Truth Vs. Pantheistic Monism

Over the past several days I have been deeply troubled by Oprah's promotion of hypnosis as well as pantheistic monism in a broadcast titled "Remembering Past Lives." Here is how she interviews Brian Weise. He's a psychiatrist and the author of Many Lives, Many Masters and he's answering a question by Oprah on how hypnosis can be used to access past lives.

Oprah: How does hypnosis help one access the past lives?

Brian Weise: It gives a direct line in because hypnosis - I was explaining to the audience - it’s just focusing your concentration while your body is relaxed. So it stops the clutter, the everyday mind, from getting in the way, and you go right to the subconscious. You can go right to where memories are. You’re still here. You’re safe. You don’t go anywhere. It’s not what you see in the movies.

Oprah: Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong. Yeah.

Brian Weise: No. It's not safe at all. In fact, when you are worked into an altered state of consciousness you become hypersuggestible, willing to believe whatever enters your mind, no matter how mundane or outlandish.

Oprah not only is promoting this past life regression, but she's also promoting and underscoring and giving credence to pantheistic monism.

Oprah: I think the biggest question that everybody has is where is God in all of
this? Your answer is?

Brian Weise: I find God everywhere in this. I was meditating on this one day, and had a metaphor of ice cubes like people. Ice cubes they’re solid, they have sides, but if you melt them with heat energy, they just disappear into water, they become water. So if ice cubes are floating in water, and you heat the water, everything is water, the individuality has disappeared. And if you keep adding heat energy, even the water disappears and it all become steam. Invisible but it’s still the H20 molecule vibrating rapidly. It’s still there. And I think people are like the ice cubes. We're the
solid part, the condensed part — we think we are separate from everybody else. We’re not, because if you heat us with love energy, not heat energy, but love energy, we melt into a spiritual sea. Spirit and water has always been equated. And if you keep heating with love, you find God. God is the steam, God is beyond the steam, the organizing Wisdom that’s in every atom of our being, as well as every atom of this chair. This is who we are. God is in all of us. And so were not so separate, so distinct, we're not different from each other. We’re all souls, and souls are all connected.

Oprah: Yeah, and I was just saying to the producers people get hung up on the word “masters” because people say there’s only one Master, and the truth is, yeah, we are all one. So you can all call them angels. I said, “You can call them angels. You can call them masters. You can call them Winnie the Pooh. It doesn’t matter.” The question we need to ask ourselves is "Do I have the ability to listen to this and discern between wheat and chaff, heat and light? Can I spot the error or does this simply wash over me as though it has little consequence?"

If pantheistic monism is true it has a very direct relationship to how lives are lived for this world and the next. Oprahfication of the culture is one thing, but I'm equally exorcised over Barack Obama's theological dictum that, in his words, "There are many paths to the same place" as well as Obama's denunciation of Christians who hold that those who haven't embraced Jesus Christ as their personal Savior are going to hell. I certainly believe that because God is not a cosmic rapist. He's not going to force people who reject Him in this life to be dragged into His loving presence for all eternity. If He were to do that, heaven wouldn't be heaven. Heaven would be hell. The righteous would inherit a counterfeit heaven and the unrighteous would be incarcerated in heaven against their will, which is a torment worse than death. In fact, I would say it could legitimately be called an eternal cosmic rape.

What did Jesus say? He said "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father but by Me." While Obama's obfuscation - and he said "I don't presume to have knowledge of what happens after I die" - might be politically correct, it's puzzling in the face of the box top of Scripture, the words of the Apostle John who said "I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life."

I'm equally troubled by this liberation theology of the man Obama called his mentor. For Pastor Jeremiah Wright liberation theology and its horizontal, materialistic vision for humanity is king. His emphasis is not so much on liberation from the wrath of God through faith in Jesus Christ, but on liberation from what he describes as the government of the United States of White America, a government that he says has unleashed the AIDS virus on African-Americans, a government that victimizes victims, a government that oppresses the oppressed. In the end Wright's message is liberation through class struggle rather than liberation through Christ's sacrifice. Those who sit under the mentorship of men like Wright should carefully consider whether anger, disregard for truth, victimization theories are the path to victory, or whether it's the Gospel that sets us free to be all that God created us to be no matter what condition we find ourselves in.

It's truly remarkable that thousands of congregants applaud a man who openly garnered support for Louis Farrakhan who, of course, is the notorious leader of the Nation of Islam, a man who is blatantly anti-Semitic and subscribes to the notion that the White race was grafted into existence 6,000 years ago by a scientist named Dr. Yakub who allegedly created the white beast to be inherently deceptive and murderous. A man who has openly referred to Jews as "bloodsuckers" and Judaism as a "gutter religion," and Hitler as "a very great man," a man who characterizes Christianity as a White man's religion. A man who denies the afterlife and, as such, denies eternal consequences for the atrocities of despots and dictators. We've come a long way, baby. The question is, are we headed in the right direction.

So often it's easy for us to set up a we/they siege mentality against these kinds of philosophies which are now being openly espoused by leaders in the political realm, and pundits on television. But the truth of the matter is the culture is where it is not because of Obama and Oprah. They reflect the culture. The culture is where it is because Christians are unable, ill-equipped what they believe and then give answers, always ready to give an answer or reason for the hope that lies within them with gentleness and with respect. If we don't give a clear sound, who's going to follow? If we aren't those who can communicate the credibility of the words of Jesus Christ, who can answer obfuscation, who's going to do it?