[Upper Room] The Gospel According to Buddhism

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Heavenly Father, thank you for gathering us here tonight. Thank you for this series that we've had over the past couple of months looking at various ideologies and isms that are prevalent in our world today. Help us tonight as this one is probably the least familiar to us and the most foreign to our Western ways of thinking. Help us to think well so that if we encounter people in our lives who follow this path, we might be able to present them the truth of Scripture and the hope of the gospel so that they might see that salvation is not a matter of going deeper within, but going further up and further into your reality to know you, our only Lord and Savior. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Alright, you may be seated. So today we are talking about Buddhism. What is that? That wasn't a rhetorical question. I'm asking you, what is Buddhism? Do you know any Buddhists? Do you spend time with any Buddhists? Used to. Used to?

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Buddha.

SPEAKER_00 1:40

Buddha was a person.

SPEAKER_05 1:43

It is kind of perfect, but I don't have the name that I'm giving, so it's kind of like a good thing.

SPEAKER_00 1:48

Yeah. Yeah, Buddha means the enlightened one. And it refers to a historical figure by the name of Siddhartha Gitama. And we'll talk about him in a couple minutes. What's that?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

She said it was easy for you to say. Easy for you to say. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

Yeah. Well, if you, as kind of layman, right, we don't have a lot of daily encounters with Buddhists, as we might think of a Buddhist as like an Eastern monk dressed in their robes. We might see them at the airport, right? And maybe if we go by a Buddhist temple in Nashville or something like that. Yet the worldview of Buddhism and the practices, really more the practices than the worldview, are somewhat popular among secular people.

SPEAKER_08 2:35

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 2:36

And they're taken up. Have you ever heard of mindfulness? Mindfulness is like Eastern spirituality brought into a more Western and self-help kind of mode. And it adopts a lot of the practices of Buddhism. And it might not get as metaphysical as Buddhists at point, but still it kind of treats reality the same way that Buddhists might treat reality. So we might learn some things tonight that'll help us relate to some of our friends who might say that they're spiritual but not religious. And maybe into meditation and things like that. Roy, what do you got?

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Quick question, since I've never talked to Buddhists. People told me that Star Wars was Zid Buddhism or something. And what is it? Is it? Or is it something separate? The religion of Star Wars.

SPEAKER_00 3:29

There are Buddhist elements in it. There are pantheistic elements in it. The force, I'm no expert. You could say the force is kind of like karma, but yet at the same time, Jedi, by you know, meditation and self-mastery and stuff, they're able to manipulate karma. Or they're able to manipulate the force in a way that wouldn't really, doesn't really apply to karma.

SPEAKER_06 3:57

Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:59

Wendy?

SPEAKER_06 4:00

Is is ying and yang kind of the Buddhist way of looking at the world.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

That's that's more Confucianism, if I'm not mistaken. Again, I'll put cards on the table. I'm not an East an expert in Eastern spirituality. So please don't stone me if I get some things wrong. That's not quite what's going on with Buddhism, because that has to do with balance. And Buddhism is more uh disintegration and detachment. Okay. James, are you? I mean Steven, I I like to call you by your son's name. James's dad.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Uh man only got like two experiences of Buddhism. One is this little Buddha right here. Yeah. And then uh the other was like we were out training, and normally like the um, you know, like the Christian chaplains or even like the rabbi chaplains would go by and be like, oh hey, how can I pray for you? Because you don't really have experience with the outside world and you're out running around in the woods. Um there was one time there's actually a Buddhist chaplain who came by, which is unique, but he's like taking notes, he's like, oh, how can I think of you? It's like I don't want you to, what do you what is you thinking about me gonna help me out at all?

SPEAKER_00 5:14

Like Did you ask him that?

SPEAKER_02 5:16

No, I was just like I was kind of just as an afterthought, I was like, he just say how can I think for you? Yeah. Oh, but yeah, I probably shouldn't have asked him.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

Yeah. That you know, that is an interesting thing that you might expect from a Buddhist because Buddhism, it's it's ultimately about enlightenment. It's about uh thinking your way out of what we would call the fallen condition. Uh samsara, death, sickness, suffering, all of that. These are these are the pains of worldly attachment that we're trying to break free of. And you break free of them by way of transcending them through spiritual practices like enlightenment. So let's let's, or meditation. So let's let's get back to the historical origins of Buddhism. Like I said a few minutes ago, it starts with a man by the name of Siddhartha Gautama. He lived from 563 to 483 BC. He was a warrior prince, somewhat high on the food chain, born in Nepal. And it's said that when he was born, he wasn't attended to by the angels like Jesus. He was attended to by thousands of maids. And he didn't enter the world like a normal baby. You know what I mean by that. He uh he descended from the sky, and and as the story goes, he was so full of awareness already because he had spent countless lifetimes before his birth meditating. Uh he took seven steps, seven steps, right after he was born, and he said, Quote, For enlightenment I was born, for the good of all that lives. This is the last time that I have been born into this world of becoming. So that's some of the mythology that comes that surrounds his birth. Uh after he was born, his mother died. And a Hindu priest prophesied over him, told his dad that if he didn't experience suffering, he would become a king. And if he did experience suffering, he would become a holy man. So his father tried to protect him from the experience of suffering, but you know, he lived in the world, so he had to experience, so ultimately he would become a holy man. He had a wife and son, lived a fairly luxurious life until the age of 29, when he said, No, I want to leave this. And in leaving it, he experienced what Buddhists called the great signs. He experienced sickness, he experienced aging, death, and eventually kind of liberation. And he realized how sheltered he had been in his luxurious life. And so he wanted to transcend that. And he spent six years trying to find the answer. He studied with Hindu gurus, but he knew it all. He knew everything they had to teach him. He learned everything, and he still didn't find what he was looking for. And so he apprenticed himself to ascetics, you know, otherworldly people, monks who really uh are severe with the body. So he tried to beat himself into submission. He nearly starved himself to death trying to look for the answer. And the answer didn't come until eventually he came to Bodhgaya in India and he sat under the Bodhi tree. Bodhi means enlightenment. And he sat under this tree and he renounced his asceticism by accepting a bowl of porridge from a girl. And he, as he was sitting under this tree, he entered into the lotus position and he vowed not to get up until he had attained enlightenment. This um, like this process, it's said in the Buddhist kind of tradition and literature that he did battle through his meditation under the Bodhi tree, he did battle with Mara, who is the Lord of death, who repeatedly tempted him. It sounds a little bit like Jesus in the wilderness with Satan. So Mara repeatedly tempted him, and he defeated Mara by going deeper and deeper into meditation. And as he went deeper and deeper into meditation, he saw all of his past lives, he saw all of his rebirths, and he he even saw past his own lives, deaths, and rebirths, into the cycle of death and rebirth itself, into the very workings of karma. And I gave you this sheet, this is yours to keep. It gives you, if I use words that are new and weird, you might find them on the sheet. And karma is essentially the universal law of cause and effect. So during this sort of meditation experience, he's kind of peering into the deep structure of reality and how karma works. And as dawn rose, he awoke enlightened. And henceforth he was known as the Buddha, which means the enlightened one. He didn't get up, right? He had vowed to get up, not to get up until he experienced enlightenment, but he chose to stay sitting under the tree for 49 days. And he didn't get up until the principal gods of Hindu, or Hindu, Brahma and Indra, implored him to get up and to share his enlightenment with the world. And that's what he did. He taught others, he attracted disciples, he traveled. Eventually he died at the age of 80, surrounded by his disciples. And his last words were decay is inherent in all things. Be sure to strive with clarity of mind for nirvana. And that's what Buddhists believe happened to Buddha when he died. He broke free of the cycle of death and rebirth, reincarnation, and he finally entered into nirvana, which means nothingness. He became nothing. He became one with the force, you could say. After that, you know, he founded the Sangha, which is a group of monks and nuns that put his teaching into practice, but he had no successor. So it became a kind of tradition that passed down over the centuries from his disciples, from his students and their students, and so on. There's a lot of variety in Buddhism. It's hard to talk about, like you can talk about, you know, some main beliefs and things, but there's a lot of differences among Buddhists. Some believe in gods, some don't believe in gods. Some believe that the Buddha was a kind of divine figure, others believe he was just a man who achieved the kind of enlightenment that any man could achieve. If you look at worship practices of Buddhism, they vary wildly based on the individuals, based on the location, based on personal preference. Westerners, we tend to think of Buddhism as meditation, but there are some Buddhists who don't meditate at all. Some venerate statues of Buddha, some chant his name, others light incense in front of images or at their homes or in the temples. And for Buddhists who do it who do meditate, they often do it silently while seated. If you were to visit a service at a Buddhist temple, you'd see people barefoot, you'd see incense, you'd smell incense, you'd see images, statues, you'd hear drums and chanting, people would be meditating, some people would be teaching, some would be talking about the Dharma, the teachings of Buddha, reading from some of the scriptures of the Buddhist tradition. You wouldn't find any pews, people would sit on the floor or stand or walk around a statue of Buddha. A lot of variety. Two main traditions in Buddhism: Theravada Buddhism and Maya Mahayana Buddhism. Therapada Buddhism, it means the way of the elders, and it's the oldest, most traditional, most conservative. It's dominant today in Southeast Asia. So in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, and it's basically about the monks. The monks are the primary in Theravada Buddhism. And the lay people are meant to support the monks as the monks pursue enlightenment. Enlightenment's just for the monks. So their life is meditation, it's begging, it's chores, it's the guys in the robes that you see in the airport. And the lay people, their life is about providing for the monks, providing money to maintain the temples and following their own kind of lay people version of ethics. That's Theravada Buddhism. That's the old traditional Buddhism. Mahayana Buddhism means greater vehicle, and it's a kind of a reaction against the strictness of Theravada Buddhism. It's dominant in eastern countries like China and South Korea and Japan, and it's focused not just on the monks, but on the lay. The idea is that not just the monks have an opportunity to be enlightened, but to but the laity as well. Enlightenment's for everyone. Mahayana Buddhism also believes that the Buddha is godlike, and he's not the only being like him. You have these bodhisattvas who are enlightened beings. There are multiple Buddhas that are a part of the Trishan and looked up to and followed. We can go even deeper than that in Mahayana Buddhism. There are different versions of it. There's Pure Land Buddhism, there's Zen Buddhism, which is the most popular version of Buddhism in the West that focuses on meditation very much. There's Tibetan Buddhism, the Dalai Lama. We've heard of the Dalai Lama, the ocean teacher. He's believed to be the 14th reincarnation of a bodhisattva. He's like a divine sort of being. Religious writings, they don't have a canon of scripture the same way we do. The Buddha didn't write anything down. And the Buddha and his disciples didn't believe themselves to be God. They encouraged people to question everything and to discover the truth for themselves. So, Buddhist writings, they're not considered inerrant or authoritative revelations. They're considered more like practical guidelines. Here's the teaching of the Buddha, here's how life should go. But remember, question everything, figure everything out. So it doesn't wield the same kind of authority as the Bible might. Any questions so far? Alright, so the core teachings of Buddhism ground in the four noble truths. The first, all life is marked by suffering. Suffering, you can't escape it. If you're alive, there's some kind of principle, there's some kind of existence of suffering. Even if you're happy for a time, there's something about that happiness where it's not as pure as you know it could be because you know it's going to come to an end. Second noble truth, we're trapped in samsara. Aging, sickness, death. And the reason we're trapped in samsara is because we desire things and we attach ourselves to them. So why do we suffer? Well, we suffer because stuff goes wrong and we lose stuff. The death of a loved one. You suffer, you grieve, you mourn because that loved one died. And that shows that you had some sort of attachment to the loved one. So as the thinking goes, if you can sever every possible attachment, you won't suffer anymore. So that's the third noble truth. The good news of Buddhism. Suffering can be eliminated. The bad news is suffering can only be eliminated by following the noble eightfold path. So we got four noble truths. Now we have a noble eightfold path. And here's the path. First step, you see things as they truly are, and you understand the reality of and cause of suffering. Second, you think accordingly. Third, you speak accordingly, you speak the truth. Fourth, you act according to the teaching of Buddha. Fifth, you live in a manner that does not disrupt other people's lives. Sixth, you spend your time doing things and not becoming or doing good things and not being attached to anything. Seven, you cultivate an awareness of your thought at all times. And eight, you focus your mind, concentrate, meditate, pursue enlightenment. You think about people, like Stephen mentioned earlier. Now there are some things that, you know, core features of a Buddhist worldview that we can spend our time kind of understanding, thinking about, because these are the areas where we can bring them in line with a biblical worldview, or well, we can bring a biblical worldview to bear and say, this is your view of reality, this is our view of reality. And to put it indelicately, ours is better because it's true. So the first one has to do with creation in time. In Buddhism, there is no creation, strictly speaking. The universe is eternal. The universe has no beginning, the universe has no end. And it's governed by that law of cause and effect that I mentioned before, known as karma. There's a kind of cyclical development in all things. What we might call creation is karma pulling together bits of nothingness in order to make somethingness. The next step is abiding. This idea of us being here for now. The next step in the cycle is destruction or disintegration, our bits of existence pulling apart. And the fourth step is nothingness. It is that state of utter disintegration. And it's a circle. Throughout all of not time, but eternity. This has just been happening again and again and again and again, ad infinitum. And in this you have six realms, according to the Buddha, six realms into which we're born and reborn. The highest realm is the realm of the gods. These are divine-like beings who experience luxury, and because they experience so much luxury, they're blind to suffering. The next realm is the realm of humans, our realm. And this is the realm of potential enlightenment, where we can seek awakening or we can be consumed by our acquisitiveness, by our attachment. The next realm down is the realm of the Titans. These are the demigods and demons who fight with the gods because they want to be like the gods. Fourth realm, the ghosts. These are pitiable creatures who, it's said that their necks are so thin that they can't eat. Ghosts are people who are jealous and greedy in their former lives. They lived a bad life, but not quite bad enough to end up in hell. Next realm down, animals. Animals are those who live lives marked by comfort and ignorance and apathy. And the sixth realm is hell. They're those who have led really bad lives, angry, abusive. And in hell, they're either tormented by fire or they're frozen in ice. So what think, engage that biblically. Right? If you had a Buddhist friend, or let's say, you don't necessarily have to be antagonistic, we're just thinking, you have a Buddhist friend who sees the world in this way, what are some things that you might want to help them see from Scripture to talk about the true nature of reality?

SPEAKER_04 21:28

Yeah, um, your cousin became duded about 10 years ago, and we've seen him um several times, um, and he spoke to me about this what he talked about. And he believes that Jesus is a person, and it makes him cry to think about how he achieved that level, you know, of uh mindfulness and all that so we're talking, you know. I told him Jesus is God.

SPEAKER_08 21:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 21:58

And and he listened, so and then I have you could pray for him and and uh you take some.

unknown 22:06

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Yeah, that is the Jesus, yeah. Everybody's gotta do something with Jesus, and it's hard to deny that there's something special about Jesus. And okay. Oh what is Jesus, right? Is it he's just a man or is he the God man? And you read the beginning of John's Gospel, and Jesus' identity, if we're going to believe anything about Jesus, the only place we're going to come to know about Jesus is in the Bible. And John presents Jesus to us as an integral feature of his identity. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. All things were made through Him. And apart from Him was not made anything that was made. It's like, okay, right there. Wrapped up in Jesus' identity is a doctrine of creation. This is a real fundamental difference between us and Buddhists. A Buddhist believes the universe is eternal. We believe the universe is created. Roy?

SPEAKER_01 23:18

I've not talked to one, but uh I think I would start off with a question of reason. Because if the universe is eternal and beginning and eternal to the end, there's a third law of thermodynamics and everything degrades.

SPEAKER_00 23:33

Yeah, it's the second law, but yeah, that's this is the right way to go.

SPEAKER_01 23:36

Everything degrades, yeah, and if uh everything is degrading, then you can't have eternal unless if you have an outside power, force, authority to rewind the watch.

SPEAKER_00 23:49

Right. So if you talk to anyone who believes that the universe is eternal, whether it's a Buddhist or some other kind of Eastern spirituality person, or a secularist, right? A modern scientist who has no account of, you know, where's that where's the universe can come from? The Big Bang. Alright, where's the Big Bang come from? Uh-uh. Right? Uh okay, if the universe is eternal, so Newton's law of thermodynamics, second law of thermodynamics, the law of entropy states that when there's when there's a change, there's an what?

SPEAKER_03 24:19

Do you want to give us you couldn't have asked the kid?

SPEAKER_00 24:22

Caesar. Second law of thermodynamics.

SPEAKER_03 24:25

Um I don't know the law. I know that it explains why heat flows from an area of higher temperature to area to lower to understand.

SPEAKER_00 24:35

Alright, it explains why heat flows from an area of higher temperature to lower temperature. But basically, when there's something that happens in the universe, there's a heat loss. And unless you have some external source of energy and heat, the loss continues, continues, continues until all of the heat, all of the energy leaves the system. And then it dies a heat death. If the universe is infinite, if the universe is eternal, then it would have died a heat death in eternity past. Does that make sense? It's conceptually impossible for the universe to have no beginning. The universe must be a creature. The universe must be upheld by the word of God's power. Hebrews 1. So that's a really good way to critique any kind of view of the universe as eternal. But bringing it back around to positive truth is to say that, you know, as Christians, we believe, and we have it revealed for us in Scripture, that God created all things out of nothing. The reason there is something as opposed to nothing is not because this impersonal law of cause and effect, which came from we don't know where, pulled together bits of nothingness in order to make somethingness. That's not the story of the world. The story of the world is an infinite, eternal, and unchangeable God who is all-powerful, all-wise, holy, good, all the things, creating all things by the word of his power. And creating even time itself. So when we look at the flow of time, we don't see an endless cycle of eternity repeating itself. We see a drama. We see a story. We see a history working itself out. It has a beginning and it has an end. And that's good news. Because this God enters into history in order to reconcile and redeem us and to actually fix the timeline. And so what we look forward to is not this endless cycle. What we look to is the consummation of history. We look forward to an actual end to the story in which we exist as part of it. And that leads us into the next point to look at when we think about Buddhism, and that's the anthropology of Buddhism, the view of man that's wrapped up in this worldview. There's a Buddhist concept known as Anatta. It's on your sheet. Basically translates as no self. So a key distinction between Buddhism and the Hinduism out of which Buddhism kind of emerged as somewhat of a protest and a reaction. In Hinduism, there's this idea that there is an immortal soul named Atman. In Buddhism, souls are imaginary. And we, strictly speaking, don't exist. I don't exist. There is no me. It's a kind of illusion caused by attachment. The thing that does exist is an aggregate. Living beings, every living being is composed of five different skandas. They're conglomerations of matter and sensation, perception, thoughts, consciousness, and karma brings all these things together to create what we perceive to be individuals. So it's really counterintuitive, right? Insofar as we cling to this idea, right? You're probably reacting against it, right? Like, what do you mean I don't exist? I exist, right? I see my hands, I hear myself talking. Descartes in my mind, I think, therefore I am, right? I exist, right? And according to Buddhism, it's as you cling to that experience of yourself, you only tighten the knot of samsara. It's only when you learn to let go of all of that that that knot loosens, and karma begins to release the aggregates, and you're finally set free from this endless cycle, and you're finally allowed to disintegrate into nirvana, become nothing as you truly are. So respond to that biblically. How does that differ from what scripture teaches us about human existence?

SPEAKER_05 29:31

Well we're created. We're created being we're created for a purpose. And so we are we both have a soul and a body.

SPEAKER_08 29:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 29:43

And that purpose is ultimately to glorify God. And so that's the end of the that's the end of time when that's the end of the story for those who for us who believe in Christ that time will end, but we will continue into eternity. Yes. But we have to begin. Yeah. Yeah. That's part of it.

SPEAKER_08 30:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:16

I think it applies in their logic of everything existing forever. Because if this is true, then the world will cease to exist.

SPEAKER_00 30:28

You'll all disintegrate into nothingness. But then karma will bring it back together again.

SPEAKER_05 30:34

And then I would ask, who is karma?

SPEAKER_00 30:37

Yeah, who or what is karma? Well, for the Buddhist and the Buddha, right, he encountered that kind of question. And the answer was basically like, why does it matter? Who cares? That's speculation. If you had the answer to that question, would it help you in your life? He probably wouldn't be as snarky as me right now. He'd probably be very enlightened and wise, but you know, it's it's it's the kind of there's this anti-speculative kind of thing. Once we hit the ground in terms of samsara and and karma and you know the eternal cycle and all these sort of things, it's kind of like, well, we can't speculate anymore. We're just, you know, it is what it is. It's convenient. Yeah, so the story that scripture tells about human existence. We are not some aggregate of bits of existence that happen to be pulled together by an impersonal force. Psalm 139. He knit us together in our mother's wombs. Every human being is created in the image of God. We all bear the imprint of our Maker. We're all the product of divine intentionality. We have individual existence. We will live forever. We'll live forever either as saints in glory or as wretches in hell. But we will live. We will exist. We will not disintegrate into nothingness. So that's that's a really significant difference. You boil it down to your view of man. Because you have a view of who you are, what you are, what's important. It's like God gave us, as individuals, sense and reason. And for us to use that sense, to use and use that reason, for us to experience suffering, even, is not, it's evidence that something has gone wrong, yes, but the understanding of what's gone wrong is completely and utterly different. And that leads us to the third thing to talk about, which is salvation. A Buddhist view of salvation versus a Christian view of salvation. Because in Buddhism, the problem, again, is samsara. It's the death, the dying, the sickness, which is rooted in our attachment to worldly, to anything, right? And so the problem is actually baked into reality. It's just, it's it's uh it's a feature of the system, it's not a bug. Uh and so what does salvation look like in Buddhism? Salvation looks like detachment, it looks like pulling away, it looks like disintegration, moving toward enlightenment. And how do you achieve that? You achieve it by self-effort. You achieve it by self-improvement, you achieve it by thinking the right thoughts and living the right kind of life so that you will be reborn into a better state, and then you do it again, and you're reborn into another better state, and on and on and on and go, and you go until you finally cross the finish line wherever and whatever that finish line is. Whereas our view in scripture of the problem, the problem is suffering exists because sin exists. This world is not what it was meant to be. This world is broken. And what we need to do is not to be set free from our creaturliness, which is also a feature of the system. What we need to be set free from is our sin, which is the bug in the system. We don't need to be disintegrated. We don't need to be pulled apart. Yes, we do need to be enlightened, but a Christian view of enlightenment is completely different than a Buddhist view of enlightenment. Our enlightenment revolves around the light of the world who came into the world. And we receive the light of Christ by way of the Holy Spirit who shines in our hearts to give us the knowledge of the glory of the grace of God and the face of our Lord Jesus Christ. Alright, so salvation, it's not about us achieving our own enlightenment and escaping our own creaturliness. It's about God Himself stepping down into our creaturliness, putting on flesh, God becoming a man, and saving us from ourselves. Alright, so you know, in Buddhism, who saves you? You save you. In Christianity, who saves you? Jesus. Jesus saves you. So if we're engaging the thought of Buddhism, I mean you can tap right into that. Right? Because at the end of the day, they're on the same hamster wheel as anyone else who buys into a kind of works righteous view of works righteousness view of salvation. It's like I'm meditating in order to achieve enlightenment. Well, how's that going for you? How will you know when you're there? Do you feel like you've ever been there before? How's it going? Right? And that's a good, that's a good way to engage people or a kind on this, or a kind of on this hamster wheel. So to wrap this all up, the end of the story. And even that's kind of an imprecise way of talking. The end of the story as we would think about it for Buddhism, it's nirvana. It's the end of suffering by the end of existence. So that's that's the hope, if you can call it that. But the end of our story is the new heavens and new earth. It's the end of suffering by way of the end of sin. So that's that's the story you can hold before your Buddhist friends if you have any. Or if you have secular friends who find themselves really into Buddhism, then you can talk about some of this and try to get them back toward a biblical way of thinking. Any thoughts or questions about what we've talked about tonight? This is the weirdest one, right?

SPEAKER_07 36:36

I'm just thinking how elements of it get integrated into Christian worship. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

How elements of Buddhism have been integrated into Christian worship.

SPEAKER_07 36:48

Um Christian yoga and meditate, meditating on the different things that seem very this sound right, yeah, because those are good things, but they really can come in slightly.

SPEAKER_00 37:08

Well, that's a really good question, because Christians are into meditation, right?

SPEAKER_06 37:12

Yeah. We're just meditate on that's work.

SPEAKER_00 37:14

Yeah, well, alright, let's what's the difference between a Buddhist way of meditation, given what we've talked about tonight, versus a Christian way of meditation? What do you think the difference is?

SPEAKER_06 37:25

Buddhists can empty their mind and just try to detach and and and not have any connection to God. We want to connect it to God, and when we have a right relationship with Him, we we'll have a better relationship with those around us. It's connected. We're connected to.

SPEAKER_07 37:51

I know in yoga, uh, like I went with a friend once, she said, it was a Christian yoga class. Let's go to this. It was after this that I started to change my mind and say they were Christian music playing and they were reading scripture, but and in uh studying a little bit more about yoga and where it started and the um the different um positions, those all those positions were many of those positions were specifically made those positions in order to call certain gods into the room and into the I'm not speaking of it very well, but yeah, they have an origin, right? It wasn't just for exercise. And and we're crew we're recreating those positions and things that we don't know that could be bad for us.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

Yeah. The meditation piece, so then come back to that, is emptying and filling, it's the right way to think about it. I mean, in Buddhist, there, or just more generally, an Eastern kind of meditation, you really are, uh, or even in a more mystical form of meditation, because you get some of this in the Middle Ages, and you get some people form like a or practice a Christian form of this. It's an idea of meditation as you're emptying yourself, right? You're becoming less, you you're disappearing, you're emptying, you're clearing your mind. But Christian meditation is discursive meditation. Christian meditation is a meditation that's centered on the word. Uh you are you are meditating on some truth that God has revealed about himself, some facet of his character or of his being. You are you're focusing your mind, you're focusing your attention on that, and you're learning, you're growing, you're growing in relationship. You're like you said, you're getting more attached to God and to his people.

SPEAKER_06 39:41

Like in a psalm, David made meditated on the law day and night.

SPEAKER_00 39:45

Yeah. Yeah, he's meditating on the law day and night. That's absolutely right. And when it comes to yoga, it's like, yeah, it's can Christians stretch? Yeah, right? Sure, we can do stretches, and some a lot of yoga stuff is like physiologically beneficial, right? But you also need to understand what you're dabbling with and what you're messing with. Uh, where does it come from? What is it for?

unknown 40:11

Right?

SPEAKER_00 40:12

And in that case, you're right to give a second thought to like what are we just gonna slap some Bible verses on this and call it good? Or are we gonna be more careful about the whole tenor of how we're doing our our stretching and where we're where we're getting it from? Because you know, that that stuff, just like any other spiritual practice, gets completely secularized, right? And it's kind of it's cut off from the dark spiritual root, but there's still a real cause for caution for Christians.

SPEAKER_07 40:46

I can share one incident. Um my ex-husband was going to dharma classes, and um as a Christian, I was trying to bring some relationship together there. Yeah, um, he invited me to um an event where he said we're just everyone just meditable, it's just meditating. So you meditate on what you want to meditate on. So, okay, I'll go with him to this and I'll meditate on Christ. But when I went in the room, all the little candles lit on the stage and all that, and um many people started speaking out and calling on different gods. And I just it was like bam, I just stood up and left the room. It's it's like it wasn't even me doing that, it was just like in out of here, but um I I didn't realize what I was stepping into.

SPEAKER_00 41:39

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's I mean it's we live in a weird world. We're modern secular people, we're modern secular people, so we don't give much credence to like spirits and demons and things like that. We're very quick to write things off as you know psychological and mental phenomena. But when you are opening yourself up to the cosmos, when you are sitting in meditation, you are just kind of disappearing and disintegrating. What are you inviting in? I mean, Jesus talked about the person who cast the demon out, and the demon disappears for a while, but then he goes and gets seven of his buddies and comes by and comes back. Right? So, you know, the weirdness involved, the the sort of the revelations, the sort of this bodhisattva taught me this thing or taught us this thing, and we wrote a book, and he we we're supposed to put our faith in like the Amidah and all these sorts of things, uh maybe there is some kind of reality to those divine-like figures and demons and things like that, but that's precisely how we would understand them as demons. And generally, Christians are not supposed to consult demons or listen to them, or even talk to them at all.

SPEAKER_07 43:13

We can believe that they exist, but we do not. We better believe that they exist.

SPEAKER_00 43:18

We don't talk to demons, we talk to Jesus about demons, and he takes care of it.

SPEAKER_04 43:23

Well, the thing is that a demon or Satan, we are the angels of light. Yeah. I mean a false light, a false way of doing things. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Yeah. So this becomes another one of those thoughts that we have to hold captive to the word. Whether you're praying or you're meditating, whatever shows up to you and speaks to you, first John says test the spirits. Do they acknowledge Jesus? Go back to the word.

SPEAKER_03 43:58

So there's no payment in Buddhism.

SPEAKER_00 44:02

Right.

SPEAKER_08 44:03

No, I find it's interesting that there's a hell.

SPEAKER_00 44:06

There is a hell. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 44:08

That's interesting.

SPEAKER_00 44:10

Yeah. Yeah, no, this the top of the ladder, so to speak, isn't hell. The bottom is hell, but the top isn't heaven. It's disintegrated. It's nirvana.

unknown 44:22

Right.

SPEAKER_03 44:22

And that's uh but they do see nirvana as the the top of happiness, the fulfillment, ideas.

SPEAKER_00 44:30

I don't know, happiness. Is the word so much as an escape from suffering? Because again, even if you have happiness, suffering is gonna mess it up somehow. There's no such thing as pure unadulterated happiness. Suffering is always in the picture. So the only way you get away from suffering is nirvana. I don't want to not exist. I want to live forever. I want to live forever in the presence of God. That's better than not existing. Alright. Thank you all for being here. Thank you all for your attention and engagement with, again, what was one of the weirder of our nights of this. We're gonna take a break for a little while after this, in terms of Sunday night gatherings and services. We'll take a few months off, and we are going to come back together in a few months with another one of these upper room series. It's gonna be on technology. So we'll call it Faith in a Digital Age. So we'll talk about what technology is and God's plan. We'll talk about phones, we'll talk about the internet, we'll talk about AI, all that kind of stuff. So, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:54

Will you teach Brenda how to use her iPhone?

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Oh Caesar will be on hand to help any technological questions?

SPEAKER_06 46:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:06

Any chronologically advanced members of the church to set up their devices.

SPEAKER_04 46:13

Okay. I've now been voluntal to that.

SPEAKER_00 46:16

You have been voluntole.

SPEAKER_03 46:18

Alright, I need to start waving back.

SPEAKER_00 46:20

Alright, let's let's sing together. This song is a wonderful reminder that the world is not the uh the consequence of impersonal karma just pulling stuff together. The world is created by our Heavenly Father.