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Mike Shreve was a teacher of yoga at four universities. (The portrait above was drawn by one of his students in 1970.) Then a spiritual rebirth brought him into a real relationship with God and drastically changed his heart, his life and his belief system. Read his story here.
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Vail Carruth's StoryFormer teacher of Transcendental Meditation
As a child I had attended church, but Jesus didn’t seem very
real in these church services or in my life at that time. My early years were underscored by a deep, relentless hunger
for personal identity. My first
spiritual awakening was when my mother and my grandmother told me about the
gentle, caring Jesus. Some kitchen
helpers in our home invited me to attend a summer church Bible camp meeting
where I asked Jesus into my life, but I was given no adequate follow-up or
discipleship, and I drifted away.
The resulting spiritual vacuum inside of me led to what would prove to be
counterfeits of spiritual fulfillment. I
experimented with the Ouija Board, astrology, hypnotism, and psychic phenomena
in an attempt to develop psychic powers. During
my college years I suffered from a state of purposelessness, meaningless living
and spiritual disintegration. You
can’t play with fire and not be burned. The
tap-root of occultism that had entered my life during my teen years later led to
experimentation with mind altering drugs and hallucinogens and finally to
involvement with eastern mysticism. The
Berkeley-San Francisco Bay Area was filled with many occult groups and
practices, and I looked into many of them.
At this time in my life God was pursuing me by bringing into my life two
Christians. One, the head secretary
where I worked part-time, was the former personal secretary of Billy Graham.
The other was a man who tirelessly preached in front of the Cal Berkeley
campus, none other than “Holy Hubert” Lindsey, the original former
“Alfalfa” of the TV special, Our Gang.
But even though both of these people witnessed to me about Jesus, I
remained sold out to the life style and mind set of the 60’s.
When Maharishi Mahesh Yogi brought Transcendental Meditation (TM) to the
United States in the 60’s, it took the Berkeley campus by storm, with the
promise that it would relieve stress and that through the practice of TM, one
could reach cosmic consciousness in five years. Like many others, I was drawn to
TM because I had grown weary (and wary) of altered awareness through the use of
dangerous drugs. Through Maharishi
and the free PR of the Beatles, meditation became a household word.
I was initiated by the charming and affable Jerry Jarvis, Maharishi’s
right-hand man. I did experience
what appeared to be a relief from stress and a heightened sense of spiritual
awareness, but I also encountered some negative and dangerous effects of TM
meditation. Later, I was to uncover
the reason why.
Although TM can bring some improvements, scientific studies have
shown that these changes are actually a result of a conditioning
of the nervous system and not
necessarily a removal of stress. Further,
it has been proven that TM lessens
(not increases) creativity in the waking state. It has caused many to experience mental and spiritual
problems, such as oppression and even possession by malevolent spirits.
During a teacher training course while in bed one night, a powerful
spirit tried to overpower me, but I resisted it (with great difficulty) until it
left. I remembered hearing someone
ask Maharishi what to do if they encountered a demon.
He answered, “Don’t be afraid, invite them in.”
Another time, however, he said to “resist it” and it will leave.
Providentially, I chose the latter suggestion. But the experience was very scary.
Maharishi’s Hindu philosophy clearly appears to avoid
the issue of human suffering. He
was always telling us that TM will remove all suffering and that Christ’s
suffering on the cross wasn’t real suffering, and certainly not for the
removal of man’s sins. Of course,
this contradicts true Biblical teaching. Furthermore,
I was to discover that I can avoid much personal suffering simply through
obedience to Christ and His commands. Then,
I can be blessed and not have to learn my “blessings” the hard way.
But though I practiced TM for
five years, it did not bring about the real heart
change I was seeking. While having many visions and psychic experiences of
altered awareness, I was undergoing personality changes, becoming proud, aloof
and insensitive to the needs of others. Basically,
TM replaced the high I had gotten from drugs but did not make me a better
person. The meditation-induced
state of euphoria motivated me to become quite “evangelical,” proselytizing
wherever I could. During this time I attended the San Francisco Conservatory of
Music majoring in piano and living on a houseboat with a female saxophone
player. After I moved to another
apartment, I had a near death experience during the night by inhaling fumes from
a faulty gas wall heater. This
experience might have sent me to an early grave without Christ.
God does allow certain situations to get our attention.
In order to further my goal
of becoming a teacher of TM, I enrolled in advanced training at the Humboldt
State College campus. It was here
that I became a “checker” of meditations.
During the break between classes, I had a chance to speak with a group of
Christians out on the lawn that had come to tell us about Jesus.
Their presence spawned many questions at the course as to whether TM and
Christianity were compatible. Because
none of them were TM meditators or followed any mind altering techniques, their
peacefulness and joy unnerved me because I couldn’t figure out how they got
it. While at this residence course,
we were given advanced techniques. It
was there that I learned about the “Yogic Flying” technique.
I myself did not take the course on flying as it was very expensive and
seemed ludicrous. No one who has
taken these courses has ever demonstrated the ability to actually fly to my
knowledge.
My deliverance from TM began with my independent search for Truth apart
from the confines of the TM lifestyle, accelerated by a divine confrontation
with a group of Christians from Campus Crusade for Christ.
I was drawn to them because they had the look, that “mellow look,”
that made me think that they were meditators.
When I asked them if they meditated, they just presented to me an open
Bible in which they showed me the scripture where Jesus said that no one could
come to the Father except through Him, and that all who came before Him were
thieves and robbers. They also
showed me the scripture that says, there is no other name given under Heaven by
which we must be saved. I read Hal
Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet
Earth, which challenged me to consider the possibility of spiritual
deception and to understand what the Bible says about the end time strong
delusion. After trying in earnest
to fit East and West together in my study of both eastern philosophy and the
Bible, I finally gave up in frustration. I
realized that such unity was impossible because Jesus’ claims to divinity were
exclusive.
When I finally realized that my attempt to join my TM path with
Christianity was ultimately and eternally futile, I put Jesus on the shelf and
pursued the teacher training in Fiuggi, Italy under Maharishi.
One of the goals of becoming a teacher of TM was to speed up
one’s evolution towards cosmic consciousness.
I performed the mind altering initiation ceremony called the Puja
many times and taught TM at the Berkeley Student’s International Meditation
Society building, which was lost to a fire a few years ago.
As a teacher and practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, I saw things
from the inside of the movement which disturbed me, namely the fact that we were
told to present the technique of TM as a simple scientific method, while every
teacher I knew realized that the teachings and practices of TM were blatantly
Hindu. At the teacher training in Fiuggi, Italy along with about
2,000 others from around the world, Maharishi presented his “World Plan.”
This troubled many of us because it seemed to point towards the formation
of a world spiritual system that would, by definition, have a problem
with exclusive or fundamentalist
religions such as Christianity and Judaism.
After Maharishi’s announcement, I overheard one teacher trainee
lamenting, “This World Plan had better be right or we’re all in BIG
trouble!”
One of the main claims of the proponents of TM is that it releases
tension and stress in a process they call “unstressing.”
At the teacher training course, my stress level seemed to be magnified a
hundred times. Some of my symptoms
of unstressing were undoubtedly the deep sense that something was fundamentally
amiss. I had an increasing sense of
spiritual emptiness, and the feeling that there was a real lack of love among
meditators. There were suicides and
divorces among TM meditators and teachers, something rarely discussed, but I
personally witnessed a near suicide attempt in the meditator’s house where I
lived. She had recently come back
from a teacher training course.
After returning from Italy, there was an adjustment period of
“coming down” from the intense and long meditations.
My encounters with demonic spirits actually increased from this time
onwards. I observed many emotional
problems and defections among TM teachers, and in my desperation to speed up my
own “evolution,” I visited a psychic fortune teller who gave me a lot of
false information.
While many people’s lives
have been transformed through the plain preaching of the Gospel, God chose a
nontraditional approach with me. He
chose to use a psychic who had dabbled in many different spiritual paths
including Christianity. I met him one day on the Berkeley campus and was drawn
to him because there seemed to be something different about him.
I was interested in learning how to become more psychic, so he said he
would hold some classes at my apartment where he led us in a unique method of
“calling on the Name of the Lord.” There
we would tune into the psychic or spiritual fields of various spiritual leaders,
such as Mohammed and Buddha, beginning with first focusing on a friend.
Eventually this psychic friend of mine told us to call on the name of
Jesus, the “Name above all Names.” He
said that God loves us and will respond to us when we call out to him, similar
to the way a loving Father will respond to his child.
He said that calling on the name of the Creator would free us from the
realm of the created world and release us into God’s uncreated realm.
He drew a distinct line of difference between the Creator and the
creation. Jesus as the second
person of the Godhead was not to be confused with some “life force,”
although His power created the world and continues to influence it.
I called on the name of Jesus for a week, verbally and out loud, not
silently like my mantra. During this time I began to feel smaller and punier and
my ego was getting crushed. I
wondered how I could be losing my enlightenment.
Because I had been on the verge of cosmic consciousness, I reasoned that
there must be some special kind of power in His Name, so I pressed on and
didn’t give up calling on Him. I
want to make it clear that I had come to a point in my life where I was willing
to do anything to find God. I would
lay down all my previous preconceptions, all my hopes and desires, with only one
burning desire, to KNOW HIM! The
Scriptures tell us, “You shall find Me when you seek for me with all of your
heart.”
Amazingly, “calling on the name of Jesus” from my heart brought me an
astounding release from spiritual blindness and completely fulfilled my desire
to know God. I received a personal,
tangible relationship with Jesus Christ as Savior who is the Light of the World.
As a result of this breakthrough, the TM mantra no longer held the same
power or effectiveness but instead brought undesirable results, so much so that
I had to stop practicing it. There
was so much power in Jesus and his precious name that it threw light on
everything dark and sinful in my life. His love truly set me free!
For a more detailed description of this amazing experience and
breakthrough, read my book, The Kiss of
God. Ironically, I discovered that I was now a “Jesus freak” in the eyes of others. Humbled but undaunted, I relished every opportunity to witness to the many lost and wandering souls in the new age area in which I lived, discovering that many of them were as hungry for truth as I had been. There is a great difference between salvation and cosmic consciousness. “Psychic” is not to be confused with “spiritual.” But Jesus did not disappoint my desire for the supernatural! Right from the beginning, I have experienced many wonderful touches and miracles of God as well as emotional and physical healings. The healing of my spine is documented in my book, The Kiss of God, complete with photographic and written documentation. Visit Vail Carruth's website, www.living-light.net.
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The Berkeley campus in the mid-60’s
was where my Spiritual Odyssey began.
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TheTrueLight.Net ©2002 copyright
by Mike Shreve.
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