Yoga is literally demonic.

In 1893, an unknown Hindu monk arrived

at the Parliament of Religions in

Chicago.

He was Swami Vivekananda.

He made a stunning impression on those

who heard him, both by his appearance,

but turbaned and robed in orange and

crimson, and by what he said. He was

immediately lionized by high society in

Boston and New York. Philosophers at

Harvard were mightily impressed. I say.

And it wasn't long until he had gathered

a hard core of disciples who supported

him and his grandiose [music]

dream.

The evangelizing of the Western world by

Hinduism.

And more particularly by Vedantic or

monistic Hinduism. Vedanta societies

were established in the large cities of

the United States and Europe. [music]

Hey there friends, today we are

infecting humanity. But these centers

were only a part of his work. More

important was introducing Vedantic ideas

into the bloodstream of academic

thinking.

Dissemination was the goal. It mattered

little to Vivekananda whether credit was

given to Hinduism or not, so long as the

message of Vedanta reached everyone.

On many occasions he said,

"Knock on every door.

Tell everyone he is divine."

Vedanta, the philosophical backbone of

what Vivekananda was selling, rests on

one central claim. That the individual

self is not distinct [music]

from the divine. It is the divine. You

are God. Everyone is God. Everything is

God. The apparent separateness of things

is an illusion. Sorcery.

>> [groaning]

>> And the entire purpose of spiritual

practice is to realize this. To dissolve

the boundaries of the individual self

>> [music]

>> back into the universal consciousness.

There is no personal God who created you

and loves you and calls you to account.

There is no fall, no resurrection.

[music]

There is only the cosmic oneness that

all religions are at varying levels of

sophistication groping toward.

This makes Vedanta very strategically

flexible and made Vivekananda very

effective. He could affirm every

religious tradition simultaneously.

Yes, the Muslim's Allah is real. Yes,

his own Shiva is real. And yes, your

Jesus Christ is real because none of

them are the final word. They're all

just fingers pointing at the same thing.

Christianity becomes just one more

lower-level teaching that the

spiritually mature will eventually

supersede like a child outgrows his

training wheels. Which is, of course,

one of the most thorough rejections of

Christianity imaginable dressed up as a

tolerant affirmation of it.

>> [music]

>> Vivekananda just needed to get it into

the bloodstream of the West and get in

it did. [music]

The same way Marxism, transgender

ideology, and every other pathetic

contrivance does. Slowly and patiently

[music] over decades starting in our

universities where upstart professors

and shining intellectuals corrupt our

youth with their hubris and atheistic

self-emancipation from God and all

authority

>> [music]

>> and help prepare the ground for the

general public to receive Vedanta using

a neat, harmless little package called

yoga.

Yoga moves. A new [music] kind of

workout. Take part in yoga. The most

ancient [music] system of healing,

toning, and rejuvenating your body.

Join us.

Have fun.

Get a new [music] look at the world.

A new look at you.

Enlightenment isn't serious.

Vanity, spiritual weakness, and mass

market did the rest. Until by 1985, your

aunt was doing yoga in the living room

to a VHS tape with a glass of

Chardonnay. Nobody was asking any

questions at all. And today, [music] of

course, it is a multi-billion dollar

industry. And that's the genius of it,

really. Vivekananda knew you don't sell

the West on Vedanta straight. You sell

them on the stretching, on the calm. You

sell them on feeling better. There's

something vaguely spiritual about it,

but surely not dangerous.

And the rest of it comes along for the

ride quietly. But the rest of it was

always the point.

Surya Namaskar, the sun salutation,

opens virtually every yoga class in the

Western world. It is a sequence of 12

postures, [music] a devotional ritual to

Surya, the Hindu sun deity.

Not a metaphor, a pagan deity. You're

not warming up your hamstrings, you are

making an offering.

>> And you let anything go that's no longer

serving you in a positive way.

Virabhadrasana,

the warrior pose, possibly the most

ubiquitous yoga pose in the West, is

dedicated to Virabhadra, a warrior deity

created specifically to carry out

vengeance and destruction. [music]

Nice. These are not ancient Sanskrit

words that happen to sound spiritual.

They are the names of specific beings in

a specific religious system. And these

sequences and postures are inseparable

from what they were designed to be and

what discerning Christians recognize

them to be.

The worship of demons.

The late great Father Seraphim Rose

quotes a Benedictine monk named

Jean-Marie Déchanet who wrote an entire

book called, [music] and I promise I'm

not making this up, Christian Yoga. And

his experience is worth thinking over

because it is a very precise

illustration of exactly how this demonic

influence works on someone who may even

have genuinely good intentions. Déchanet

describes the postures as producing an

extraordinary sense of calm, a feeling

of general well-being, a euphoria that

lasts. His nerves settle, his fatigue

disappears. His whole personality, he

says, has been altered. He is gentler,

more content. [music] And then, and this

is where it gets interesting, his prayer

life transforms overnight. He becomes

contemplative in a matter of weeks. He

feels more receptive, more open, more

ready to be, in his words, seized by the

spirit. Father Seraphim identifies this

immediately for what it is.

Anyone who understands the Orthodox

concept of prelest, spiritual deception,

will recognize in that description

exactly the characteristics of someone

who has gone spiritually astray. The

striving for holy feelings, the

willingness to be absorbed by anything

spiritual with no regard for

discernment, the seeking not for God but

for spiritual consolations.

We notice the incredible ease with which

this monk becomes [music] mystical,

contemplative, elevated because genuine

Orthodox spirituality does not work like

that.

The prayer of the heart, the real deal,

is acquired by very few people after

many years of ascetic struggle under the

guidance of a God-bearing elder, not by

doing pagan poses and breath work for 3

weeks. We can see that demons don't need

to try particularly hard when we just

open the door.

And this is Father Seraphim's larger

point, the one that connects back to

Vivekananda's mission directly. The goal

[music] of all this was never to make

Westerners Hindu. It was to prepare the

ground for what Vivekananda called the

religion of the future, a universal

spirituality with no doctrine, no

exclusive claims, no Christ. Just

experience and feeling. Getting people

to say, "I'm not religious, I'm

spiritual." Yeah, we're not particularly