Are Hindu and Christian Meditation Incompatible?
December 5, 2014
(Left. Catholic schools teach meditation)"New Age Mind Games for Ontario Catholic Schools"
London, Ont. father, Thomas Carter thinks
Hindu mediation is a nasty New Age incursion
which opens us to demonic spirits.
What do you think?
Carter: "Children should be learning about God. As they learn about Him their love for Him will grow and they will serve Him. Learning about God takes labour and proper direction. These children are chanting meaningless syllables while they can't answer even the most elementary question about the faith."
by Thomas Carter
(henrymakow.com)
The shock came on Wednesday evening when my daughter told me at the dinner table, "Oh Dad, today we did Christian meditation."
Up until this point, my kids were coming home with Rosaries and saying them regularly at school. I was starting to think they might even be raising them to be Catholic.
My hopefulness quickly turned to despair after I asked what they did for meditation. She said, "We sit with our hands out and say 'Ma-ra-na-tha' again and again, Ma-ra-na-tha means 'come to me, Lord.'"
Having dabbled in various forms of Eastern/New Age meditation in my early twenties, I could see that someone was passing off a Hindu practice as Christian.
After speaking with a school official, I learned the program was already fully implemented in the Diocese of Hamilton and was going through a test run at my children's school. The same official told me that the plan is to make it province wide. What was I to do, knowing the true origins of the program they were implementing?
RESEARCH
More research was needed to prove my case. Luckily, Br. Max Scully had done the groundwork and fully exposed the fraud in his book Yoga Tai Ci and Reiki a guide for Christians.
Brother Sculley informs us that an Irish diplomat named John Main was working in Malaya in 1955 and encountered an Eastern guru named Swami Satyananda. Main, being impressed with the gurus 'peacefulness,' asked him to teach him the yoga way of meditating. "During the time of your meditation, there must be in your mind no thoughts, no words, no imaginations. The sole sound will be the sound of your mantra, your word. The mantra is like a harmonic. And as we sound this harmonic within ourselves we begin to build up a resonance. That resonance leads us forward to our own wholeness. We begin to experience the deep unity we all possess in our own being. And then the harmonic begins to build up a resonance between you and all creatures and all creation, and a unity between you and your Creator."1
By emptying the mind by repeating this meaningless sound, Main could experience being at one with the cosmos and the Hindu god Brahman.
The fact that 'maranatha' has Christian overtones in no way alters the movement towards an altered state of consciousness simply because we are here dealing with sound and not with meaning. And it would be presumptuous to think that one would be protected from the influence of demonic spirits by the Christian meaning of the mantra when one deliberately enters a state which opens one up to such influence. Indeed, the use of a Christian mantra can lull practitioners of C.M. into belief that they are practicing Christian contemplation"
DANGERS OF "CHRISTIAN MEDITATION"
Eastern gurus will tell us that the main purpose of yoga is the awakening of kundalini. Unleashing this spiritual energy can be dangerous. Br. Sculley informs that, "There are over 50 New Age Spiritual Emergency Centres established by Stan and Christina Grof. 40% of calls deal with kundalini breakdowns; there are kundalini help-groups in Scandinavia and Denmark."
Brother Sculley sheds a little light on the claim that meditation has been practiced by Catholics for thousands of years.
[Christian meditation] "was not a mantric form of meditation but a form of Christian aspirational prayer."
This 'discovery' is to be found in the writings of the 4th century desert monk John Cassian who recommended the constant repetition of a single psalm verse, 'O God come to our aid, O Lord make haste to help us.'5
The continual repetition of this verse throughout the day 'keeps the mind wholly and entirely upon God...[ this verse ] carries within it all the feelings of which human nature is capable'6. [ emphasis added ] Over time this sentence and its meaning become a part of one's personality.
As Cassian states, the repetition of this sentence focuses the mind, it does not empty it. And the focus is on meaning and the affections, not on the sound as in mantra yoga.
The use of a sentence in the vernacular and not in a dead language lends itself to the stimulation of ideas and feelings and possibly images. In contrast, mantra yoga seeks to remove all these from the mind. The idea of focusing on the sounds of all the syllables in this sentence would be ludicrous.
It is obvious, then, that Main's claim to have discovered mantra meditation in Cassian's form of aspirational prayer is quite spurious.
The organization behind building the program is the World Community for Christian Meditation . As you can see from this photo (left) from their website their practice are void of anything typically Catholic.CONCLUSION
School officials are incapable of seeing what is so obvious to anyone with any sense of what the Catholic faith is about, that is, to know, love and serve God in this world.
It's an ordered process, and the children should be learning about God, and as they learn about Him their love for Him will grow and they will serve Him. Learning about God takes labour and proper direction. These children are chanting meaningless syllables while they can't answer even the most elementary question about the faith.
For instance, what are the two kinds of grace? Answer: sanctifying grace, which cleans the soul and actual grace, which helps us to do good actions. Fifty years ago any six- year old Catholic would have been able to answer this question.
Furthermore, without pressure from parents, schools will continue to implement programs given to them by their dioceses, which are made of bishops and priests who are bent on destroying the faith. I can guarantee that all priests coming through the seminaries today have been carefully screened and are void of either a brain or a backbone. You might find one or the other but never a combination of the two.
Dear Catholic parents, are the souls of your children the least of your concern? Why do you allow the school to experiment with the little ones' minds? Why aren't you concerned that your child doesn't know the first thing about the Catholic faith? I implore you to obtain a traditional catechism, the kind that worked for centuries to convert millions of people, people who kept the faith. Also find a traditional Mass, where the priest has been properly ordained in a traditional seminary and says the old mass, in Latin!
Traditional Latin Mass directory for North America (see footnotes below)
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(Makow comment - In my opinion, meditation is the most important thing children can learn in school. We all need to learn to stop identifying with our thoughts. "We" are not our thoughts which can be easily influenced by . We are our souls witnessing thoughts. Our souls are our God-connection and intuitively know Truth and Morality. The soul guides the thoughts like a hand on a sheering wheel. Hindu and Christian meditation are both about concentrating and controlling the mind. Hindu meditation is experiencing the soul while Catholic affirmations are training the mind to obey the soul. Teaching meditation in Catholic schools is fine as long as Catholic teachings are given prominence.)
First Comment from BPC-
Hello Henry - love your site and the great information you regularly post. However, I think you're dead wrong about Hindu 'meditation'.
Hindi 'deities' are actually demonic idols. Prior to the subversion of the Roman Catholic Hierarchy with the election of John 23rd and the disastrous consequences of Vatican 2, Catholic teaching was always clear and concise about the dangers of dabbling in eastern mysticism due to the dark forces lurking therein.
When people practice Hindu 'meditation' by reciting a 'mantra' repeatedly, whether in a classroom or yoga studio, they are unknowingly summoning dangerous, occult forces. Experienced exorcists can confirm this through the various battles they wage with these same forces. As recently as the early 1970s, the Church Fathers warned Western Christians and the public at large about messing around with such things.
Christian mysticism and meditation are entirely different from Hindu 'prayer'. Holy Prayers such as the Rosary involve the repetition of key Biblical prayers and phrases while meditating on the Divine Mysteries. These prayers are offered up in petition, thanksgiving, and adoration of the One True God - Jesus Christ, the Father, and the Holy Ghost.
Your writer is sadly correct in his observation that modern priests and bishops seem intent on destroying what's left of the Traditional True Catholic Faith. Catholics are no longer taught to stand up for the True Faith. Instead, the vast majority of post-Vatican 2 Catholics are being led by the nose into an entirely different religion that emphasizes a false 'unity' or ecumenism with pagan/demonic belief systems and whose ultimate goals is the destruction of Christianity and the imposition of a 'world' religion. And we all know what that's about...
Richard writes:
I know the definitive answer to the question. Any meditation that involves 'making the mind empty' has a different trajectory than Christian contemplation. Christian meditation is filling the mind, not emptying it.
There's no need to bash Hindus. Any Hindu will tell you the same if you tried to teach his children there's no difference. These are different religions, each has a different trajectory. They're not interchangeable.
When Jesus spoke of prayer he always referred to the Psalms. A psalm may give praise to God, or give thanks, or invoke wisdom, or lament. Jesus combined all of these during his crucifixion plus added a new one -- offering one's own suffering up to God as a sacrifice for everyone (humanity).
Read St. Teresa of Avilla's 'The Way of Perfection' to your children. She wrote that to help her novice nuns deepen their prayers.
The writings of the saints hasn't been taught in Catholic schools for a century, really. Seminarians aren't reading St. John of the Cross or Thomas Aquinas anymore - they're assigned heretics like Thomas Merton - the Trappist monk who hung out with beatniks like Alan Watts and promoted Zen meditation and the Dalai Lama. He also had a love affair with nurse 1/3rd his age before he died. He should have been excommunicated, not enshrined.
I'm sorry have to say to fellow Catholics that it's time to "come out of her my people" * Benedict XVI held back for seven years but with Pope 'Frankenstein' the last pretense is over. I suggest ... I urge, parents to write the rectors of Eastern Orthodox churches if there are any near you. Their schools still children an old fashioned Christian formation.
I remain active in volunteer work with the poor through my parish church, but must be realistic that the Catholic Church of our ancestors no longer exists. As Mr. Carter found out, the injection of New Age ecumenism have been in the queue for sixty years but they've had to bring it out very gradually. First they dumbed down Catechesis, but didn't dare introduce New Age religion until enough parents lacked sufficient formation to recognize it as such. What they've done here is substituted the word "Christian" for Krisha Consciousness.
Long gone are the days that parents can trust church schools to provide a solid Christian formation. Not just faith, but the full understanding of Christians ethics. That's a lot more that a list of wimpy platitudes. They don't preach "showing the courage of your convictions" anymore.
* Revelation 18: (Apocalypse of John of Patmos) "Then I heard another voice from heaven say: "'Come out of her, my people,' so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues."
and Jeremiah 51:45
Footnotes:
1. John Main, The Gethsemani Talks, Medio Media Singapore, 2001, p. 14.
2. Brother Max Sculley writes, "The technique which Satyananda gave Main is classic mantra yoga as described by Saraswati: 'Mantra is a combination or assembly of powerful sound waves. As such the intellectual understanding of the mantra is not at all necessary. It is not the meaning - some mantras don't even have a meaning - but the sound waves created by the mantra which influence the cosmos internally and externally'. www.satyananda.net/prospectus , p.1.
3. John Main, The Inner Christ, Darton Longman & Todd, 1987, p. 29.
4. The Gethsemani Talks, op.cit., p.8.
5. Psalm 70:1.
6. John Cassian Conferences, trans. Colin Luibheid, Paulist Press, 1985, pp. 133, 140.
7. What Main 'discovered' was not mantra meditation but aspirational prayer in which a meaningful phrase is constantly repeated so that the meaning and affections eventually sink into one's unconscious and one may even repeat it in one's sleep. And aspirational prayer did not begin with the desert fathers. It goes back to the beginnings of Christianity. Jesus in his agony in the Garden of Gethsemane used this form of prayer when he cried out repeatedly to His Father for an hour or so: 'Father, if it be possible let this chalice pass me by, nevertheless not my will but thine be done'.7 Lk 22: 42.
8. Likewise the blind man at Jericho kept crying out to Jesus for healing, 'Son of David, have mercy on me'.9 These all differ from a mantra in that the focus is on a limited meaning, not on the sound of syllables.Lk 18: 13.
9. Mk 10: 47
Adrian said (December 7, 2014):
Religionists who exploit religion for personal benefit have distorted
all religions. The basher comments about Hindu "demons" reject
the whole of Hinduism because of a bit of pop culture introduced by
Hundu religionists. That is a shame.
Religions have the same basis, a biological basis (see reference below), and if the book bashers would just stand down for a while, some
harmony might be reached on Earth.
We all evacuate our minds when we stand in awe of creation on a beach or looking at the night sky. The author clearly never evacuates his
mind to come closer to God.
That said, transcendental meditation is often extremely harmful due to the unnatural provocation of the biology involved (see reference).
Reference: Professor Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Gopi Krishna: "The
Biological Basis of Religion and Genius". 1972