Uncovering the New Spirituality, Part 1

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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. You see, he did his homework. He understood the Western mind much better than the Western mind understood the Eastern mind and that applies till this very day. He's taken the abuse of Christianity as meaning Christianity and he has ignored the abuse of Hinduism and treated a pristine version of it. What do the new spiritualists actually believe?

What path led them to such prominence? Hello and welcome to Let My People Think with author and apologist Ravi Zacharias. Ravi Zacharias examines the new spiritualist movement in his book, Why Jesus? Rediscovering his truth in an age of mass marketed spirituality. In this book, he goes head on with the claims of the new spiritualists. People like Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, and even Oprah Winfrey have huge influence on the spiritual beliefs of millions. Is there any truth to what they taught?

And how did Eastern ideas gain so much traction in the West? This week on the broadcast, Ravi answers those questions in his message, Uncovering the New Spirituality. It was about a couple of years ago that I was writing a book that I had called From Oprah to Chopra, looking into the new spirituality. And when a publisher found out I was working on it, they contacted me and asked me if I would consider doing it with them, except they were unimpressed with the title. They wanted to give it a new title and we went through this quite a while and went through a tremendous amount of research. I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours studying and getting ready for it. And they came up with the title on the basis of some talks I was giving and they called it Why Jesus?

Rediscovering his truth in an age of mass marketed spirituality. And I worked on it for a long time and I go overseas to do my writing because I write at odd hours and I cannot be disturbed in any way. So I get up at four in the morning and write until about 11 o'clock in the morning and after that my world view changes and I just have to wait for the next day. So when I finished it, about 70,000 words, I phoned Margie at home in Atlanta and I said it's done with the 70,000 word mark. Since she does all my editing, I had not realized when I promised her she would have the last word on everything, it included my books as well. And so she said, but Ravi, it's supposed to be 100,000 words and not 70,000.

I said, what? She said, yeah, I remember the contract. It was 100,000 words. I had to extend my stay by a week, write out another 30,000 words, which was okay to do because there's a lot to say. And after I finished, we sent it in and about six weeks ago, they wrote back and said powerful book, but it was to be 70,000 words. You've got 100,000 words here.

I shall bring her next year to defend herself. You know, I always yield to her opinion because nine times out of 10, she's right and I'm wrong on it. But this time, one of those few times I was right. And there we were the last four weeks spending time getting rid of 30,000.

You know, it's easier to add it than delete it because now your thought is flowing logically. And about last week we sent it in minus, well, we just took out about 20,000, I think and asked them if they'd have mercy. The reason is they'd already pre-publicized it and it was in brochures and all. And so price had all been set on the basis of a 70,000 word book.

Anyway, they wrote back very thrilled at what had been done. And from my point of view, it's over and it's all done. It's a very tough book to write because you've got to bring together issues that are very real in our world. Our whole world changed when television came into your rooms. When it was found out how light could be converted to electrical impulses, traverse over a distance, reconverted to light, and you could look at something taking place 10,000 miles away in your living room in living color, only time will tell whether it was human genius or the ultimate death of common sense. Only time will reveal that. It was William Blake who said, this life's dim windows of the soul distorts the heavens from pole to pole and goads you to believe a lie when you see with a knot through the eye. We're intended to see through the eye with the conscience and we end up seeing with the eye devoid of a conscience, our information is circumscribed, it's boxed in. And by looking at two or three pictures, we think we know the whole story. There's an incredible power of seduction in the camera. It can make ordinary human beings feel like petty potentates and think they really are icons.

And if you read even the journey of Oprah Winfrey, from being this young teenager who always signed her name in books in high school and all with the name of Jesus in it, to ultimately become the kind of person that she was actually viewing herself in almost a semi transcendent way. The power of the camera had done its work. People can say things on camera that they would never have said otherwise because they really think they've become invincible. So you take the power of the camera, take the hunger of the spirit, where we all long for something beyond the physical and you take the collapse of culture in the West, all coming together in the 60s during the peak of the Vietnam War. It was almost like America's soul was coming back in a body bag.

Everything was changed so dramatically. And this idea of what I like to call it, we stern spirituality, W-E-A-S-T-E-R-N. In Hindi, they have a saying called Desi Murgi Pardesi Chal, which literally means this a local bird with a foreign walk, meaning if you're from India and go overseas to America for one week and come and act like an American, they'll say Desi Murgi Pardesi Chal, local bird with a foreign walk. Well, Eastern spirituality is a Pardesi Murgi with a Desi Chal. It's an overseas bird with a local walk. That's really the opposite of what has happened, a reconfiguring and a redesigning of spirituality.

It fits America's appetite very well because we are ruggedly individualistic and we like to have everything tailor made to our tastes. And so the Eastern gurus got on to that. Now, this is going to be a combination of a teaching plus inspiring, I hope, not perspiring, but inspiring towards the end. But I remember being at Moody years ago when Evie Hill, the famed African-American preacher, I don't know if any one of you had the opportunity of hearing him, quite ample in size. He hardly had a neck. I remember at Amsterdam, Billy introduced him with just this line, here's Ed, he'll wake you up. So powerful preacher considered by Time Magazine in his time as probably the greatest, certainly one of the top preachers of his time.

Evie Hill was preaching at Moody Bible Institute at Founders Week. And he said a young Black Panther had come to him after his service in Watts one day and asked him, Evie Hill would say, talk like this. What do I get when I get Jesus?

What do I get when I get Jesus? And he said, I gave him 13 points. And he said he was going to preach on that that night at Moody. But after six points were over, the time was gone. So he left him.

And the next year, he came back to Moody and began his opening words with seventhly. And those who were there the previous year connected those who are not said, what on earth is this weather for six? So if you're here today, you'll connect tomorrow. If you're not here today, there's no point talking to you right now. Well, you'll find out tomorrow. Allow me to give you a little bit of an apologetic, okay?

This is going to get you to put your thinking caps on. We are apologists. What do we mean by that? We're not apologizing for what we believe. We're giving reasons for the hope that is within us, which is what the Bible asks us to do. And I have a grid that I formed in the early days of my speaking.

I called it the 345 grid. What do I mean by that? When you're looking to answer questions and find coherent answers, you generally will have to do three things to assert what it is that you've just said. You'll have to have logical consistency, empirical adequacy and experiential relevance to be logically consistent.

Empirically, you have to find a way of testing the truth and it has to be relevant experientially. Those are the three. But it takes you through four questions. Origin, meaning, morality and destiny. Those are the four questions you have to answer on any worldview.

Where do I come from? What does life really mean? How do I define good?

How do I define evil? And what happens to a person when he or she dies? Is death the end?

Or has Christ indeed conquered the grave and given us a door into the glimpse of what eternity is all about? See Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher, said, I've learned to define life backwards and live it forwards. What he meant by that is I've learned to define life in terms of its destiny and then move towards it. Origin, meaning morality and destiny.

That's what forms your worldview. Three tests, four questions in five disciplines that you have to deal with. What are the five disciplines? The first discipline is that of God. Who is God?

Does God exist? That's theology. Second is reality, metaphysics. How do you deal with philosophical issues that are not merely tested in the laboratory? Meaning is not a scientific question.

You may draw an inference from science, but you do not define meaning from the empirical sciences. So you deal with God, theology, reality, metaphysics, knowledge, which is epistemology. How do you know something is true? That's what episteme means in Greek. If you go and see the ruins of Greek columns today, you will see the word episteme is still written there, from which we get the transliterated English word epistemology. How do you know something is true?

How do you verify it? And different fields of disciplines have different ways of measuring. In a science lab, you do it one way. In a philosophical discussion, you do it another way. So God, reality, knowledge, fourth is morality.

That's ethics. This is where the atheists are totally silent. They are doing their best to demonstrate to you that it is all deterministic and neurologically engendered. Well, if that is true, then so is this conclusion. So you're not really making a truth claim. You're just like an automaton.

You're spitting out what the machine is telling you to spit out. And moral reasoning is something that gives the atheist immense problem. Is it all right for a man to take a knife and carve out a baby for his personal pleasure? If time plus matter plus chance has produced your existence, then values are totally autonomous. Totally autonomous. That's why the Muslim has one value. The Hindu has another value. Atheist, a third and the Christian, the fourth. So you've got God, reality, knowledge, morality, and ultimately humankind.

What does it mean to be human? So I start off with that. So you really, you know, you've got theology, you've got anthropology, you've got ethics, you've got philosophy. All these issues come into play. It's not as simple as saying the law of gravity explains everything. That's so ridiculously reductionistic that one philosopher at Cambridge University said of Stephen Hawking, maybe the oracular professor Hawking is not kept up with philosophy and theology. And what he was saying is, do your homework and other disciplines. Don't just do everything in your scientific lab and create a scientific single vision.

Those are the three, four, five issues. And so when we deal with these Eastern spirituality or Eastern spirituality, let me take you through a little bit of a journey. Now I know there's a lot of stuff here and forgive me for being ponderous on this.

So I'm just going to take some of the surface in it here. Three names from Eastern philosophy that changed America. The first of them was called Swami Vivekananda. And when you were Swami Vivekananda was a brilliant, brilliant Indian philosopher. He arrived at the conference in the Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893.

He was not an invited speaker. But they have big delegates, big philosophers from all over the world were talking about world religions. Vivekananda went up to the platform and said this, 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. We look about us 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. I've heard the creeds of the Muslims applauded when today the Muslim sword is carrying destruction into India.

Blood and sword are not for the Hindu, whose religion is based on the laws of love. And he sat down, clever, very, very clever. You see, he did his homework. He understood the Western mind much better than the Western mind understood the Eastern mind.

And that applies till this very day. Do you notice what he's done? He's taken the abuse of Christianity as meaning Christianity. And he has ignored the abuse of Hinduism and treated a pristine version of it. What would Vivekananda have said when Graham stains the missionary with his two boys were put into his vans a few years ago in Orissa and kerosene doused on that van and the van set ablaze and the missionary and his two boys are burned to death.

Is that Hinduism or Hindus claim to do it? Much of that will even go on today. Why is it that Christianity is judged by its abuse? And other worlds 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. yoga Nanda was another a contemporary Vivekananda that the name Ananda is oftentimes put onto a guru's name because Ananda means joy. And so they'll Vivekananda live the joy of life yoga Nanda, you know that the joy of yoga and things like that and so on and you'll have this these that kind of appendage oftentimes, but your yoga Nanda with this 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, 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 yoga Nanda was the disciple that he picked as his ultimate successor Vivekananda yoga Nanda, you and I may not be too familiar with that. Indians are the Western 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 pockets 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 of 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 Durham, 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 Taoism, 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 portions and natural portents and there's a lot of good in it. So 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 l three to s one I'm fused 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 really but it's only palliative, it's not correct if 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 anytime 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 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 1000 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 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 1000 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 is 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 as Eastern spirituality actually means here's what it says, by the way, pages of they tell you what it is not anytime 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. As Christians, we need to be able to respond to the challenges posed by the new spirituality. We hope you'll join us next week as Ravi concludes his message on the topic and shares how we can respond to the teachings of modern day gurus. 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 rdim.org or rzim.ca for those listening in Canada. If you're not familiar with our ministry, our website is a great place to learn more about our efforts around the globe. There you can see a list of upcoming conferences and events being held at the Zacharias Institute. Sign up for an online class through RZIM Academy or learn about the work being done through our humanitarian arm, Wellspring International. You can also find content from our global team that you can read, listen to or watch to help you grow in your Christian faith.

Hello friends, this is Ravi Zacharias. For nearly half a century now, I have been covering this globe, visiting scores of countries and in the open forums which are unique particularly to academic settings and more and more even in the business arena. There are three phases to the program. We present to talk, then we field questions and after that we talk privately to individuals. The format we're going to be using on our radio broadcast Just Thinking is in the Q&A format. We hope to be taking people's questions, answering them and then finding the bridge from the head to the heart.

I know this will be exciting. You will enjoy it and I pray you'll be inspired and blessed. Thank you for standing with us. I hope you will tune in to the question and answer format on our Just Thinking program. At RZIM we aim to help reach younger generations, encourage churches and answer questions from Christians and sceptics. To find out more about the work being done around the globe or to donate, visit our website at rzim.org. If you're listening in Canada, that website is rzim.ca. Let My People Think is a listener supported radio ministry and is furnished by Ravi Zechariahs International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.