THE UNQUESTIONED ACCEPTANCE OF BUDDHISM AND MEDITATION

Religion and religious statements are unavoidable. Even the highly secular New York Times cannot resist affirming explicitly religious beliefs, even when incredible:

·       …in many strands of Buddhism there is a remarkable honesty regarding the implications of salvation. Rather than promising that your life will continue, or that you will see your loved ones again, the salvation of nirvana entails your extinction. The aim is not to lead a free life, with the pain and suffering that such a life entails, but to reach the “insight” that personal agency is an illusion and dissolve in the timelessness of nirvana. What ultimately matters is to attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter, so that one can rest in peace. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/opinion/why-mortality-makes-us-free.html

This religious affirmation elicits many questions. The author claims that “there is a remarkable honesty” in “many strands of Buddhism.” What demonstrates its honesty? It seems that the author admits that “nirvana entails your extinction,” but what makes this statement honest? Even more perplexing is what follows. According to the author, “the aim” is to “reach the ‘insight’ that personal agency is an illusion and [will] dissolve in the timelessness of nirvana.” If we have been extinguished, who is it who reaches this “insight.” Certainly not those who have been extinguished! And who is it that experiences reincarnation? An illusion of a personal existence?

The author then claims that “What ultimately matters is to attain a state of consciousness where everything ceases to matter, so that one can rest in peace.” Well, who is that “you” if you no longer exist?

It doesn’t seem to matter at all that Buddhism rests upon a confused and illogical foundation. But Buddhism is a Teflon frying pan, which seems to be unassailable by means of reason and even by experience. Besides, it is hard work. What then is its appeal? The author writes:

·       You engage in meditational practices as a means for the end of deepening your ability to care for others and improving the quality of your life.

But how can meditation and Buddhist thought accomplish this, especially in light of the fact that we are not even individuals now – this is just part of the illusion that we have to transcend – and we will not be individuals in the eternal? Wouldn’t displays of caring just reinforce this illusion?

Some Eastern thinkers claim that it will! Paramahansa Yogananda (1893 –1952), author of “Autobiography of a Yogi,” claimed that even suffering is an illusion (http://www.yogananda-srf.org/):

·       “Then this cosmic movie, with its horrors of disease and poverty and atomic bombs will appear to us only as real as the anomalies we experience at a movie house. When we have finished seeing the motion picture, we will know that nobody was killed; nobody was suffering.”

If suffering is just an illusion, why alleviate it? Why not instead simply teach the sufferer that he is being deluded, and so there is no need to extend him any comfort.

In “The King of Knowledge” by Prabhupada, the founder of the Hare Krishna and International Society of Krishna Consciousness, therefore taught that the alleviation of suffering was counterproductive:

·       The hospital making business is being conducted by the government; it is the duty of a disciple to make hospitals whereby people can actually get rid of their material bodies, not patch them up. But for want of knowing what real spiritual activity is, we take up material activities.

Evidently, his meditative techniques were teaching him that caring was unnecessary. Why then meditate? Has it promoted those nations committed to it? The author seems to think that it is enough to simply mention that Sam Harris is an advocate and practitioner.

HOW BAD THEOLOGY CAN UNDERMINE THE FAITH

Paul had warned that bad theology undermines faith:

·       See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. (Colossians 2:8; ESV)

Bad theology can take us captive. Sometimes, it can even look benign:

·       Now the Spirit expressly says that in later times some will depart from the faith by devoting themselves to deceitful spirits and teachings of demons, through the insincerity of liars whose consciences are seared, who forbid marriage and require abstinence from foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and know the truth. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, for it is made holy by the word of God and prayer. (1 Timothy 4:1-5)

Paul argued that even the smallest morsel of bad doctrine can undermine the entirety of our faith:

·       You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. (Galatians 5:7-9)

A little bit of bad teaching can contaminate everything. I know that this sounds unbelievable, but just think about a computer virus. It’s just a small bit of information, but it can destroy your computer. The same seems to pertain to our faith.

Let’s take a couple of examples. Universalism is the belief that everyone will be saved in the end. They argue that, since God is love, He would never condemn His creations to an endless hell. However, this one simple belief contradicts the entire Bible.

Why should any bother to read the Bible if they are going to be saved anyway. The Christian life is not easy. We are called to suffer (2 Cor. 4:10-11). Why then live for Christ? Why be obedient if all will be saved?

The same goes for prayer, confession, repentance, and certainly evangelism. I would be ashamed to tell anyone that they need to come to Christ if they are going to heaven regardless. In fact, if all are to be saved, nothing in the Bible is of any real consequence. Better to eat, drink, and be merry!

Many other heresies will also undermine the entirety of the faith. Mysticism is becoming fantastically popular. Mysticism is the belief that we can enjoy the love and blessings of God without certain beliefs and doctrines. All that is necessary is the practice of certain mindless techniques/exercises like meditation to clear the mind, visualizations, repetitions of a single word, or imaginations.

If we can experience the love of God through the various mystical exercises, who needs the Bible, confession, repentance, faith, and obedience. Mysticism makes them all irrelevant. However, their various techniques are entering the Church like a tsunami.

Why? Progressives are coming to believe that experience, rather than our opposing beliefs, will bring world unity. Sociologist Tony Campolo wrote:

·       A theology of mysticism provides some hope for common ground between Christianity and Islam. Both religions have within their histories examples of ecstatic union with God…I do not know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystical experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism. (Roger Oakland, Faith Undone, 108)

According to Campolo, we can plug into God through mystical techniques and experiences, and this common experience can become the basis of “common ground” among the various religions. He claims that he has been able to achieve “intimacy with Christ” through “centering prayer” (113). For him, this involves the repetition of the name of Jesus. However, he suggests that Muslims – and probably others – may also be able to achieve this same “intimacy with Christ” through the use of similar mystical techniques. If this is so, then theology and doctrine are no longer important. Instead, they build walls and present obstacles.

However, Campolo’s hope that people of different religions are experiencing our God lovingly and savingly is biblically absurd. Without having been reconciled to God through His Son, we cannot enter into His presence; nor would we want to. Israel had been so terrified by the manifestations of God on Mt. Sinai that they thought they would die (Deut. 5:25).

The Temple stood as a constant reminder that anyone not authorized to approach God would be struck dead. Even the authorized could only approach after lengthy preparations.

Jesus reiterated that fact that, naturally speaking, we hate the light of the presence of God:

·       And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

Jesus, therefore, is the last One the unredeemed would want to encounter. What then are they encountering when they claim to have an encounter with God through exercising their techniques? Paul had warned:

·       For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, disguising themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. So it is no surprise if his servants, also, disguise themselves as servants of righteousness. Their end will correspond to their deeds. (2 Corinthians 11:13-15)

Where then can we find safety from demonic deception and demonic encounters? Only through Christ and through His Word!

MINDFULNESS MEDITATION, BUDDHISM, AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

Russ Harris wrote in the “Happiness Trap”:

·       “If you bring mindfulness to bear on negative feelings, they loose their impact. Just let them be there without struggling against them, and you’ll eventually feel less anxiety and depression.”

In The Observing Self, psychotherapist, Arthur Deikman, writes,

·       “Mystical tradition asserts the equation: I (Real Self) = God. While ‘I am God’ is the fundamental realization of mysticism, it is blasphemous in many religions…the goal of mysticism—experiencing the Real Self—is said to cure human suffering because its very basis [the illusion of the false, individual self] is thereby removed.”

Deikman, along with a growing number of educated Westerners, believes that the “reality” of our senses is illusory. According to them, reality is one, and we’re all one Self, and that Self is God. And this makes us God! This raises a truck-load of questions:

1. What evidence is there for this? By their very definition, there can’t be any. Instead, the evidence is just part of the illusion. The inevitable conclusion is that there is no evidence! Why should I trust illusory “evidence” that there is such a oneness-reality, against everything my senses tell me firsthand?

2. When I achieve the experience of the “Real Self,” how do I know that this is the “Real Self” and not also a delusion? How do I know that it’s the oneness?

3. Even if this exercise of experiencing the “Real Self” helps me to dissociate myself from pain, how do I know that this experience isn’t the mother of all delusions? Perhaps this is a doorway to mental illness, as many have claimed?

4. Perhaps reality is a matter of me alone? If everything I perceive is part of the illusion, perhaps those others, the “we,” are also part of the illusion? Why then act morally towards phantom-people?

5. What does it mean to be God? If I am God, shouldn’t I have some special powers—like controlling the weather or holding my breath for an hour?

6. Isn’t this life-denying? Should I shut my eyes and heart to family, friends, vocation, and interests if they’re all illusion?

7. If everything is illusion, is there anything to learn about an illusory world?

8. If everything is illusion, isn’t loving others also part of the illusion, since there are no others to love? So too compassion, justice, and every other value that makes life worth living.

9. If everyone is part of the illusion, why even bother to promote such an absurd notion to illusory others?

Surprisingly, Deikman concludes:

·       “Mystical science [meditation] is for those who can obtain satisfaction of their worldly needs from appropriate sources and do not seek them, in disguise, in the spiritual domain. Worldly needs [including psychological struggles] must be satisfied elsewhere so that their pursuit does not interfere with the [spiritual] learning process. Similarly, psychopathology must be dealt with first.”

Well isn’t mindfulness supposed to reduce the impact of negative feelings, as Harris claims? Evidently, Deilman thinks otherwise. However, he doesn’t explain why, but others do.

One former meditator and humanist, writer Mary Garden, confessed:

• Back in 1979, when I was living in Pune, India, as a starry-eyed devotee of the infamous guru Bhagwan Rajneesh, something happened that has disturbed me to this day. A man who had just come down from Kathmandu after completing a thirty-day Tibetan Buddhist meditation course killed himself. I had met him the night before, and we'd had coffee together. I don't remember what we spoke about, but he was friendly and didn't appear distressed. But the next day he climbed to the top of the multi-storied Blue Diamond Hotel and leapt off. The Bhagwan, at his first lecture after the man's suicide, tried to reassure us by saying the man had already reincarnated as a more enlightened soul. But I was quite upset and remember thinking how strange it was that someone should kill himself after a meditation course. Isn't meditation something you do to get--at the very least--peace of mind? I wondered whether he might have had a mental illness and perhaps shouldn't have taken the course in the first place. Even if he had, shouldn't the meditation have helped? It didn't occur to me that the meditation itself might have caused a mental imbalance that tipped him over the edge--that meditation could be dangerous for some people. Has such a notion ever appeared in the mainstream media, let alone the myriad New Age magazines? http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/MaryGarden.html

Are the dangers of meditation simply a product of having the wrong attitudes or expectations, as some claim, or are they endemic to meditation? Garden writes:

• On a Goenka Vipassana discussion board called tribe.net, a participant named Tristan writes: “I wish I could say wonderful things about my experience but I can't. I stayed the full ten days, many of them filled with incredible hallucinations, from being inside an egg, to being a bird-like animal with broken wings, to following tunnels through my brain, to feeling completely connected to the universe. No problem, I told myself, it's just sensation. I'm perfectly safe. On the last day of the retreat, listening to the last lecture, I let out a huge scream and fell down.” [This meditator] says he became psychotic and ended up in a psychiatric hospital for several weeks.

• With Goenka's courses there have been a number of failed suicide attempts in India, including one that resulted in a broken spine and another in which the survivor suffered a ruptured lung and a fractured skull. Researchers at Goenka's headquarters at Igatpuri looked at cases concerning nine persons who'd harmed themselves after a course, and they found all had either practiced other forms of meditation, used healing techniques, or used drugs prior to doing a course. They consequently attributed the serious mental disturbances following the retreat not as side effects of the meditation technique, but to the practice or use of these other things.

• But a woman who recently contacted me said her son did a Vipassana course in January in New Zealand, found it to be a very positive experience that produced many good feelings of love and so forth, but that within a few days of his return he'd had a "psychotic episode." He was committed to a mental hospital where he responded well to medication and is now on antidepressants. Her son had no history of mental instability, nor was there any such history in the family. He had never tried meditation before nor had he taken drugs.

• Geoffrey Dawson, a Sydney-based Zen meditation teacher and psychotherapist, has come across twenty people who had mentally distressing experiences as a result of attending courses at the Goenka Vipassana Retreat Center in Blackheath (located in the Blue Mountains of Australia). Dawson says these meditators became fragmented rather than integrated and their experiences included panic attacks, depressive episodes, or both that in most cases persisted months after the retreat ended. There were also some manic episodes, one of which later became diagnosed and treated as a bipolar disorder. Dawson was also contacted by a woman whose daughter had been to a retreat. Her friends and family noticed she became withdrawn and obsessive afterwards. Her psychological condition deteriorated and some months later she became psychotic. Within eighteen months she was hospitalized and committed suicide.

• Dawson suggests that "if a gradual approach to meditation retreats is adopted, supportive processes are put in place during retreats, and follow-up care is provided," while it's not guaranteed participants won't have adverse experiences, "it can certainly help prevent and minimize the development of mental disorders."

• Christopher Titmuss, a former Buddhist monk who now lives in England, holds yearly Vipassana meditation retreats in Bodh Gaya, India. He reports that occasionally people go through very traumatic experiences and require round the clock support, the use of strong drugs, or even hospitalization. "Others may experience a short-lived terror of the mind utterly out of control, a temporary fear of going mad," he notes. "Or an alienation from conventional reality that makes it difficult for consciousness to recover without active intervention." But Titmuss claims it isn't the meditation that causes such behavior: "The function of meditation, as the Buddha points out, is to act as a mirror to what is."

Is meditation just “a mirror,” or does it open the meditator to new dangers? Garden gravitates towards the latter option, citing another former meditator:

• Those who play the "mental illness" defense card seem to have a vested interest in Eastern philosophy. Meditation appears to create mental imbalance by messing with the brain's chemistry.

Garden also backs up her concerns with the relevant research, pointing to the fact that there are profound costs endemic to meditation:

• Professor Richard Davidson of Wisconsin, a long-term Buddhist meditator himself, claims that meditation can "change neural states in circuits that may be important for compassionate behavior and attentional and emotional regulation."

·       "Meditation is not going to be good for all patients with emotional disorders and it may even be bad for certain types of patients."

• Dr. Solomon Snyder, head of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University, warns that during meditation the brain releases serotonin. This may help those with mild depression but too much serotonin can cause, in some, a paradoxical relaxation-induced anxiety. Instead of relaxing during meditation, these people become distressed and may even have panic attacks. Snyder says that in some cases of schizophrenia, meditation can launch a person straight into psychosis.

• Dr. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania scanned the brains of long-term practitioners of Buddhism while they were meditating and compared them with images taken when they were not. Newberg saw that blood flow to the posterior superior parietal lobe decreased during meditation. This area of the brain determines the boundaries of one's body in relation to the environment and allows us to navigate a complex three-dimensional world without bumping into things. "We know that the posterior superior parietal lobe plays that particular role because there are patients with damage in this same region who literally cannot move around without falling," Newberg reports. "They'll miss the chair they intended to sit on, and generally have a fuzzy understanding of where their body ends and the rest of the universe begins." He says that when people have spiritual experiences and feel they become one with the universe and lose their sense of self, it may be because of what is happening in that area of the brain. "If you block that area, you lose that boundary between the self and the rest of the world."

• Dr. Michael Persinger, a professor of neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Canada, studied 1,018 meditators in 1993 and found that meditation can bring on symptoms of complex partial epilepsy such as visual abnormalities, hearing voices, feeling vibrations, or experiencing automatic behaviors such as narcolepsy. Note that epileptic patients who suffer from seizures in the temporal lobes have auditory or visual hallucinations, which they often interpret as mystical experiences. Some are convinced that they conversed with God.

• Persinger set out to investigate so-called "mystical" experiences under controlled laboratory conditions. He got volunteers to wear a helmet fitted with a set of magnets through which he ran a weak electromagnetic signal. Persinger found that the magnetically induced seizures in the temporal lobes generate the same sort of hallucinations and mystical experiences reported by epileptic patients. Four in five people, he says, report a "mystical experience, the feeling that there is a sentient being or entity standing behind or near" them. Some weep, some feel God has touched them, others become frightened and talk of demons and evil spirits. "That's in the laboratory," Persinger notes, referring to subjects' knowledge of a controlled environment. "How much more intense might these experiences be if they happened late at night, or in a pew in a mosque or synagogue?"

Garden concludes:

• After my Indian odyssey and my return to worldly life in 1979, I've found being back in the world not such a bad thing after all. I no longer regard the world as a place from which to escape or detach myself. My mind is no longer something to conquer or to cleanse of impurities. In fact, my life is immeasurably richer without meditation.

There are many other pro-meditation sources that admit to the inherent dangers. Here are just two of them:

http://simonarich.com/meditation-dangers

http://thoughtbrick.com/meditation/dangers-meditation-10-things-look/

CAN MINDFULNESS MEDITATION BE BAPTIZED FOR CHRISTIAN USE?

Mindfulness is a form of meditation to attain peace and just about everything else. It promises the world, as a "Christianity Today" article suggests:

·       . . . "mindfulness has come to comprise a dizzying range of meanings for popular audiences. It’s an intimately attentive frame of mind. It’s a relaxed-alert frame of mind. It’s equanimity. It’s a form of the rigorous Buddhist meditation called vipassana(“insight”), or a form of another kind of Buddhist meditation known asanapanasmrti (“awareness of the breath”). It’s M.B.S.R. therapy (mindfulness-based stress reduction). It’s just kind of stopping to smell the roses. And last, it’s a lifestyle trend, a social movement and — as a Time magazine cover had it last year — a revolution."

However, can their techniques of clearing the mind to attain peace and self-awareness be of use to the Christian? 

First of all, the practice of mindfulness competes with the Bible, which has its own resources to produce these fruits. Instead of meditating on one's  inner states, Scripture would have us meditate on God's very words:

·       “His delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers.” (Psalm 1:2-3)

Our thoughts, hopes, and worldviews are to be set on the things above:

·       “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.” (Colossians 3:1-2)

Life is filled with pain and disappointment. Our pains and failures tend to make us feel that we are missing out on something - some technique or spiritual therapy. However, it is when we focus on Jesus, and not on ourselves, that we find the necessary peace, endurance, and hope:

·       “Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted.” (Hebrews 12:2-3)

If our meditations/mindfulness are on Scripture and our Lord, no problem! But if they represent placing our hope in something else to deal with our spiritual/emotional problems, then we are wrongly placing our trust (1 Tim. 4:1-3; Gal. 5:1-4; Provide. 3:5-6).

Scripture assures us that it is able to give us everything we need for our spirituality, growth, and service:

·       “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.” (2 Timothy 3:16-17)

One respondent lamented that her husband was spending less time praying with the family in favor of mindfulness meditation. He was placing his hope in the wrong thing.

Christ has given us the necessary resources for life. To go beyond Him in spiritual matters, is to place our hope in the wrong thing, as another respondent wrote to a Christian therapist and advocate of mindfulness:

·       "I have used mindfulness-based techniques for a number of years in seeking to combat depression and anxiety. I found the techniques to be quite powerful for that time. I am a discerning, theologically trained evangelical Christian and felt that I approached all psychological treatment with due caution and thought (or so I have judged myself!). 

·       Ultimately, however, I have come to reject this approach to mental health. In recent months I have received healing from my mental and emotional torture in a far more complete way. This has come from a 'renewing of my mind' through the Scriptures, and particularly a proper understanding of spiritual warfare and the role that Satan plays in trying to deceive, accuse and bring fear to those who belong to Christ. This has not been a type of 'super spiritual power encounter' or exorcism or something dramatic, but rather a 'truth encounter'. I have had to repent of many false beliefs about God, about the world and about myself. Many of these beliefs were deep-seated and at the root of my depression and anxiety. 

·       When I practiced Mindfulness, I believe I actually allowed myself to be opened further to deceiving and accusing thoughts (see 1 Tim 4:1). In fact, I can now see how dramatically I had shifted in my theology, in my morality and in my worldview during its use. I have repented of using it, and instead am seeking to take every thought captive to Christ (2 Cor 10:5). Previously, I didn't really take seriously the spiritual realm, and the way the enemy seeks to render Christians weak and unfruitful. This was to my peril. Now I have become aware of Satan's schemes and can resist them. My mind is at peace."

Peace and self-acceptance are the gifts of our God. Although, self examination is important, even necessary (Prov. 20:5; 1 Cor. 11:31), it is important as the needle and thread are to the jacket. They merely restore to us the use of the jacket. Self-examination - and its byproduct, confession of sin - is merely a tool to restore us to our Source and all-sufficient Provider.