Uncovering the New Spirituality, Part 2

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Support for this podcast comes from your generous gifts and donations. You can find out more about Ravi Zacharias and the team at www.RZIM.org For those in the world, it can be easy to lose hope. Think about how hopeless it seemed for Jesus' disciples and friends who endured a time when hope seemed to perish on the cross with Jesus. But the despair was short-lived, for when the women arrived at the empty tomb, an angel said to them, Don't be afraid, for I know you are looking for Jesus, who was crucified.

He is not here. He is risen, just as He said. Despite the pain and suffering so prevalent in the world, please be encouraged. We have hope because He is risen.

I wish you all a blessed Easter. The end result is actually very obvious. It is this, that there is no absolute truth, that there is no absolute morality, that there is no ultimate purpose and meaning in life, and language really has no actual meaning.

You have to determine what meaning you will choose to give language. Hello and welcome to Let My People Think with Ravi Zacharias. How much do you know about the spirituality of authors like Deepak Chopra, who sold millions of books and even appeared on popular TV talk shows?

He clearly appealed to the masses. But when you take a closer look at his philosophy or that of similarly-minded authors, what do you find? Are their views sustainable? In fact, under closer scrutiny, would we even want to live in a world where those ideas reign? Here's Ravi Zacharias with part two of his message on covering the new spirituality.

Why is it that Christianity is judged by its abuse and other world's religions are judged in their pristine fashion? But that's precisely what happened. And the university doors were swung open to Vivekananda in the early 1900s. The man was a brilliant man, but I've covered his life, covered some of the aberrations on it, and where exactly things started to fall apart.

But I don't have time to go on. Vivekananda was one of them. Yogananda was another, a contemporary Vivekananda. The name Ananda is oftentimes put onto a guru's name because Ananda means joy. And so Vivekananda, the joy of life, Yogananda, the joy of yoga and things like that and so on.

And you'll have that kind of appendage oftentimes. But Yogananda, with his flowing locks of black hair, very impressive looking man, nuanced it in a different way with Hinduism. He would wear a cross around his neck. He was a disciple of a man called Ramakrishna, was one of India's most famous gurus who died in his 40s of throat cancer that came about, they say, from two things. The addiction to betel nut, which causes throat cancer and the incredible spasms his body would go into when he was levitating and carrying his meditation into some intense forms that almost resembled some kind of epileptic fits of some sort.

But it was part of his religious routine. And in his 40s, Ramakrishna died. Yogananda was the disciple that he picked as his ultimate successor. Vivekananda, Yogananda, you and I may not be too familiar with that. The Indians are, the Westerners may not be, but Maharishi Mahesh Yogi of the 60s, transcendental meditation, we all know his name and how he came about and basically caught the West in a stress filled life.

We were running, running, running, making money. And he devised a very clever scheme of telling us how to stop running and took the money from our pocket into his pockets in order to tell us how to vegetate and meditate. One of his premier disciples was Deepak Chopra. Deepak Chopra was a follower of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

At that time, he was a practitioner in medicine in Boston. And Chopra did something incredible for the Eastern spiritual movement with his knowledge in medicine and his what I would call somewhat sophomoric understanding of the sciences. He blended that along with a little touch of quantum theory, which Richard Dawkins mocked in a dialogue with him. And Chopra did a very poor job at defending why even uses quantum. He said, well, I use it as a metaphor and Dawkins just looked at him, use it as a metaphor.

So he blended wellness, touch of science, spirituality, and he did something incredible. You know, life has its boxes. We live in a box. We drive in a box. We give gifts in a box.

We do all these things in a box and ultimately we are carried out in a box because things are ultimately contained in some way. Chopra was brilliant. He gave his belief no name. The Hindu philosophers have really railed against him for this because he has marvelously leveraged Hinduism, but he doesn't call it Hinduism. He calls it Sanatana Dharma, which literally means the eternal Dharma, the eternal religion.

So you can't box him in. You can't critique him from Hinduism. You can't critique him from Buddhism. You can't critique him from Daoism. You can't critique him from any ism.

How many people want to critique Sanatana Dharma? Eternal religion. Deepak Chopra took this and he blended together two or three things. And I want you to listen to me very carefully now. He took our hunger for wellness.

Who doesn't want to be well? He took our longing for wellness and said there were ways in the ancient wisdom that did it all very well. And so we go back to those and I'll tell you what.

I was born and raised in India. I know that system very well. Ayurvedic medicine coming from the science of health. Goes back to natural ways and natural potions and natural potents, and there's a lot of good in it. It's a lot of strength in the herbs.

There's a lot of strength in the oils. I have very serious back problems. Many of you know, I've had two critical back surgeries.

I've got two metal rods that bracket me from L3 to S1 unfused and that there's metal rods there with eight screws bolting me in. And the only thing that's actually really helped me in a palliative way is to use some of those anti-inflammatory oils, which I use for massage therapy. And there's absolutely no doubt that there's relief, but it's only palliative. It's not corrective.

It didn't correct anything in my skeleton. And there are various ways in which you can find relief. But some of the biggest struggles that they will have in the East in these ways, they come to the West for Western medicine to help correct. Somewhere in the middle is the balance.

And any time you go to either extreme, you actually do disservice to both of them. But Chopra capitalized on this hunger for wellness. How many don't want to be relieved of pain? I don't know anybody who doesn't want to be relieved of pain. How many don't want to be finding a less invasive way to get better?

We all long for this. I remember my father, who was severely asthmatic, used to stand in front of the window and literally lift his nostrils trying to breathe. For 20 years, he lived wheezing every night to sleep. And an Ayurvedic doctor met him and told him, if you go to Hyderabad over a thousand miles away from where we lived in Delhi and if you stand in line, there's a particular guru. My dad was a Nottingham trained student.

He studied at the University of Nottingham. He held a very high post in the government of India as a deputy secretary in the State Department, what we call the home ministry. My dad was not foolish. He just hungered for wellness in this situation. If you go to Hyderabad, there's a guru who comes out one time of year and just before dawn at the early moments of dawn, he will take a tiny little fish and put a mixture of spices in it. And he will give it to you. You swallow it three years in a row.

If you do this, you'll be rid of that problem. My dad went three years in a row over a thousand miles to Hyderabad to swallow that fish. He still struggled terribly all his days till we moved to Toronto in the 60s. And they found out what the allergies were.

And my dad never had an asthmatic attack after that when he moved to Toronto. It's a true story. True story. I'm just saying this to mitigate the claims. They are extreme.

But I want you to listen carefully now. What is it that Eastern spirituality actually means? Here's what it says. By the way, pages of they tell you what it is not.

Any time a person takes hours to tell you what something is not, you can probably sure because they're not quite sure what it actually is. So here it is. Spirituality is an attitude of fearlessness, a sense of adventure. It is a way of looking boldly at life we've been given now on Earth as a 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 tranquil abiding.

And so one of the writers here, Elizabeth Lesser, after defining it, tells you one way to find the answer here. 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 on your fingertips lightly on the spot of the center of your rib cage to the right of your physical heart. It is the spot that you can feel when 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 the spot you are touching is the top of a deep, deep well. Follow your breath into a 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 thoughts and emotions on the journey, do not push them away.

They are part of you, but not all of you. Greet what you find and move on ever deeper into the well of your spiritual heart. Sit in this 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 open your eyes.

You think that's all there is to it. And they tell you their answer for terrorism. Marianne Williamson, for a minimum of five minutes every day, meditate in 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 eggshell is made of the spiritual equivalent of titanium. It is impenetrable. Any malevolent, hateful or violent thought that emanates from the mind of the terrorist cannot get past the confines of the eggshell.

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 eggshell into the heart and mind of the terrorists. Pray for your lost brother. See him or her healed by the force of divine love wrapped in the arms of angels, reminded of who he truly is. Do this five minutes every day.

Tell everyone you know to do the same thing. You know what? When you read this and you go on and on and on, you don't know whether to laugh or to weep. What's going on here?

I'll tell you what's going on here. There are four links in Eastern spirituality. Greek link from Neoplatonism, the Hindu link, the Buddhist link and the Taoist link.

I've given all those four links and their quotations from their writers in my book itself. And when you see that happening and understand it, you will begin to see what is the end result. And this is the end result.

The end result is actually very obvious. It is this that there is no absolute truth. That there is no absolute morality. That there's no ultimate purpose and meaning in life. And language really has no actual meaning. You have to determine what meaning you will choose to give language. Check it out with Taoism. That's exactly where the yin and yang ultimately lead you to.

That words are devoid of meanings until you fill it. And they end up with a situation that I think is absolutely incredible. I'll read for you one more thing and then try to move gently towards the answers.

It is this. The tale actually goes something like this. In the beginning, God. God spoke, but that was a long time ago. We wanted certainty now. But 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 feeling. We wanted to feel.

So we found a way to generate feeling into the picture. Truth was framed into the 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 and deconstructed cubicle, breathing deeply to make 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. If you take that paragraph, as I summarized it, you'll understand exactly why Eastern spirituality has its appeal. You know why it has its appeal? It allows you to define morality without bringing in God. Which is exactly what happened at the Garden of Eden. In the day that you eat of this fruit, you shall become as God's defining good and evil. That's what it really meant. You will define good and evil. And you know, ladies and gentlemen, we are living at a time of incredible hunger for definitions.

And we don't have it. And so the Eastern spiritualists have capitalized on our gender conflicts. They've capitalized on our sexual proclivities.

They've capitalized on our cultural wars going on. Every now and then you will see Deepak Chopra very cleverly taking some evangelical writers view on homosexuality and slamming the so-called Christian fundamentalist. Chopra very cleverly ignores what's going on in the newspapers today in India. But the Minister of Health in India made some comment about that kind of a sexual practice and it's all over the country. And he's a Hindu man. He said, as Minister of Health, I have some thoughts on this and he just voiced it. And the convergence of letters and articles and one famous guru said the same thing. Chopra cleverly ignores those pronouncements because he could see when he says what he does. They will clench a fist against the caricature of Christianity and then grabbing the finger of one issue.

They think they've grabbed the fist of the whole system and somehow made it look as something totally unattractive. You know, when you see the way Jesus dealt with women, one was beautiful things to see. Think of this fact at the grave after his resurrection, the first ones, the first evangelists would have been.

Whose view was not even acceptable in court at that time. When you look at how he honored sexuality, do you realize sexuality is the only thing that is such a gift of beauty that God does not engage him himself? Because it is bound to the physical and God is a spirit. So we don't understand the physicality of life, we move into the spirituality to redefine physicality and we profane the sacred again and again and again.

And as time goes by, I just want to close with a couple of things. You know, there was a stone found in the Libyan desert a long time back and it said this, I, the captain of a 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, and nobody has both. There are two things to be sought in life, love and power, and nobody has both. He was almost right and dead wrong. He's right. No human being ultimately has both in the absolute sense.

There is one who does and that's God himself. Absolute power and absolute love coalescing in the Trinity, in that Godhead where love and truth and holiness coexist in their absolute sense. I want to bring this to a close with a couple of comments.

The first one is this. It was a few years ago that Matthew Paris, an English atheist writer wrote this in the Times of London, December 2008. John and I have often talked about this. He's an atheist and his lifestyle proves it. But here's what he writes on December 27, 2008.

He says this. Before Christmas, I returned after 45 years to the country that as a boy I knew was Nyazaland. Today it is Malawi.

And the Times Christmas special appeal now includes a small British charity working there, Pump Aid, which helps rural communities to install a single pump letting people keep their village wells sealed and clean. I went to see this work. It inspired me and renewed my flagging faith in development charities. But traveling in Malawi refreshed another belief too. One I've been trying to banish in my life because it confounds my ideological beliefs.

It stubbornly refuses to fit into my worldview and has embarrassed my growing belief that there is no God. But now as a confirmed atheist, I have become convinced of the enormous contribution that Christian evangelism makes in Africa. Sharply distinct from secular NGOs.

Education and training alone will not do. In Africa, Christianity changes people's hearts. It brings a transformation. That birth is real.

The change is good. There's a long fashion among Western academic sociologists for placing tribal value systems with the ring fence beyond critiques founded in theirs and therefore best for them. Authentic and of intrinsic worth to ours. I don't follow this. I observe that tribal belief is no more peaceable than ours and that it actually suppresses individuality. People think collectively. This feeds into the big man and gangster politics of the African city. The exaggerated respect for the swaggering leader and literal inability to understand the whole idea of loyal opposition, anxiety, fear of spirits, of ancestors, of nature and wild, strikes deep into the whole structure of rural African thought.

A great weight grinds down the spirit. But Christianity, with its teaching of a direct personal two-way link between the individual and God, unmediated by the collective and non-subordinate to any other human being, smashes straight through the philosophical spiritual framework I've just described. Those who want Africa to walk tall amid the 21st century global competition must not kid ourselves of providing the material means or even the know-how that accompanies what we call development will make the change. A whole belief system has to be supplanted.

And I'm afraid it has to be supplanted by another. Removing Christian evangelism from the African equation may leave the continent of the mercy of a malign fusion of Nike, the witch doctor, the mobile phone and the machete. It's an atheist. You know what he's saying? Something about the transforming power of Christ that replaces the hunger for power with the hunger for love and knows how to deal with power.

Let's face it. What is it that we ultimately want in life? The new spiritualist wants the same thing we do. You want harmony.

You want this to connect with this. They want the hunger that is in this body to go beyond the body. And so they patent breathing techniques and so on to relax the body, thinking that that will convert the soul. The truth of the matter is, just as the radical environmentalists forget that there is an environmental problem to that, they have to take care of that first.

Otherwise, the environment will always be in jeopardy because the environment is always corrupt and polluted. And so I say that the bridge from the head to the heart, the bridge in harmony is what it is going to take. But I want to close with a beautiful hymn that is one of the few times in life I wish I could really sing because it's sung by one of my favorite soloists, Kenneth McKellar.

It's called The Lost Cord. Seated one day at the organ. I was weary and ill at ease and my fingers wandered idly over the noisy keys. I know not what I was playing or what I was dreaming then, but I touched one chord of music like the sound of a great amen. It flooded the crimson twilight like the close of an angel's psalm. It lay o'er my feeble spirit like the touch of infinite calm. It quieted pain and sorrow like love overcoming strife. It seemed a harmonious echo through our discordant life.

It linked all perplexed meanings into one perfect peace and trembled away into silence as though it were loath to cease. I have sought and I seek it mainly that one lost cord divine which came from the soul of the organ and entered into mine. It may be the death's bright angel will speak in that chord again. It may be that only in heaven I shall hear the grand amen. That'll be the sound of ultimate harmony and the silence of ultimate awe. How does Jesus bring this now into your life and mine? Father, you are a God who tells us that you've provided for us the truth in your son and grace through him to give us the love that we might control the power.

You know the audience and everyone in his or her need. You know that some our hearts are aching and breaking. Some hearts are yearning. Some hearts are uncertain.

And all of our minds seek certainty in this day and age. Bless us, dear Father, and minister to us so that we will walk in the light with the sound of music in our heart that you and you alone can give. Make this a blessed day. Meet us in our deepest need. Help us to know that our spiritual hungers are met in you, the Lord of life and the Lord of truth. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen. You've been listening to Ravi Zacharias in a message titled Uncovering the New Spirituality. If you've enjoyed today's program be sure to check out Ravi's book Why Jesus in which he takes an in-depth look at the new spirituality and shows why Jesus is still the only answer to life's questions. You can order the book or today's message by calling us at 1-800-448-6766 or through our online bookstore at rzim.org or rzim.ca for those listening in Canada. And connect with us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for live updates, photos, articles and more great content from the RZIM team. Just search for RZIM on social media. Let My People Think is a listener supported radio ministry and is furnished by RZIM in Atlanta, Georgia.