Posted by on July 05, 2011 at 19:29:09
In Reply to: Re: Slaves by choice? posted by long time exer on July 05, 2011 at 12:13:52:
long time exer:
Thanks for your thoughtful response. Here’s my careful response; not intending to directly contradict you, but to share my experiences and reasoning with you, with all due respect and meekness toward you, and all reverence toward God:
You said: “I do realize that personal motivations for joining or for leaving varied by person.”
With the amount of membership in TF since its 1968 inception somewhere around 30,000 or so, by some estimates, and with another 10,000 or so still in, despite the newest “change” (which I do not believe for a minute, but see as a PR/Marketing necessity on the cult leadership’s part, because of their “Invade the Churches /Heavenly Deception” doctrine and major practice in the West, and because of the continually escalating pressure of continued exposés, via the Internet, TV shows, etc., of their doctrines and practices), I can see how that would definitely be a true statement. There was and is still a great deal of variability of why each one joined; including my own experience.
And, every one of “us” WAS the cult, or at least a microcosm of it, to one degree or another, over greatly varying lengths of membership; right? So, there is the entire range of characters, and their varying moralities/comparative sins to consider. There is also the consideration that many joined without yet having had a genuine born-again experience through the real Jesus Christ of Scripture, versus the false one(s) spoken of by both Christ Himself, and Paul (“…another Jesus, another spirit, and another Gospel…”, which is definitely what the cult offered, and still does).
I presume tha many did NOT ever receive the real Jesus Christ, as I did. But, praying by myself, months AFTER I joined, I received the REAL One, and months later, all by myself on night-time guard duty, I asked Jesus to do what John the Baptist promised He would, and He definitely baptized me in the Holy Spirit, and with FIRE. I experienced many rue “giftings”; which are literally what got me OUT, eventually
I am 59 next December. So, I understand the sort of “hippie nomenclature” of calling the era “renaissance”, during which we both, I presume, entered the cult. Calling myself a “Renaissance man” at the time did get me laid a lot, because of young females back then who fancied themselves “Renaissance women”—a rather silly title looking back; I was all of 17-19 years old, and quite a fool, mostly looking for “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll”, despite any vaunted conformist -hip veneer.
I’m “Old Timer Too”, and you are “long time exer”, so I’m guessing I’m not far off in assuming we’re age cohorts, or close to it. As I have written before, here, I was a “college weekend hippie Hindu wannabe”. I don’t take having considered myself to have been a “hippie” very seriously any more, although I was on an earnest philosophical/experiential search at that time of my life. At the time, because of demonically-empowered Yoga occult experiences, I was not only an avid practitioner of Hatha (physical) Yoga, but also of Siddha, Raja, Bhakti, and Kundalini Yoga, but a zealous recruiter for all of the above—but there was no power to do my recruitment demonstrations any time I ran into REAL Born-Again Christians, and one of them finally silently rebuked out of me the source of my on-loan “powers”.
But the stretching I experienced in Tae Kwon Do, Hapkido, boxing and Greco-Roman wrestling was far superior in its results of limberness and resulting strength-per-pound grasping/throwing/striking/blocking power than silly Hatha Yoga.
So is Pilates, if you don’t like sport fights/self-defense/defense of the weak. Hatha positions are positions of WORSHIP in Hinduism, like it or NOT, including worship of a Guru, usually the one who began the tradition, worship of nature (like the “Greet the Sun” beginner position).
The Hatha Yoga “asanas’ (positions), prepare the practitioner for, essentially, SELF-worship. There are attendant vocal/mental “mantras” (invoking Hindu deities, or “deva/devata”), “Yantras” (patterns you stare at till hypnotized in preparation for possession by said “devata”—and you don’t need a guru present). Like “TM”, for instance. Then there are Tantras, which are entirely sexual (as in “Tantric Sex”). ALL involve the “opening of the chakras” (7 in all—and one is directly over the genitals, with a promise of added virility/seductive power)—ESPECIALLY Hatha Yoga—they are specifically advertisements to the world and angels/demons of the “truth” behind the entire Hindu religion—its positions literally invite demons—and I am talking PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, NOT mere theory, religious prejudice or an unthinking 1970s’ acceptance of a popular belief—that trumps/outranks any hippie ideal of the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.
I am very glad that you say that you “follow no guru or leader”. WE definitely don’t need any more demonized David Berg types in our lives. Yeccch!
Here are some linguistic considerations: ”Yoga” insists on practitioners “yoking” themselves to what I have just described—that’s its literal meaning; lte. And, “Guru” literally means “both light and darkness”. And, “Kundalini” literally means “serpent”. Something to chew on—Judeo-Christian “meditation” has ALWAYS meant to “ruminate and consider”—like a cow does its cud. Hindu/Gnostic/Spiritistic “mediation means to literally empty one’s mind, and to invoke the presence of a “spirit” (NOT God’s Spirit). What follow there, in my experience, are what I call “demonically controlled hallucinations”—real enough to the individual perception/experience, but definitely not from God.
Been there, done that, don’t like the company of demons anymore—my Journey.
I had heard the Gospel many times in both High School and college, but willfully rejected it. That was hardly God’s fault. Before my 2nd year of college, I worked at a medical tent at a week-long rock festival in Louisiana in 1971, where I first met the CoG, but I didn’t like them, because of what I perceived at the time as their incredible self-righteousness, and their trying WAY too hard to be “hip”—very corney.
Picking up ODs (overdosed concertgoers) 8 hours a day, and tending to them for another 8 hours a day, after having experimented myself with any and every drug I could get my hands on (opium, peyote, psilocybin, mescaline, hash—everything but heroin—I was being pretty stupid, by choice, at the time, but even I wasn’t THAT stupid!) in the days leading up to the festival, scared me off drugs for good, except for pot.
And, I had a little epiphany: the entire counterculture was mostly CRAP: I didn’t yet have the Biblical phrase/sociopolitical language to accurately describe it, but just UNDERSTOOD inside me that it was entirely the “blind leading the blind”, into a ditch of rebellion for its own sake.
The Bible says that that is justr like the sin of witchcraft—it opens you up to the deceptive power of fallen angels—see Eph 6.
And Satan definitely got some hooks into me: a psychic first perfectly described my family of origin, and then predicted and described a group I would join, by the exact number of people to the color of paint and shutters in a house in which they (CoG/TF) would be living when I joined them, and that “we would have a tremendous spiritual impact on the entire world”. That was the first big setup. The second was a dream a friend back at college would have, in which he saw me climbing a mountain, and when I reached its summit, there was a bright light, and I stepped up into it, to join others wh were already basking in this “light”. That was a perfect description of one of the earlier cult tracts, which was no longer used a little after that, loosely based on Berg’s writings about mountain men, etc. My friend had visited the Texas compound to photograph them, and surely picked up one of their religious deceiving spirits while staying with them for a while—he almost joined.
I am sympathetic that you said that you were “descending into drug addiction and despair”, and empathetic that you had a “very high level of anxiety”, during which time you chose to resign yourself to what appeared to be a “good cause”. For myself, I can see now that I was BOTH “deceiving [others] and being myself deceived”.
And I realize now that ALL of the choices were my own—no one held a gun to my head. Romans 1:20 says that all of us are “without excuse” concerning God’s existence and power, and a corollary of that is our God-given common sense, our consciences, and, as you alluded to, the ability to reason.
I just know that I freely chose the party line the cult was putting out, and I was not drugged out of my mind at the time—I WANTED spiritual self-importance/significance, for whatever personal reasons, and I rejected the warnings of other Christians at college who tried to warn me the CoG were definitely a cult—but I was too “hip”! I had a mostly absent/uncaring father, low self-esteem, and so on—I was pretty anxious, myself.
Like I said before, I have learned since that Satan really does try to get us to follow the pattern of HIS sin, so that we truly become morally liable before God, for ALL of our decisions. Repentance through Christ is childlike and simple, but near impossible once you’ve bought into your own self-importance, at Satan’s urging; I have learned. And after Christ-rejecting decisions, Satan literally has legal access to further deceive us.
You also said, “Sure, there are always choices, but sometimes choices are between the lesser of two evils presented as "good". At least until a person has more experience to start letting reasonable doubt overcome irrational indoctrination.”
So, you do admit that we do have a free-moral-choice-making capacity--good. I see fatalism and nihilism as terribly foolish positions to take; the reason I have seen people who do so use, usually involves not wanting to admit true moral guilt for pseudo-intellectual BS reasons—that makes that “reason” . “There are absolutely no absolutes” is the irrational refuge of fools, IMO. Even the idea of “evil as the co-equal opposite of good” is a moral/logical absurdity on its face as well.
C. S. Lewis wrote a lot about this as an admittedly former atheistic pseudo-intellectual himself. He said neither of those “pictures” of moral reality fit what we all know within ourselves to be the truth, anyway. God is God, and we are not, and never will be; despite the “promises” of Hindu-Gnosticism’s pantheism/panentheism. Pantheism basically believes God is nature. Panentheism believes that God is in nature and also separate from it: “god is all and all is one” is pantheistic, nature-worship and worship of individual entities, like Hare Krishna, is panentheistic.
After experiencing both the Yoga experience and “promises”, I recognize/discern what is offered as a re-hash of the original false spiritual promises made to Eve, as recorded in Genesis chapter 3: “Hath God said” (Answer: Yes. The absolute propositional truth of everything He has said is in His Word, transmitted by over 40 authors over a 1500-year period, with over 300 accurate prophecies about Christ), “You won’t surely die” (the “lights went out” immediately spiritually—no spiritual life to pass on) or reincarnation/transmigration of the soul, and the real corker: “You will be as gods, knowing good and evil”—translation: panentheism/pantheism is true, anything but the truth about God (a la Romans 1:20), and all morality is relative, and it is up to the now-disconnected-from-God individual to determine for themselves (including especially atheists like Marx/Lenin/Mao/Pol Pot, and other politically “evolutionary/revolutionary thinkers”, and so on ad infinitum, ad nauseum)—religion vs. a true relationship with God through faith and grace alone, from Christ alone; no “works trips”.
And, whoever it hairlips, atheism IS A RELIGION—an anti-God religion without any scientific proof whatsoever. So I am very happy for you that you currently have no “religion”, in that sense. But rejecting the real Jesus can also come in the form of just not accepting Him—my FIRST great mistake about Him.
And, our choices will always predict fairly accurately our future experience. I believe additionally that “bad doctrine sticks to a dirty heart, and that unless we really cry out with our whole heart for God, and His truth, we will not find it, and will remain in darkness.
Hatha Yoga is not just an exercise program. There is a ton of even pro-Yoga literature that admits that, and has done, for many centuries. And the Vedic literature is not as old as its adherents claim, either—it’s NOT older than the Old Testament, which has over 300 prophecies that Jesus Christ fulfilled in His life, death and resurrection. I merely had “jesus christ” on my imaginary mental list of “Ascended Masters”, was entirely ignorant of the Bible, because at every opportunity I had a baseless and completely ignorant mere opinion about it. I CHOSE to be “willfully ignorant”, as the Bible describes it.
But I am no longer ignorant, or inexperienced. I hope others can benefit from what I have so painfully experienced, especially other TF “exers”. And I honestly only “demonize” what I have literally experienced to BE specifically demonic. In fact, the most significant experience I had just prior to being saved was to have a demon silently rebuked out of me (the guy who did it explained it later), while I was an active practitioner of every kind of Yoga I could get into experientially. Some things MUST BE “DEMONIZED”, because demons do exist; like it or not—my Journey.
I agree that “we all bleed red, all have faults, stumble and rise”, and I also “see humanity as one”.
But, BECAUSE I have experienced it to be so, I believe that a true relationship with God through Jesus Christ is EXCLUSIVE OF ALL “OTHER” RELIGION, since Biblical Christianity is not a religion in the first place (I Hate religion, and believe that God does, too! He also hates the evils you described (female circumcision, pedophilia, incest, etc.) All the other weird crap comes from the fact that mankind is FALLEN, IMHO.
I made the CHOICE of joining a cult at a very formative and important time in my life; as many did. My resulting life has been literally so ruinous because of my choices, that I attempted suicide seriously (NOT as an attention-getting/manipulative-of-others emotional ploy); even most recently in the Spring of 2009; only two years ago—so I do know psychic suffering, to a very high degree—I don’t wish it on anyone; not even my worst enemies.
A friend of mine’s 55-year-old work associate committed suicide just yesterday, because he was in debt (much less further in debt than I am because of my educational loan debt of over $103K), but said he “just didn’t want to start over”, when somebody started to sue him. My friend was the last person to talk to him, and he did try to be a compassionate Christian witness to the poor guy.
There’s the ULTIMATE bad life choice—there’s literally no coming back from that one—it made my friend so very sad. We discussed the nature of choices—like I am trying hard to portray to you, here, lte.
God bless you; my friend. I am so very glad that you did escape the cult. I am sorry for all the pain, including pain of conscience, that you may have suffered, before you decided to do so.
There are two kinds of wisdom:
“James 3:13 Who is wise and understanding among you? Let them show it by their good life, by deeds done in the humility that comes from wisdom. 14 But if you harbor bitter envy and selfish ambition in your hearts, do not boast about it or deny the truth. 15 Such “wisdom” does not come down from heaven but is earthly, unspiritual, demonic. 16 For where you have envy and selfish ambition, there you find disorder and every evil practice.
17 But the wisdom that comes from heaven is first of all pure; then peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere. 18 Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness.”
Berg’s supposed “wisdom” as a false prophet/false brother was perfectly described in verses 13 through 16. AS it was embraced and followed, to ANY extent, it produced what we all saw in TF leadership; “…envy…selfish ambition…disorder and every evil practice“. As Berg was followed, the cult degenerated down into literally “every evil practice”, affecting each and every member.
I deeply regret any influence for the cult that I had, even in the short 2 ½ years I was in. I remember a beautiful young girl I met at the Spokane Washington’s World’s Fair, right before I left in July of 1974 (yesterday was my 36th anniversary of freedom from the cult!!!), who told me she was going to join, and that I had strongly influenced her to do so—she was physically gorgeous—I hope the Berg meat-grinder didn’t destroy her—I pray for her whenever I think of her.
I just do not want ANY spiritual filthiness in my life, or anyone else’s, because I love God, and consequently love His Truth. And I don’t want anyone to make the mistakes I have made in my life—“throwing the baby out with the bathwater” by rejecting the real Jesus, because of a horrible experience with “…another jesus, another spirit, and another gospel…’ (2 Cor 11) is, to me, the very worst tragedy I could imagine for another fellow ex-cult member. That, at least, didn’t happen to me; although almost everything else did. I left right BEFORE the sex-sin stuff spread all the way through the cult. I had my own “associate Colony”, so it was easier to leave with my then pregnant wife and my step-son.
About Berg, et al; Scripture does say that to whomever you yield yourself as a servant to obey him, you (literally) ARE his slave.
Here’s to freedom!!!
Very sincerely,
OT2