America is up to its eyeballs in Eastern mysticism. What does the Lord God have to say about adopting pagan practices? Plenty:
When you come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the LORD. And because of these abominations the LORD your God is driving them out before you. You shall be blameless before the LORD your God, for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the LORD your God has not allowed you to do this.” Leviticus 18:1-1
In other words, God’s people are not to involve themselves in any Americanized version of Eastern mysticism. Period.
Garrett Haley, who penned the piece I’m posting here, quotes from a blog post titled “The Subtle Body—Should Christians Practice Yoga?” by Albert Mohler of Southern Baptist theological Seminary:
There is nothing wrong with physical exercise, and yoga positions in themselves are not the main issue. But these positions are teaching postures with a spiritual purpose.
Mohler concludes:
Christians who practice yoga are embracing, or at minimum flirting with, a spiritual practice that threatens to transform their own spiritual lives into a “post-Christian, spiritually polyglot” reality. Should any Christian willingly risk that?”
Now to Garrett Haley’s report:
A growing number of major American corporations are offering meditation, mindfulness and yoga programs for their employees, practices that are believed to have originated in pagan Eastern religions.
Last week, the California-based software company Salesforce generated media attention for putting meditation rooms on every floor of the company’s newest corporate office building in San Francisco.
Marc Benioff, who is Salesforce’s CEO and an outspoken proponent of homosexual marriage, said the meditation rooms facilitate “mindfulness.”
Fifty miles southeast of Salesforce’s San Francisco office, Google offers a meditation course called “Search Inside Yourself” to workers in its Silicon Valley headquarters. More than a thousand Google employees have been through the mindfulness training course, which promotes Eastern meditation practices.
“It’s not just Google that’s embracing Eastern traditions,” a report from “Wired.com” explained. “Across the Valley, quiet contemplation is seen as the new caffeine, the fuel that allegedly unlocks productivity and creative bursts.”
Google’s meditation routines are designed to help employees “search for meaning and emotional connection.”
Google is one of many technological companies that has come to embrace meditation and mindfulness programs. Facebook, also headquartered in California’s Silicon Valley, provides a meditation room for employees and is actively seeking to infuse Buddhist values into its corporate culture.
“While many other Silicon Valley companies are teaching their employees to meditate, Facebook is trying to inject a Buddhist-inspired concept of compassion into the core of its business,” “Wired.com” reports.
Many other technological companies have begun promoting Buddhist-inspired meditation techniques. AOL Time Warner offers quiet rooms for employees to refresh and mentally refocus. Yahoo! encourages workers to take advantage of meditation rooms. And Apple reportedly allows employees to take 30 minutes each day to meditate at work.
Why are yoga and meditation so popular among corporate giants of the tech field? Some trace the trend back to the early pioneers of computers and the Internet. Continue reading
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See our White Papers on Yoga and the New Age Movement
Often people don’t associate this as religious because there are not set rules as you might see in church. Plus it also helps to calm the mind down and can even lead to a less stressful life and there are not much in the way of rules to it as you might find in church. You do it at your convenience and you don’t have to feel as if you have to impress people and you don’t have to worry about your soul, necessarily.
The stumbling block. for the Christian, is being able to leap over this reasons people use to dismiss it as not religious and showing them that it is spiritual in nature and as a result becomes against the Law of God. It is not an easy thing to do.
Often I wonder if a person can be convinced that it is spiritual in nature if it will open their door to the danger of what lies ahead. I work with someone who has a calendar with quotes for mediation and Hinduism and I have often pondered who to counteract that by pressing the need for God instead of those sweet sounding words. Very seducing and very alluring.
“Seducing Spirits”