Zdroj titulků je video a mluvčí čili autor textu je Steven Bancarz. Stevena jsem přímo nekontaktoval ohledně použití, když tak ho kontaktujte sami, ale myslím, že by neměl nic proti, když jsem zveřejnil co říkal.
Hey guys, Steve here. In this video, we're going to talk about meditation in a way you've probably never heard it spoken about before. Is it possible that we are being deceived about meditation? Is there a dangerous, more sinister reality behind meditation that is being deliberately swept under the rug? And what if clinical research actually proves that meditation is psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually dangerous to some people?
This may sound like typical Christian paranoia, especially coming from an ex-New Ager like myself. I couldn't have imagined making a video like this five years ago when I was writing articles on the benefits of meditation for one of the largest New Age websites in the world. Or when I was practicing meditation, or when I was writing my ebook on mindfulness that got 30,000 downloads. I really thought that meditation was a necessary part of life, and if anyone were to tell me it was dangerous, I would think they're unscientific or completely crazy. After all, all we ever hear about is how meditation can improve sleep, reduce stress, and increase creativity. But the truth is, there's a massive body of research that clearly demonstrates and proves that meditation has the ability to cause long-term and short-term psychological damage.
The only reason we hear about the good effects of meditation is that often only the good effects are reported on. Over 75 percent of meditation studies don't ask participants to report any negative effects they experience. But when subjects are asked to report negative effects or when they're tested specifically for negative effects, the results are beyond disturbing.
Now, there are many different meditation techniques, such as Vipassana meditation, which focuses on the interconnection between mind and body through focused breathing and physical sensations, or transcendental meditation, which uses the repetition of a mantra to induce a trance-like state, to any kind of general mindfulness or insight meditation. But the following dangers apply to all techniques.
So, we know this because the studies we are about to look at include reports from each of these methods. And what makes this conversation relevant right now is that this practice is continuing to become more and more popular in our society. It's currently a 1.2 billion dollar industry that is still growing, and studies show it's being practiced by about 40 percent of Americans. It's being recommended by doctors, therapists, integrated into children's public schools, Catholic schools, prisons, and even the workplace. It's being promoted by some very influential people right now, such as Oprah Winfrey, Jim Carrey, Ellen DeGeneres, and even presidential candidate Marianne Williamson. This is an absolute staple practice in Eastern religions and in the New Age movement, and now it's beginning to be a staple in mainstream culture.
So, what we're going to do is allow the studies to speak for themselves and reveal to us the shocking truth about meditation that never gets spoken of. So let's get into it.
The best place to start in this discussion is by looking at a new study published in 2017 on the negative effects of meditation, led by Dr. Willoughby Britton, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. The study sought to determine and document what kind of negative side effects regular meditators experienced during their practice. The study also sought to document how severe, how frequent, and how long-lasting these negative side effects were.
Sixty people were selected to participate in this study, each of whom had meditation experience in Theravada, Zen, and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. They also had to be exempt from any kind of unusual psychological experiences in their past that could mimic the symptoms they may report during meditation.
What is interesting about this study is just how long these 60 participants had been meditating for. It's sometimes asserted that if people had bad experiences during meditation or any practice embraced by the New Age, for that matter, it's because they're inexperienced and don't know what they're doing. They're just being uncareful and lack the proper training. But in this study, 43 percent of the participants they interviewed had meditated for 10,000 hours or more, while another 49 meditated between 1,000 hours and 10,000 hours. Not only this, but 60 percent of the participants were meditation teachers. These people were literal experts. These were also educated people, as only two lacked college degrees, and 67 percent of them had a master's degree or higher.
And what they were interviewed for was challenging, difficult, or distressing experiences they experienced during meditation. So here's a breakdown of what their findings were. And keep in mind, these are experts who have training in Buddhist and Zen meditation traditions and have meditated for more hours than probably anybody watching this video right now. Through in-person and phone interviews, the study found that 82 percent of participants reported fear, anxiety, panic, and paranoia. Fifty-seven percent reported depression, dysphoria, or grief. Fifty percent reported social impairment. Forty-seven percent reported delusional, irrational, or paranormal beliefs. Forty-seven percent reported physical pain. Forty-two percent reported occupational impairment. Thirty percent reported rage, anger, or aggression. Twenty-seven percent reported sleep disorders. Twenty-five percent reported self-conscious emotions and insecurity. Twenty-three percent reported agitation and irritability. Twenty-two percent reported headaches or head pressure. Twenty percent reported fatigue or weakness. Eighteen percent reported suicidality. Seventeen percent reported emotional detachment. And seventeen percent said that they experienced something so severe that it required inpatient hospitalization.
Now, a skeptic may say, "Well, sure, these kinds of things arise when you've never really been meditating before, and these things will work themselves out over time." But only 18 of these challenges occurred during the first 50 hours of meditation. Twenty-nine percent of reported challenges were within the first year, and 45 percent of the participants reported challenges in years one to ten. So most of these side effects actually came about with regular, long-term meditation. The study actually found that the more someone studies and practices meditation, the worse their experience will actually be.
Now, a skeptic may also say, "Well, sure, but these experiences just kind of rise and dissipate in consciousness in a matter of minutes. It's nothing to really alarm ourselves over. It's just the growing pains of ego death." The problem with this objection is that 88 percent said that these impacts bled over into daily life even after the retreat or meditation session was over. Seventy-three percent reported moderate to severe impairment because of one or more of these symptoms. And these symptoms were reported to last anywhere from one week to over a decade. But here's the important stat: most of these side effects lasted one to six months or one to three years. These two spans of time represent the most common duration of negative symptoms reported by the meditators. It's not enough to simply write these off as small hiccups along the path to inner peace. Most people reported these symptoms lasting months to years. And these regular, long-term side effects seem to be more congruent with psychological breakdowns and disorders than with enlightenment.
As the study itself notes, many of the experiences reported by practitioners in our study resemble, to varying degrees, phenomena discussed in the vast literature on schizophrenia, schizotyping, psychosis, as well as non-psychopathological forms of anomalous experience. In an interview with Yoga Journal, Dr. Britton, who conducted this study, was asked when she began to take interest in studying these darker truths about meditation. She said, "In 2006, when I was doing my residency, I worked at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, and there were two people who were hospitalized after a 10-day retreat at a meditation center nearby. It reminded me that meditation can be serious and that someone should study that side of it." When asked why she thinks these case studies and clinical findings don't get any press, she said, "Mindfulness is a multi-billion dollar industry. One of the teachers I interviewed for my research actually said, 'This isn't good for advertising.' In other words, there is a deliberate attempt to suppress the dark reality of meditation because of how profitable the industry is."
A lot of people knock the Christian church because they think it's just a money-making machine, and they go to the New Age movement instead, not realizing the suppression of information and greed that lies at the heart of all its apparently altruistic aspirations. Britain's study is the largest study in history on the adverse effects of meditation, but it's by no means the only one. A 1992 study by Dave Shapiro, a professor at the University of California, took a sample of 27 long-term meditators and found that 63 percent of the group studied had suffered at least one negative effect from meditation and meditation retreats, while 7.4 percent reported profoundly adverse effects, including panic, depression, pain, and anxiety, to such a degree that they had to stop meditation. One person was even hospitalized with psychosis. But these findings go back even earlier, when psychologist Dr. Arnold Lazarus found that meditation can lead to depression, agitation, and schizophrenic relapses back in the 70s.
Another study from 2018 found that meditation can actually worsen traumatic distress in people. Trauma survivors can experience flashbacks, disassociation, and even re-traumatization. And other studies have validated this finding that "meditation has the potential to re-traumatize people with a history of post-traumatic stress disorder." It's also been linked to depersonalization and derealization. And another study found it exacerbated depression to the point of attempted suicide.
Here are a few clinical case studies of the specific experiences of people that were published in peer-reviewed journals. For these people, meditation was linked with psychosis and loss of touch with reality. A case study in 2001 looked at two manic episodes that both emerged after a meditation session. Three case reports linked meditation to the reliving of traumatic memories and events. And three case reports also linked meditation to psychotic episodes in people with a history of schizophrenia.
A news media outlet called The Guardian highlights two real-life examples of meditation gone wrong, which sound identical to what these case studies have been finding. Claire, a 37-year-old, was sent on a three-day mindfulness course with colleagues as part of a training program. Initially, she found it relaxing, but then she found she completely zoned out while doing it. Within two or three hours of sessions later, she was starting to panic. The sessions resurfaced memories of her traumatic childhood, and she experienced a series of panic attacks. Somehow, the course triggered things she had previously gotten over. Claire says, "I had a breakdown and spent three months in a psychiatric unit. It was a depressive breakdown with psychotic elements related to the trauma, and several dissociative episodes. Four and a half years later, Claire is still working part-time and is in and out of the hospital. She became addicted to alcohol when previously she had been driven and high-performing and believes mindfulness was the catalyst for her breakdown.
Luis, a woman in her 50s who had been practicing yoga for 20 years, went away to a meditation retreat. While meditating, she felt disassociated from herself and became worried, dismissing it as a routine side effect of meditation. Luis continued with the exercises. The following day, after returning home, her body felt completely numb, and she didn't want to get out of bed. Her husband took her to the doctor, who referred her to a psychiatrist. For the next 15 years, she was treated for psychotic depression.
Even my own girlfriend went on a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat before she got saved, and she said that she felt confused, emotionally detached, that it impaired her relationship to other people, and she said it felt like she was on a self-induced acid trip.
We could go on and on with these studies, but the evidence is clear. Meditation, whether practiced by an expert or beginner, has the potential to cause short-term and long-term psychological damage. But the funny thing is, even meditation teachers themselves recognize this. Here is a mindfulness teacher named Leo, who runs one of the biggest self-help and personal development YouTube channels online. His channel, actualized.org, has almost 1 million subscribers.
* * *
Here is a video he made called the dark side of meditation teaching some
of the things people can expect from their meditation practice.
"Meditation is not all rainbows and butterflies; some of the stuff that
comes up is freaky weird, downright alien. Expect depression and
meaninglessness. I can almost guarantee that if you're gonna meditate
for longer than a year, that you will be hit by some serious spells of
depression. Also expect suicidal thoughts. I can almost guarantee that
if you are meditating effectively, you will have more suicidal thoughts
than you've probably ever had in your life. The more I meditate, the
more suicidal thoughts I have, and that's totally fine. You might turn
back to old habits that you've worked through already. You might go
start doing drugs again or alcohol or smoking cigarettes, even though
you haven't done that for years. You might go on a sex binge and go
sleep with a bunch of random strangers on one night stands. Expect old
repressed memories to come bubbling up. It's gonna be some traumatic
stuff, especially if you had traumas in your childhood—stuff that you've
repressed—maybe examples like abuse, sexual abuse, bullying,
humiliation that will come bubbling up. Expect sometimes to have waves
of insanity and madness wash over you where you just feel like your mind
is like a swarming hive of bees, and the more you try to control it,
the more out of control it gets. This is all quite common stuff, this is
stuff that you should definitely expect. Don't be surprised at all if
it happens to you, and not just once but repeatedly."
* * *
In fact, what you should start noticing is that it's a recurrent theme
throughout long-term meditation, is that this stuff starts coming up. So
here's a question: How could it be the case that meditating could give
rise to so many negative experiences? How can something like sitting or
focusing on your breathing or trying to develop a new relationship to
your mind result in something like hospitalization for psychotic
depression? I think there's a few psychological reasons we should start
with, and the first is this: Meditation causes us to tap into deeper
layers of our psyche where trauma has been filed away. Our brain is
designed by God to increase our chances of well-being and survival in
the next moment. It's not designed to put life on hold the minute there
is discomfort or trauma. It's meant to help you cope with surviving the
next moment in spite of that trauma. For example, if something traumatic
like a divorce happens, our psychology is not designed to sort out
every ounce of pain and every negative thought before moving forward.
Imagine if our brain required us to be 100% trauma-free before we could
accomplish the tasks in front of us that day. We would get absolutely
nowhere in life. And so, our mind will naturally file some of this away
to ensure we can still function, and in so doing, it suppresses
traumatic memories and represses traumatic feelings in deeper
psycho-emotional containers. A lot of people turn to meditation
precisely because they are experiencing stress, anxiety, or depression.
People attempt to use it as a way to pacify negative emotions. But by
attempting to bypass the surface levels of their own mind, they are
accessing deeper reservoirs in their psychology where trauma has been
filed, and all of these anxieties and traumas from the past begin to
surface as a result. To try to bypass ordinary consciousness is to tap
into deep repositories of the psyche that have been designed by God to
store and process trauma. And the result could be, as we have seen,
long-term psychological damage and the resurfacing of traumatic memories
and events. Now, I fully believe God wants us to deal and work through
the trauma that has been buried in us from our past. He wants to redeem
these wounds and these memories and heal us emotionally. Claire, for
example, the woman who had traumatic memories resurfaced, ended up in a
really bad place not because of her past, but because of how her past
manifested when it wasn't supposed to. If we are struggling with things
from our past that are still affecting us, God doesn't want us bearing
it. God wants us to be resourceful in our healing and create the right
set and setting for that healing—going to a qualified Christian
counselor, having a loving support system of friends and family, being a
part of a local body of believers who can pray with you and support
you, and spending time in the Word of God, having your mind renewed,
growing in the power and the presence of God. God wants us dealing with
these things. But meditation is an attempt to hack a system that is not
meant to be hacked, and as we have seen, it causes things to emerge in
ways and at times that are psychologically damaging. Another
psychological danger is that meditation causes you to fundamentally
alter the structure of your own mind. Eastern and New Age philosophy
tells us that there is something essentially wrong with how human
psychology is designed. We are designed to live from a personal sense of
self as our only experience of the world, which we are told is a
problem. And we are designed to naturally identify with the ego-mind,
which we are told is a problem. There is a structural error in how the
self and the mind are built, resulting in most of our suffering.
Therefore, we are told, we need to dissolve or detach from the ego and
disidentify from the personal sense of self-identity to reach a state of
enlightenment and liberation. We don't need to simply input new data
into the mind, but to change the very software and structure of the mind
at a root level. The Bible, however, tells us that our psychological
templates are perfect. Our problem is not that we live as an ego or that
we live from a limited personal sense of self. Our problem is that we
have a fallen nature and live in rebellion to God. But meditation
traditions identified the problem as being the actual structure of our
psychology, and therefore, we must put mindfulness into practice as an
attempt to fix our own psychological framework. The problem is not a
fallen nature and a wicked heart. The problem is the very design of the
mind and of the self. But who wrote the rule that said the self is
something we need to transcend? Who said that the ego is something we
need to dissolve? And who said that trying to do either of these things
is psychologically safe? What if the Bible is right when it says that we
are fearfully and wonderfully made, but just fallen? And that these
parts of our psychology were designed by God to facilitate a very
important purpose? What if we could be dangerously tampering with God's
design for the human mind by trying to dissolve or transcend anything?
There is a reason why God said man was created good in the garden—not
because we're good in our actions, we're fallen, but because we're good
by design. Major problems can occur when you try to manipulate the
structure of your own psychology. And I think a lot of these symptoms,
such as depersonalization, confusion, manic episode, psychosis, loss of
sense of self, irrational thinking, and schizophrenic-like symptoms are
the result of trying to tinker with God's design for the human ego, for
the human mind, and for the personal self. We end up alienating
ourselves from a proper relationship to our own thoughts and feelings,
resulting in chaos. As psychologist D.A. Trelaven says, there is a
disconnection between thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations that
is exacerbated by contemplative practice. And I also think it's possible
that meditation, in some cases, can open us up to demonic oppression.
The meditation study done by Willoughby Britton also found that 42% of
participants experienced hallucinations, visions, or illusions. 37%
experienced involuntary movements. 33% reported seeing visual lights.
And 18% experienced seeing physical objects dissolve. Now, while some of
these experiences may be psychosomatic, it's known within all spiritual
traditions, especially Christianity, that things like visions and
involuntary movements can be induced by dark supernatural forces. A
study was published on meditation-induced light experiences, documenting
in clinical research and in Buddhist traditions that meditators
experience visions and hallucinations, such as seeing waves of smoke,
orbs, jewels in the sky, ropes appearing out of objects, or light
emanating from their own bodies. Another study linked meditation to the
occurrence of out-of-body experiences, an experience which is
intrinsically demonic, as proven further in a video I did on astral
projection. It's common knowledge that meditation leads to an increased
occurrence of nightmares and sleep paralysis, which can be demonically
inspired at times. And as we have already seen, meditation is linked to
suicidal tendencies in all kinds of mental health problems, such as
delusions, paranoia, and psychosis, which may have spiritual orientation
as well. Since the Bible will sometimes correlate these symptoms to
demonic oppression. For example, in Mark 5:15, a demon-possessed man
cutting himself was only found to be 'in his right mind' once demons
were expelled from him. Meditation causes paranoia, confusion,
disorientation, etc., which the Bible tells us can come from demons.
Oddly enough, it's common knowledge that things can go spiritually
sideways during meditation. Listen to what Leo from Actualized.org says
can happen."
* * *
"Expect nightmares, expect weird dreams where in your dreams you're living out weird fantasies like having sex with your mother or, you know, killing people or butchering your dog with a cleaver or something like that. Like, you know, you might start to behave like an animal, like literally. You might start to scratch yourself like an animal or crawl around on your knees or even howl, howling like a wolf.
Also, expect paranormal phenomena to happen to you: having past life experiences or seeing the future, having full out-of-body experiences where you actually leave your body and you travel to some sort of astral realm and interact with various kinds of entities. You might see spirits or hear spirits. You might hear weird voices in your head. You might actually see angels and demons, again, not imagined but standing before you. You might see gods, deities, giant crawling insects, praying mantis people, spirit animals that talk to you, try to tell you things, or maybe that try to kill you. You might see entities, you might see aliens, you might feel like you're being channeled by some sort of extraterrestrial or that you're getting abducted or probed.
You might also experience a Kundalini awakening, which can be a freaky thing. It might feel like you're losing your mind and you actually have this weird energy moving through you, and you start to behave as though your body is being controlled by a puppet master. Like, you're not even in control of your body anymore. Your body is just moving on its own, and you have no idea what the hell is controlling you. It's almost like you've been possessed."* * *
This is demonic by any and all standards, and all it takes is a quick Google search to see that people struggle with demonic attacks after meditation and are looking for help on public forums. And because it opens up doorways to the demonic, meditation is actually something taught in spiritual Satanism to facilitate demonic encounters. On the Joy of Satan ministry site, for example, there are scores of different meditations listed for spiritual power and growth, the exact same ones taught in the New Age movement, some of which involve invoking the energies of demons or of Satan himself. Another Satanic ministry tells us that you can use meditation to get to know demons better. Now, if meditation was a safe and purely physical exercise, it would not result in demonic encounters, and they would not be taught by spiritual Satanists to facilitate demonic encounters. The problem is, meditation is an intrinsically spiritual practice. For thousands of years, meditation has been used to facilitate and develop a certain spiritual estate, such as Nirvana, or a certain kind of spiritual insight, such as Moksha in Hinduism, for example. Meditation is believed to result in what are called 'siddhis,' which are supernatural abilities, which include the ability to teleport at will, to leave your body and enter the body of another person, to mind-read, to control the weather, to see into the future, to see into the pastimes of the gods, and to die when one desires to die. Now, the Bible is super clear that things like this are the abilities or deceptions brought about by demons, such as in Acts 16:16, where a demonic spirit gave a woman the ability to predict the future. If meditation traditions tell us that side effects of the practice mirror what the Bible attributes to demonic power, that should be a red flag to us.
And what we are doing in the West is taking something that is an intrinsically spiritual practice and trying to strip it of its spiritual purpose, and then we wonder why the practice is going sideways. So here's a question: How is it the case that meditation, something like sitting still and trying to develop a new relationship to your thoughts, how can something like that result in demonic oppression? I think the first is that we are making ourselves a spiritual open house to the spirit world by relaxing what the Bible says is one of our primary defense systems: the mind. The Bible is extremely clear that one of the ways we protect ourselves spiritually is by exercising our minds correctly. We are told to take every thought captive, to be vigilant and sober-minded, to not follow after the stranger's voice. We are told to test the spirits and to guard our hearts. All of these commands are a call for us to exercise our thinking correctly, not empty our thoughts. It's a call to be on guard by protecting our mind against thoughts that go against the will and Word of God. We need to use our mind to access the weapons of our warfare. The Bible tells us that the weapons of our spiritual warfare are our helmet of salvation, the belt of truth, the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. To use the spiritual weaponry God gave us is to fight down wrong thoughts with right ones and to expel lies with truth. God tells us in 1 Peter 1:13 to 'prepare our minds for action.' This is actually what biblical meditation is. Biblical meditation is about filling your mind with the Word of God. Over 20 times in the Bible, the word 'meditation' is used. In the Hebrew, the word is 'senuah,' which means to consider, to be concerned with, and to muse. Now, to muse literally means to 'be absorbed in thought.' So when the Bible talks about meditation, it's referring to being in a state of ponderance, being in a state of deep reflection. For example, David talks about meditating on the law, the precepts and the statutes of God, the works of God, the promises of God, the deeds of God. So God tells us to fill our minds with the truth. Meditation tells us to do the exact opposite, to empty our minds. And by emptying our minds, we are setting our spiritual weaponry aside, rather than actually engaging and activating our defense systems. Meditation trains us to allow thoughts to just pass in, and we're not to judge them or not to react to them. Ram Dass even talks about 'loving' his thoughts by allowing thoughts of murder into our minds. By permitting thoughts of murder and rage into our minds, the Bible says we can attract spirits of murder and rage to ourselves, because to be thinking that way is a sin. And what's worse is that some of our thoughts aren't really our thoughts; they're demonic projections and thought forms being infused and projected into our minds. Thoughts begin to be projected into our defenseless minds by outside forces influencing our thoughts and desires. Additionally, our own sinful thoughts go unchecked and can attract the wrong spirits to us. There's literally no way to protect yourself when you're in a state like that; you have made yourself a spiritual open house. And the next thing you know, you are suicidal, paranoid, hallucinating, seeing demons or aliens, or wanting to howl like a wolf, like Leo says.
Now, another way meditation opens us up to demonic is that meditation qualifies as being the sin of psychological magic or psychological witchcraft. Aleister Crowley, a famous 20th-century occultist who had a major role in popularizing Eastern practice and philosophy in the West, defined magic as being 'the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will.' It is theoretically possible to cause, in any object, any change of which that object is capable by nature. Crowley believed that by tapping into our will and marrying that with intention, we could access the primordial flow of energy in the universe and produce change in any eligible structure in the natural world. This was his definition of occult magic. And notice how this definition doesn't require there to be a supernatural force involved. For example, attempting to use the power of the mind and will to bend the spoon, implant a thought into someone telepathically, or make an object levitate would be examples of the sin of magic that have nothing to do with calling on a supernatural force or being. If you were using the power of your mind to attempt to alter the structure of something, producing an effect that goes against its natural design, you are engaged in magic. Remember what we talked about earlier in the video, how meditation seeks to change the structure of the mind itself. The kinds of things people seek to accomplish with the practice of meditation include transcending the personal self and dissolving the personal ego. We're using our will and our intention to change not the content of our mind, but the very structure of our God-given and God-designed mind. There is a way God designed the mind, and meditation tries to cause a change at the structural level, just like someone may try to use their will to change the molecular structure of a spoon at a structural level to produce an effect. If I'm using my will and my intention to try and dissolve a layer of my psychology known as the ego, I am just as much practicing magic by Crowley's own definition as if I were to try to attempt to levitate a physical object. Whether I'm attempting to bend or dissolve a spoon with my will or bend or dissolve my mind myself or the ego, I am tampering with God's design of nature in a way that I shouldn't be, and I'm involved in a practice of psychological magic, which is a sin, which is an open door for demons to oppress me. This would fall under the category of sorcery in Galatians 5:20 or magic arts in Revelation 21:8. This is something that puts us outside of the protective covering of the Father and gives demons right of way to oppress us in ways that we've already documented and seen evidence for in this video.
Now, before we close, one more notable danger of meditation is that it promotes deception. When we are in an altered state of consciousness and when our brainwave state has been fundamentally changed, we are more likely to believe things about the world and about ourselves that we normally wouldn't believe. For example, if you alter your consciousness with psilocybin, heroin, or acid, you are going to be self-deceived about your own experience and may end up believing things that contradict the truth. You may end up believing that you are God, that the trees are God, but that you have lived many past lives. Likewise, altering your consciousness and brainwaves through meditation causes you to become prone to deceptions at a psychological level, but also because of any supernatural influence that may be at work in your practice through this altered state. Perhaps you too will end up believing that you are God, the trees are God, and that you have lived many past lives, which is what every New Age and Eastern tradition actually adheres to. Reincarnation and pantheism are staples in the New Age and Eastern spiritual philosophy. And what's interesting is that the major study we looked at earlier, done by Dr. Britton, found that 48% of meditators experienced changes in their worldviews. Those who meditate often tend to adopt the same core spiritual beliefs. And this is another danger of meditation because it makes us prone to deception. I believe this is partly because of the alteration of consciousness, and partly because of the oppressive principality over this practice projecting false thoughts and impressions into people that seem to validate what they are naturally predisposed to while being in this altered state.
So as we have seen, meditation has been proven to be clinically dangerous psychologically and emotionally, short-term and long-term, whether pertaining to novice or expert meditators. We have also seen that meditation can result in certain experiences and side effects that are best explained by inferring demonic oppression. This is not something God wants us doing, and this is not God's path to peace. God's path to peace is righteousness, listening to our consciences, living responsibly, living for an eternal purpose with God's redemptive plan in mind, guarding our hearts and our minds with the truth, forgiving and blessing our enemies, believing what God says about our identity and His love for us, and most importantly, being in a saving relationship with Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace, through repenting of our sins and believing the gospel. Jesus promises us that if we are weary and we are heavy laden, that He will make us lay down by still waters and give us peace under our souls. Jesus Himself is our peace. When we repent of our sins and believe on Him for our salvation, He puts His Spirit inside of us and causes the fruit of His peace to be exhibited on us. And He causes us to walk out His plan and purpose for our life in righteousness, which protects the peace He paid for us to live in. Our problem isn't the ego; our problem is pain and rebellion against God, both of which Jesus came to help us with. Jesus said He came to heal the brokenhearted.
My hope and prayer is that those of you who may be trauma survivors, those of you who are looking for peace, will turn from meditation and will begin to take the Lord's Word seriously and come to Him today for the forgiveness of your sins and for a chance to walk in a relationship with the One who is love itself."
