Seeking Truth in Ancient Falsehood —
New Age Spirituality And The Inner Self

In this post, Christian author Mark Fisher looks at the modern hunt for truth in the inner self and New Age spirituality, a search the ancient Celts abandoned the moment they learned about Christ.

“The Woman And Spirituality Conference”

Lately, I’ve been avoiding my blog so I could focus on novel writing. But this week I ran across something I simply must comment on. I apologize for its length, but it speaks truth into lives sorely in need of it.

In September, our civic center here in Rochester, Minnesota held a “Women and Spirituality Conference”. Sounds innocuous enough until you start delving a bit deeper. The stated purpose was “a multi-faith, educational, healing event that brings together diverse spiritual traditions to create an atmosphere of shared spiritual growth.” Already, red flags started going up.

A New Age Agenda — Seeking The Inner Self

Then I looked at the agenda, a sampling of which follows:

• “Grounding Meditation, Healings, and Audience Readings” — the speaker will “work with Spirit as a spiritual conduit to help you cleanse, clear, purify and strengthen your energetic body through a guided meditation.”
• “The World is Your Oracle: Divinatory Practices For Tapping Your Inner Wisdom” — the speaker will help you tap the wisdom residing within each of us.
• “Meditation in Today’s World” — Swami Kena will help you awaken your feminine spirituality.
• “Tarot Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” — “Using tarot to find ways to own your devils rather than being owned by them.”
• “Communicating With Your Inner Spirit” — “Your inner spirits/inner guides/higher power are always communicating with you. … explore the power of meditation to deepen your communication with your inner spirit.”
• “Connecting With The Energies of the Universe” — “some simple ways to raise personal vibration and connect with energies beyond.”
• “The Fourth House in Astrology: The Womb of Your Soul” — “describes not only our connection to our families, but to our connection with all of humanity and mother earth…”
• “Drumming With the Chakras—Exploring The Celtic Tradition” —an “experimental drum workshop.” “Cleanse and balance your chakras; and discover how each of your energy centers responds to various sounds, colors and tones. Drums provided.”

Where Is One True Thing?

After reading through the lengthy two-day list of speakers and topics, I was left saddened, chagrined, and appalled. Missing from the conference was a single session on the one thing, the only thing, that will get one close to God—a session on Christ. I’m guessing if one tried to present such a session—and I’m sorely tempted to do just that next year—it would be soundly rejected. Everything here screams New Age, ersatz Hinduism, and people desperately grasping for “spirituality” in all the wrong places, in ancient religions that the ancients themselves abandoned once they heard the truth.

Drumming With The Chakras?

It was the drumming with the chakras that prompted me to write this rather lengthy blog. Chakras, for those unfamiliar with the inner workings of Hindu and Buddhist teaching, are “energy centers” in the body. Apparently, drumming creates sounds that somehow stimulate these “energy centers”. Somehow they connected this with Celtic tradition.

Upon Hearing The Truth, The Celts Abandoned The Old Ways

But when the Celts of Ireland heard for the first time the gospel that St. Patrick brought them, they quickly abandoned their ancient religion. The teachings of the druids held them in slavery to a pantheon of capricious, angry gods. Druidic wisdom had them worshiping the spirits of trees, rivers, rocks, and the sun. The people lived in constant fear of a multitude of taboos, haunted groves, and places where spirits lay in wait. The druids held them in fear of angering the fairies who might curse your family or livestock with illness or ill fortune if you violated their secret spaces. No, when the ancient Irish heard about the one God who loves, who sent his only Son to die for them, who brought forgiveness and love, they threw out the druids. And they ran with open arms to the truth.

New Age Is Not New At All

New Age mixes ancient practices such as astrology, witchcraft, the occult, Hindu pantheistic monism, and mysticism. But while the Hindu and Buddhist priests they emulate chant their mantras and look inward, trying to find reality within themselves, they abandon everyone else to their own karma. For it’s only your personal karma—your quest for reincarnation into a perfect being—that matters. Thus, it’s all about self, raising the self to a higher plane of existence through meditation and mantras. It’s all about self-love. No one else matters. It’s certainly not about God, the one who created the universe, the one who holds our eternal destiny in his hands.

So here we are, some fifteen hundred years later, with the truth in front of us, and people are still seeking “spirituality” in ancient belief systems that the ancients abandoned.

Connecting With Your Inner Self— The Result?

What will you find if you truly connect with your “inner woman” or “inner man”? Will you find love, forgiveness, and peace? Will you find mercy and compassion? Or will you find something darker, something selfish and inherently evil?

For the answer, we need only look to the daily news. There we see extortion. Bribery. Dishonesty. Slander. Sexual slavery. Robbery. Drive-by shootings. Mass killings almost weekly. People blowing up themselves and others, thinking this will get them into paradise.

This, folks, is what the Bible tells us we should find. At heart, man and woman are not good. We are fallen creatures, every one of us. And when given the chance, we will turn away from God and embrace evil.

There Is Some Good Within Us — God Put It There

This is not to say we are totally depraved. God made human beings in His image, so we all have some of his qualities, all of which are good—love, kindness, justice, mercy, compassion. The trouble is we also have free will. So when faced with the choice between good or evil, right or wrong, all too often we chose the wrong. We choose evil. What’s the first word many two- or three-year olds will say after “Mommy” and “Daddy”? It’s “mine”. We are all born centered on me, mine, and myself.

Utopia On Earth? — A Failed Proposition

For more proof that finding one’s inner self is a dangerous proposition, we need only look at the ideologies promising utopia on earth.

Communism as a theory promised a worker’s paradise leading to utopia. To achieve it, Karl Marx once said, “We make war against all the prevailing ideas of religion, of the state, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization.” Vladimir Lenin added to this, saying, “Atheism is an integral part of Marxism. … We must combat religion.” Following this line of thought, Stalin’s utopia brought his country twenty million dead, millions forcibly relocated, mass starvation, and forced labor camps.

In Communist China, Mao Tse-Tung’s worker’s paradise caused sixty to seventy million dead under his “Great Leap Forward” and his “Cultural Revolution.”

For a more recent implementation, look at Venezuela. Here we see how to turn a resource-rich country into an economic basket case, a country with soaring inflation, where 75% of the population has lost nineteen pounds, where 82% of households are living in poverty, and where people can no longer afford the basics.

This, my friends, is what happens when mankind seeks utopia on earth. If we were at heart basically good, shouldn’t we see a better result?

Atheism Didn’t Do Any Better

What about atheism? For that we can look to Hitler who called Christianity one of the great “scourges” of history. “Let’s be the only people immunized against this disease,” he said. “Through the peasantry, we shall be able to destroy Christianity.” All of Hitler’s elite were atheists. The result? 22.8-24.0 million civilian dead. 17.5-19.4 million military dead. That is what happens when men rule a nation without God.

These men—communists and atheists, alike—searched within, found their true selves, and brought us mass murder on a staggering scale, world-wide chaos, and unprecedented savagery.

Yes, We Are All Like That

But we’re not like that you say. Ah, but we are. If you scratch the surface of each of us, this is what you’ll find. Heaven help us if we all succeed in finding our inner selves without help from God, through meditation, drumming with chakras, or otherwise. For that is exactly what we’ll find. It’s that choice thing again—between right and wrong. It’s all too easy to choose what’s wrong. Without God’s help, without belief in Christ, evil will prevail.

New age is fond of redefining God to mean what they—sinful humans that they are—have “discovered”. But you won’t find God in self-meditation, drumming, tarot cards, connecting with your personal vibrations, tapping your inner wisdom, astrology, or divinatory practices. You’ll find only a fallen creature, prone to sin. Or demons. Or Satan himself.

Where We Will Find God — In His Revelation

No, you’ll only find God in the book he revealed to us through forty individuals over some fifteen hundred years. God didn’t give his truth to one person, alone in a cave. He didn’t reveal himself on golden tablets seen by only one individual that then disappeared. Instead, he revealed himself over a millennia and a half. And he unfolded a grand narrative with a single focus, a single theme:

God is creating a people for himself from those who believe in His Son as the one he sent to earth, a people whom he will love, who will love him, and who will live together with him for all eternity. And he sealed this plan with the proof of his love for us—by sending his only Son to die on the cross for our sins. If only we would believe in him and follow him….

That is a truth I can accept. That is a truth that I pray with all my heart that the seekers of New Age spirituality will someday find. Because they won’t find it by drumming with the chakras.

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Mark is the author of The Bonfires of Beltane, a novel of Christian historical fiction set in ancient, Celtic Ireland at the time of St. Patrick. To learn more about his book, click on the link.