Hey faith family, it’s brother Mario. I pray you’re having a great day. I wanted to continue in my video series with you discussing how I left the New Age movement. For those of you wondering what the New Age movement is, it’s basically a form of spirituality that people are really starting to adopt today that teaches that spirituality and having our own beliefs is nothing more than going to a buffet. If I like something from the Buddhist faith, I can take a little bit of that, remove something else. I can take something from Christianity, I can take some here and there and I just get myself a big plate of whatever I like and what I don’t like I leave off and I create for myself my own spirituality and think that I’m so spiritual in doing so. Well, I came out of that because these buffet items that you put together are not only oftentimes contradictory but completely opposed to one another and can’t come together cohesively in a logical format.
And so one of the buffet items that I grabbed onto my plate when I was into the New Age was Buddhism. I loved Buddhism. I was really attracted to the Buddha and so I would go to the Kuluta Buddhist Center in Kingston Ontario and I would sit under an enlightened one, a teacher and they would instruct me on things like the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path and supposedly how to extinguish desire, which leads to the end of suffering which we’ll discuss in a moment here. But I wanted to create this video here to tell you that I have come out of this and if you yourself have fallen into this form of spirituality, it’s simply false, it’s wrong. So to answer the question why I left Buddhism, well I left it because it’s false. And I’m a man who’s seeking after truth and if I’m gonna be caught in a system that’s faulty, I’m gonna have to remove myself from it. I don’t want to spiritually be in error and so what is Buddhism basically for those of you who don’t know?
Well Buddha, the famous figure that you’re used to seeing, represents the faith. Like Jesus is to Christianity, Buddha obviously is to Buddhism. It comes from a man who lived, he doesn’t claim to be divine or anything like that, never claimed to be and his father in fact was a very rich rich man, I think a king. And so Prince Buddha was not allowed to see anyone that was old. So his father kept growing in age away from him so anyone in the kingdom that was old, the father would remove him so that the Buddha – well he wasn’t Buddha yet – would not even know that these realities existed. Same thing with people that are sick, he didn’t allow anyone who was sick or old or suffering to be around Buddha. So Buddha one time decided that he was going to escape and go out beyond the city walls and when he did, he started to run into the things that his father was keeping away from him. His father thought that he was protecting him by removing the suffering of the world from his reality but then when Buddha was encountered with this, he freaked out.
And so he then tried to take a very aesthetic path, hurting his body in the sense of not eating. I don’t know if you know what an aesthetic is, it’s people who think that by withholding certain things from the body, food. They depraved themselves in certain areas in order to be more spiritual. So the Buddha was doing this but he almost died and a lady saved him with milk and brought him back to life because he was on the verge of death in this spiritual pursuit. And so the Buddha came out of all of this and he formulated the Buddhism that we have today. Now obviously just like Christianity, there’s different sects and different groups of Buddhists that agree with other parts, there was like denominations in Buddhism as well. But for the most part, what is agreed upon, the Buddhist foundations – the Four Noble Truths – believed to have been conceived by Siddhartha Gautama or commonly known as the Buddha. These four truths are the truth of suffering, the truth of cause of suffering, the truth of the end of suffering and the truth of the path that leads to the end of suffering. But they’re not true. That’s why I had to leave, it’s because these “truths” are false. And I’ll show you that in a moment in contrast to Jesus. Once we encounter Jesus, we see that this is not the truth.
In order to deal with this, he created the Eightfold Path, a system of works that leads to enlightenment or the state of consciousness that goes to see beyond the illusionary reality and extinguishes desire. The Eightfold Path consists of eight practices – right view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right meditative absorption or union. The Eightfold Path is one of the principal teachings of Buddhism thought to lead to enlightenment. So there’s a works-based system here that leads to a certain state. Basically Buddhism teaches that evil is an illusion, that it doesn’t exist. And why is that? Buddhism teaches that suffering, evil is rooted in an illusion. How does it teach this? It says that first of all, suffering, evil is caused by our desire. Then it also teaches there is neither a self to desire nor a permanent world – everything is an illusion. When you get to that state of consciousness, you’re supposed to experience an awakening, to realize that you yourself are not real, that the reality is not real and therefore suffering is an illusion.
How is it that I really came to understand that this was false? It was with a great book by Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias – the Lotus and the Cross. And what Ravi does is he has kind of a drama play out where he has a character which is a woman who was sold into sex slavery and has all sorts of evil done to her and then he has a hypothetical encounter – what would Jesus say to this woman and what would the Buddha say. And what you see is that their teachings are completely different. Now keep in mind when I was into the New Age movement I fell for the lie that Buddha and Jesus teach the same thing. So many people believe that Jesus is just another enlightened teacher, that he was just like Buddha transforming his consciousness in ….Couldn’t be further from the truth and factually that is just so so, not accurate at all. Jesus did not teach the same thing as the Buddha, not even close. What does Jesus teach in contrast to this? Well, the Buddha says that suffering and evil is just an illusion, that it stems from our desire and that in fact we ourselves as individuals, the ego does not exist and that the world is an illusion. So therefore what’s the solution? Meditative practice is going to be your salvation. It’s gonna bring peace and everything to the earth. I don’t think so. Jesus taught that evil is real. Now if I were to get a, I hate to do this to you but those of you that think it’s an illusion, let me stick you in a room with a psychopathic killer who’s about to… I don’t know if you ever seen the movie Saw. He’s about to perform this type of torture, satanic twisted evil to you. Now are you in the midst of that evil going to be like “Oh this is just an illusion. Let me just meditate this away.” Because that’s what the Buddha essentially teaches, that all this is an illusion. Jesus says no, they’re very real, evil is very real and there is a fallen angel who’s responsible for this. And you need salvation, you need to be made right. And so Jesus taught something completely opposed to this.
How do we end our suffering in Jesus Christ? We accept the gospel. Jesus saved us, it is not through meditative practice or works, by the Eightfold Path, by having right speech, right conduct, which is all great. I’m not opposed to people making an effort to be moral, which is essentially what the Eightfold Path leads them to but morality without salvation is not going to save you. And so this is the fundamental thing that you need to realize. All of this, every other religion, every other path, but the path that Jesus taught, is a works-based path. What do I mean by that? I mean that you need to do something to achieve. That is false religion. When you are having to work in order to get something, that’s false. Jesus is completely different. Jesus is God sending his Son to the earth, part of the Godhead and the Son, part of the Trinity, lives the perfect life that you could not live for you and then by faith you receive that life. So that it is by grace and faith that we are made right. That our suffering will be put to an end. It’s not based upon us sitting here in a lotus meditation and just “hmm” and all the evil and the rape, the murder, the sadistic twisted evil is just gonna go away if we can just meditate ourselves high enough to a level of consciousness until we realize that it’s not here. It’s a delusion, it’s a spiritual lie and it leads people astray. And I’m telling you on the day of judgment, Buddha is not gonna be your Savior. There is one Savior. Do you know why Jesus said I’m the savior of the world? Because you need to be saved and Buddha can’t do it. You can’t do it, you can’t meditate yourself out of this evil fallen twisted world. If there is coming judgment, God’s gonna judge us all and your meditative practice and your Eightfold Path and your Four Noble Truths will not save you on that day. The only thing that’s gonna save you is the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now this is going to be a topic that I’m going to be discussing a lot more. I might actually make an entire kind of mini documentary here where we’re gonna go through it all. But I just wanted to quickly put this out there in this video series for anyone who’s dabbling into Buddhism might be falling for these lies that Buddha taught the same thing as Jesus. It’s simply not true. They have completely different teachings. They are both teachers – one’s the true teacher and one’s a false one and the Buddha’s the false one. And they taught different things. The reason for suffering is completely different. Buddha taught Nirvana, which is a state of consciousness, a state of mind. That is the closest you could get to heaven in the Buddhist realm. Jesus actually talked about real heaven. It’s called Mount Zion where the King of Kings is there and there’s angels and it’s not just a state of consciousness where you just meditate yourself to. It’s a place that you’re gonna get to when you surrender yourself you receive the salvation that’s in Jesus Christ by faith. That’s how we get to eternity. Now keep in mind Buddha never really was about God, it’s more of a mind science, that’s what it is, and it’s a false one. Jesus taught the gospel and he taught the truth so I pray this was a blessing to you and have yourself a wonderful day stay vigilant and fear no evil.