Leaving Mystery Babylon

Onto the Highway of Holiness

Isaiah 50

10 “Who among you fears the Lord?
Who obeys the voice of His Servant?
Who walks in darkness
And has no light?
Let him trust in the name of the Lord
And rely upon his God.

If you have spent any time in the New Age movement, you will know the importance of the word 'manifestation' for its practitioners. It is the key concept of the Law of Attraction and contains within its meaning the belief that what you think, feel and say will directly impact the creation of the events that occur in your life. For example, if you want to have a successful career, you are to visualise yourself having the job of your dreams and listen to or say out loud affirmations to do with having success in your career. Some add additional aspects, such as watching other people with successful careers to aid visualisation (including creating vision boards), and assuming you have received what you desire as you will attract it faster into your reality.

The root of this concept is self-idolatry although, as with many of the great falsities in life, it contains some truth. If God does not want you to have something, no amount of the things outlined above will bring it about, but if God wants something to occur in your life, the barriers will be removed no matter what you watch or listen to, albeit he will be unlikely to give you blessings if you are partaking in sin. However, the shred of truth that lures some Christians to the Law of Attraction is that God uses our minds to collectively manifest reality, but it is him doing it not us, in that the events he intends play out in our experienced, subjective realities.

This has to be so, as nothing is experienced outside of conscious minds, so for us to experience anything it must first occur in the mental realm. The process of change from God’s thought to its manifestation in our reality via our minds is mysterious and unclear and is something that is above the understanding of human beings. As humans we are also uncertain of the relationship between souls, minds/consciousness, and brains, even after thousands of years of speculation. The one truth we can hold on to on this topic though is that unless we are conscious, we cannot experience anything, and all experience occurs in the mental realm. Apart from that all else is description and extrapolation. This was a point picked up on by an interesting Christian philosopher named Bishop Berkeley and never really resolved since, although another Christian thinker by the name of Immanuel Kant had a good crack at it. It is this lack of clarity, and God’s ineffable nature that has left space for the Law of Attraction and the New Age more broadly to flourish.

One subtle trap for Christians is to start believing that God sends us videos, books, and teachers for us to actively manifest something through the processes outlined above. The thought here is that God is sending things our way, but that we still have to work by watching, reading, visualising and saying things to manifest what God has planned for us; we are thus the creators of our reality and God just sends the material. This will lead us to watch more and more videos with someone telling us that good things are about to happen and can quickly end up in full-time prosperity-preaching consumption. Such a view is closer to the truth, but still idolatry, as here we are thinking that we can manipulate reality with our thoughts in the way God can. It doesn’t matter what we watch, or say, as reality will always be how God wants it to be, and whatever he sends to us is for instruction not reality-creation.

What God has really taught me of late is that he wants us to put our faith entirely in him, and that means dropping the notion that we can do anything apart from pray, repent and stay within his laws for blessings to occur in our lives. He does send books, movies and music our way, but to speak to us, not to sway our “manifestations” in a particular direction. Moreover, there are times when we have to acknowledge that no amount of hard-work, hustling, and study will help, and we just need to let go and wait on the Lord to move things in a particular direction.

Unfortunately, some have a hard time in making this final step and is something I personally struggled with. Our culture emphasises individual effort and responsibility so much and is saturated with Law of Attraction aligned thinking; it sneaks into our minds without us even noticing. This gained traction with Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, and more recently with The Secret. However, it is really an attitude as old as humanity and entails humans wanting to be like God. While I haven’t had any involvement in such things, I can imagine it is the type of thinking that runs through all sorts of cults. A casual reading also demonstrates a connection with the Kabbalah and magic.

Shore Healing provides affirmations, but they are to help fight back against demonic harassment and negative self-doubt due to years of put downs and abuse. Our affirmations are in no way intended to facilitate the “creation of reality”. They often start with “I am”, not in alignment with the I AM movement that claims we are all God, but because doing so is a powerful way to rebuke negative thoughts internally. For example, a demon may send the thought into our heads “I am useless and better off dead”, in which case it is useful to talk back automatically with a line such as “I am saved by God, and my sins have been washed clean by the blood of Christ. I am reborn.”

Lucifer’s trick here is to confuse people with a Christian-like religion based on self-worship and power using some of the elements and language of Christianity. It even uses the word “god”, leading some innocent people to think they are talking about Yahweh, the Most High God, only to have the New Age practitioners quickly shift gears into saying we are all “god”. Such pantheism will entail its advocates moving between saying “god” and the “universe”, as if they are the same thing, which they are not as God created and is transcendent of the universe.

It is not hard to see how pantheism and the notion of manifestation connect together and get wrapped up into a neat little package of ‘we are all energy’: one single energetic field to be precise; and, as the saying goes, such energy is conscious at its essence and manifests reality. So, if we imagine hard enough, and say enough words of a certain kind, then we can manifest reality, because at our very essence we are that all-powerful energetic field. There is a Hindu flavour to it all, mixed in with the American self-empowerment movement, and some Jewish mysticism. It all starts to sound like something that could be sold as the one world religion; adding bits and pieces of this and that, leaving it up to us what to take and leave. However, such a discussion is for another time.

This view of the world is not a new one by any means. You may have seen Elon Musk say that he believes in the god of Spinoza. Spinoza advocated for the kind of metaphysics I just described in the 17th century. You have probably heard people talking about the Hegelian dialectic. Hegel advocated for a type of metaphysics just described in the 18th century. Alan Watts then rebirthed the idea with a Hindu flavour in the 20h century. Yet we can go back even further and find Plotinus presenting something similar in the 3rd century. Paul warned us of such philosophers when he wrote:

Colossians 2:8 Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ.

What is new however is the notion that through visualisation and speech we can create our own reality while the thinkers above-mentioned saw us more as captive to the processes of the ‘universal one’ which they argued we are part of. I have mentioned Napoleon Hill, and he sprinkles his works with biblical verses, but the person that is perhaps the most dangerous for Christians is Neville Goddard, who presents New Age thought as a type of Christianity. He even states that Jesus is that part in us that creates reality, so we are all Jesus and God. Again, history repeats itself, as Hegel branded himself as Christian too. Many of us have fallen for these traps, as they are well laid, and often presented as Christianity for the intelligent person, when in truth they are Luciferianism.

It is easy to spot someone who has fallen into Satanism: rituals to summon demons and upside-down crosses are hard to miss. Yet, the New Age principles of manifestation and reality creation can masquerade as a type of Christianity, but in the eyes of the Lord is still idolatry as it is trying to play God by another means. My advice, if you are interested, would be to stop all such practices today, unfollow anyone promoting them, and turn to repentance, prayer and reading the Holy Bible daily. God can talk to you through his Word, and this is more magical than any magic, and I am certain that by letting go of all the foolish New Age promises and giving in to the will of the Lord, your life will be better, smoother, and more peaceful.

Psalm 25

12 Who is the man that fears the Lord?
Him shall He teach in the way He chooses.
13 He himself shall dwell in prosperity,
And his descendants shall inherit the earth.
14 The secret of the Lord is with those who fear Him,
And He will show them His covenant.
15 My eyes are ever toward the Lord,
For He shall pluck my feet out of the net.

Prayer

Heavenly Father,

I renounce all thoughts that it is me that brings about the miracles, blessings and significant occurrences in my life.

I know that I cannot do anything of substance and value without you willing it to be so, and my mind is but a painting brush for you to perform your work.

When good things happen, I know they come from you; and when I go through hardship, I acknowledge you allowed it for my own good.

I thank you for showing me how New Age thoughts have crept into my mind, and I rebuke all such thoughts in the name of Jesus.

I now see that I cannot do anything without you Lord and that no matter how much I try nothing good or bad happens without you allowing it to be so.

When I watch, read, or listen to things, I will not do so to manifest anything, but will consider what you are wanting to teach me, and I will pray for wisdom to discern what comes from you and what comes from the adversary.

Thank you, God, for gently showing me the errors of my thinking and accepting genuine repentance. I spent too long trying to create, achieve and understand without first turning to you for direction, wisdom and support.

I see how absurd it was for me to worry about worldly things and strive anxiously for outcomes when you need only wave your hand, and it is so.

How powerful you are Ancient of Days. My greatest fortune is to be lifted up by you out of a life of confusion and torment and placed under your protection.

Please continue to shield me from the false teachers that claim humans can be creators without you, for whatever is done without you is supported by forces not of you: forces that ultimately seek to steal, kill and destroy.

Shield me from those who try to sneak into my mind and inflame my ambition and ego with such talk. And protect me from myself, Father. Shield me from pride and any desire to be anything without you. Pluck all idolatry from my soul.

I ask in the name of Jesus. Amen.

Note

For those interested in the topic, we previously produced a spoken word video about it which can be found here.