By Ray Yungen
What is happening to mainstream Christianity is the same thing that is happening to business, health, education, counseling, and other areas of society. Christendom is being cultivated for a role in the New Age. The [demonic] entity, Raphael, explains this very clearly in the Starseed Transmissions:
We work with all who are vibrationally sympathetic; simple and sincere people who feel our spirit moving, but for the most part, only within the context of their current belief system.1
He is saying that they “work,” or interact, with people who open their minds to them in a way that fits in with the person’s current beliefs. In the context of Christianity this means that those meditating will think that they have contacted God, when in reality they have connected up with Raphael’s kind (who are more than willing to impersonate whomever the person wishes to reach so long as they can link with them).
This ultimately points to a global religion based on meditation and mystical experience. New Age writer David Spangler explains it the following way:
There will be several religious and spiritual disciplines as there are today, each serving different sensibilities and affinities, each enriched by and enriching the particular cultural soil in which it is rooted. However, there will also be a planetary spirituality that will celebrate the sacredness of the whole humanity in appropriate festivals, rituals, and sacraments. There will be a more widespread understanding and experience of the holistic nature of reality, resulting in a shared outlook that today would be called mystical. Mysticism has always overflowed the bounds of particular religious traditions, and in the new world this would be even more true.2
The rise of centering prayer is causing many churches to become agents of transformation. Those who practice it tend to embrace this one-world-religion idea. One of the main proponents of centering prayer had this revelation:
It is my sense, from having meditated with persons from many different traditions, that in the silence we experience a deep unity. When we go beyond the portals of the rational mind into the experience, there is only one God to be experienced…. I think it has been the common experience of all persons of good will that when we sit together Centering we experience a solidarity that seems to cut through all our philosophical and theological differences.3
In this context, we may compare all the world’s religions to a dairy herd. Each cow may look different on the outside, but the milk would all be the same. The different religious groups would maintain their own separate identities, but a universal spiritual practice would bind them together-not so much a one-world church as a one-world spirituality.
Episcopal priest and New Age leader Matthew Fox explains what he calls “deep ecumenism”:
Without mysticism there will be no “deep ecumenism,” no unleashing of the power of wisdom from all the world’s religious traditions. Without this I am convinced there will never be global peace or justice since the human race needs spiritual depths and disciplines, celebrations and rituals, to awaken its better selves. The promise of ecumenism, the coming together of religions, has been thwarted because world religions have not been relating at the level of mysticism.4
Fox believes that all world religions will eventually be bound together by the “Cosmic Christ”5 principle, which is another term for the higher self.
As incredible as this may sound, it appears to be happening now. The New Age is embedded in American religious culture far deeper and broader than many people imagine. If your concept of the New Age is simply astrology, tarot cards, or reincarnation, then you could easily miss the real New Age as it pulses through the religious current. If mystical prayer continues its advance, then we could one day see, perhaps sooner than we expect, many Christian churches becoming conduits of New Age thought to their membership.
Sue Monk Kidd is a best selling novel writer. Her book, The Secret Life of Bees has sold over four million copies, mainly to women. At one time a Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher, she became attracted to centering prayer as a way to know God more deeply. Today, she is the Writer in Residence of the Sophia Institute, which is devoted to “foster[ing] the emergence of the sacred feminine” (i.e., the Divine feminine).5
Monk Kidd now adheres to what New Agers teach, that this mystical force (called God or Divinity) is in all things, nothing excluded:
Deity means that divinity will no longer be only heavenly … It will also be right here, right now, in me, in the earth, in this river, in excrement and roses alike.6
She reiterates this in her 2006 book, First Light, in which she writes:
If I am intent on centering my life in the presence of God, then I must understand what I believe about where this presence can be found … God became the steam of my soup, the uprooted tree, the graffiti on the building, the rust on the fence.7
But what if the graffiti is gang graffiti about killing members of a rival gang or even worse, what if the graffiti is cursing God with vile language?
Well, Monk Kidd would still say that the graffiti is God.
Why?
It is because New Agers believe God is not a being but Being itself. In other words, there is nothing that is not God. This is the decision that the world is now facing–is God a personal being or is God the Universe and all that it entails? (from For Many Shall Come in My Name, 2nd, pp. 128-132. Click here for reference citations.
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