not work for him. That's pretty close to the truth, but it's dead wrong. There is one person in the world who has both love and power and that is Jesus Christ.

There is only one person who has both love and power and that is Jesus Christ. You've been listening to Ravi's message East and West. If you would like to order this message in its entirety, call us at 1-800-448-6766. You can also listen to this episode again by visiting our website at rzim.org and clicking on the Listen tab. If you're listening in Canada that web address is rzim.ca. RZIM hosts a variety of events every year, both at the Zacharias Institute in Atlanta, Georgia, and around the world. From residential programs in Oxford, England, to in-home online training, to see a list of all of our upcoming events and resources, be sure to visit our website. And if you enjoy the content from this radio program, you'll love the content on our YouTube channel. There we have messages, Q&As, and interviews with the RZIM team.

Just go to youtube.com and search for the channel Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. One of the earliest books that I wrote was the book, Cries of the Heart. No matter how much you give answers intellectually, every one of us has deep-seated cries, hurts, pains. And in the quietness of our heart, we wrestle with issues.

Remember what the Bible says? He came to seek and to save that which was lost. He tells us to knock, seek, and ask. So in the cries of the heart, we see the cry of pain and suffering and many of the cries that you have, sometimes un-uttered externally. Get a hold of the book, Cries of the Heart.

It's the existential struggle with which you and I live. I pray you'll be blessed. Cries of the Heart. Cries of the Heart by Ravi Zacharias is available at rzim.org. Let My People Think is a listener-supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia. To find out more about our ministry or to donate, be sure to call us or visit our website. That web address again is rzim.org or rzim.ca for those in Canada.