One day in 1979, a young California business man was on his morning jog on a hillside path overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Feeling the breeze against his face and taking in the beauty around him, he suddenly heard a whispered voice within him. He describes the experience:
It formed into a pair of meaningless but mellifluous-sounding syllables in my mind, which gradually grew into a chant. To the beat of my running steps I gave voice to it, feeling a bursting joy: Kah-lee! … Kah-lee! Somehow I knew that it was good and right for me to be doing this. Several months later, a friend gave me a copy of Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi. A few pages into the text, reading the author’s account of his early life in India, I came across these words: “Our family moved to Lahore in the Punjab. There I acquired a picture of the Divine Mother in the form of the goddess Kali.”
I was stunned. No wonder on that morning run I had felt such an abounding bliss . . . I had been chanting the name of a Nature god! I later learned that on that morning I had been a few hundred yards from the seaside ashram that Yogananda occupied for many years. Many mysterious experiences led me eventually to the feet of this master.1
The jogger that day was Jim Ballard, the author of Mind Like Water, a primer in Eastern religious practices. Former New Age follower Warren Smith describes his own reaction to Ballard’s experience with Kali:
Just as I had not questioned the supernatural circumstances that led me to Indian guru Bhagwhan Shree Rajneesh, Ballard did not question the supernatural circumstances that led him to Paramahansa Yogananda. Yet if either one of us had been seriously reading the Bible back then we might have looked at our spiritual experiences quite differently. . . .
Fueled by his supernatural experience with “Kali” and by other various “mysterious experiences,” Ballard was eventually led to “the feet” of Yogananda just as I had been led by my mysterious experiences to “the feet” of Rajneesh.2
Ballard’s experience took place nearly thirty years ago, but the effect the Hindu god had on him continue. In his book, Little Wave and Old Swell (most recently published in 2007), Ballard says the book was “Inspired by [Hindu swami] Paramahansa Yogananda.”3
Sadly, a very popular Christian figure has written glowing forewords to both of Ballard”s books: Ken Blanchard, author of The One Minute Manager and founder of “Lead Like Jesus,” calls Mind Like Water a “wonderful book,” adding:
I hope that you and countless other readers will find in Mind Like Water some ways to calm your mind and uplift your consciousness, and to transform the way you operate every day in this chaotic world.4
Little Wave and Old Swell is a children’s book that carries the same message as Helen Schucman’s A Course in Miracles–a New Age book made popular largely through Oprah Winfrey’s promotion. What is the theme of the Course? – ”that man is divine, and God is in all. In the foreword to Little Wave and Old Swell, Blanchard tells readers to “[r]ead it many times. Let it speak to your heart.”
Blanchard’s endorsement of Mind Like Water and Little Wave and Old Swell is a prime example of how New Age spirituality has entered Christianity.
In view of these things, I cannot help but recall the lyrics I heard so many years ago at the musical Hair: “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”5 But unlike the optimistic, utopian world the hippies in the 1960s thought was in the making, the Bible says the world will enter a time of strong spiritual delusion. Revelation 12: 9 says that at some point in history, before Jesus Christ returns, Satan will deceive the whole world.
Our hope as young hippies, for a world with “Harmony and understanding, Sympathy and trust abounding,”6 will not occur. True peace will not come before the world experiences a great tribulation, as Revelation describes, but will only occur after Jesus Christ comes back to take His rightful place as King. Before Christ returns, the Anti-christ will come, and many will fall into his grip of madness and deceit.
Before the world can accept this world leader, a conditioning process must first take place. Such a process has been going on for some decades. Western society has been heavily influenced and altered by it already. The last hold out against the New Age of Aquarius is the Christian church. Now, that too is caving in under the assault. (To learn more, read Caryl Matrisciana’s book Out of India.”)
Notes:
1. Jim Ballard, Mind Like Water (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), p. 14.
2. Warren Smith, Reinventing Jesus Christ, chapter 5 updates, p. 12.
3. Jim Ballard, Little Wave and Old Swell (New York, NY: Atria Books, Simon & Schuster, Inc., 2007), front cover.
4. Ken Blanchard quoted from foreword of Jim Ballard’s Mind Like Water, op. cit.,
5. “Aquarius,” song in the production, Hair, op. cit. (used by permission from Alfred Publishing Co. – permissions on file at LTPC).
6. Ibid.