Playing God, The Lust for Power – Part 5

By: Dave Hunt; ©2003

The belief that someone can create their own universe, or their own reality, within their own mind presents some serious problems for adherents. Nonetheless, many voices today are trying to tell us we are our own god, in charge of our own reality. Dave Hunt explains why this just doesn’t “work” in the real world.

Playing God, The Lust for Power—Part 5

Wonderful Truth or Cruel Hoax?

The goal of parapsychology is to prove that people do indeed have powers—that they are gods who create their own universe with their minds. Any child knows that is not true. Who walks in sunshine while the “negative thinkers” about him are in the rain? Who contin­ues to fly safely through the air on a plane that the other passengers and crew, because of their negative thinking, have conspired to “imagine” is falling from the sky? And if faith is a belief which creates by its own power, then the patients in mental hospitals ought to be giants of faith. They surely believe their delusions as strongly as the human mind can believe, yet their belief fails to produce the “alternate reality” of their madness.

Far from mentally creating reality, mankind has been struggling to discover the incredible secrets of a universe which is at once so awesome in size and yet so intricate in minutest detail that it reflects the genius of a Designer whose mind and creative power is infinitely beyond human capabilities. How could we possibly have created galaxies we don’t even know exist and black holes and an internal depth of unnumbered atoms about which we are equally ignorant? The simple truth is that natural events proceed on their course quite independently of the thoughts of puny man. To think otherwise is such folly that its persis­tence can only be the product of a delusion driven by the same blind pride that fueled Lucifer’s mad ambition to be “like the Most High.”

How cruel to tell Calcutta’s million beggars who are born and live out their miserable lives and die in its streets that their running sores, gnawing hunger, and poverty do not really exist, but have been created by their own “negative” thinking! There is no suffering, disease, or death; one merely imagines it is there. All one needs to do to change one’s experience of life is to change the way one perceives it. This is surely the cruelest hoax of all time.

Bringing God Down to Our Level

Most of those who teach that we can each create our own reality also theorize a Univer­sal Mind as the source of infinite power and knowledge. Oddly enough, this infinite Mind has no mind of its own but mirrors what we think. Most appealing of all, it does not reprove us for sin. No one expressed this delusion more clearly than Ernest Holmes, founder of the Church of Religious Science:

Man, by thinking, can bring into his experience whatsoever he desires….^[1]

We are co-partners with the Infinite… a Universal Creative Mind which receives the impress of our thought and acts upon it.

Because of Its very nature, this [Universal] Mind cannot act without an image of thought [supplied by man].^[2]

“Channeled entities,” no matter who they claim to be, consistently teach that we create our own reality with our minds. “Seth” (channeled through Jane Roberts), for example, declares: ‘You are given the gift of the gods; you create your reality according to your be­liefs….”^[3] Ramtha tells us, “Love yourself, you are God…. We create our own realities within which to express ourselves… and in which to evolve.” Again, Jon Klimo reminds us that this view “is virtually identical with… many other channeled materials.”^[4]

Consider the spontaneous ease with which lightning blacks out a city, a snowstorm closes roads and airports, or a tornado tears off rooftops—all of this and more not only without any help from human minds but in spite of both curses and positive affirmations. Then contrast this with the hours of seminars and self-hypnosis and subliminal suggestion tapes, the meditation and yoga, the positive declarations endlessly repeated—all of this intense effort aimed at “creating a new reality,” yet with so little visible effect. When a power failure blacked out one of her seminars, Shirley MacLaine led her audience of about a thousand in earnestly visualizing the problem being cleared up. The attempt failed to pro­duce a demonstration of what Shirley teaches, and the crowd of would-be gods, unable to dispel the darkness, had to go home.

Playing God Through Visualization

We have previously referred to visualization, the major occult technique for allegedly creating reality. David Yonggi Cho teaches that God created the universe through visualiz­ing it first in His mind and then manifesting it through the power of thought,^[5] and that we, through the laws of the “fourth dimension,” can do the same.

Cho insists that one cannot have faith except through visualizing that for which one is praying, and that through visualizing we bring this goal or object into being.^[6] However, as we have seen, we can only visualize the gross outline of a person or thing. The actual composition of cells and atoms is beyond our imagination. Our visualization could hardly be responsible for bringing into existence what we can’t visualize!

Of course, some forms of visualization (an architect visualizing the structure he is draw­ing, a reader visualizing the scene described in a novel, etc.) are legitimate. One enters the occult through using visualization to create reality or to contact spirit entities, including Christian attempts to visualize Jesus, or God.

Is the Universe a Hologram?

The modern development of holograms has supplied one of the major “scientific” argu­ments in support of the belief that we are infinite beings possessing infinite powers. A holographic image can hang in the air and be seen from all sides. Primitive ones were used in the Star Wars film series. The remarkable feature of a hologram is that no matter the number of pieces into which it is cut, each one contains the entire image.

Some theorists claim that the basic structure of the universe and all in it is holographic. If so, each of us is a tiny holographic image of the whole, containing within ourselves all wisdom, power, and knowledge that ever was or ever will be. Deepak Chopra declares, “If you examine yourself, you realize that we are all holograms—everything in the outside world is inside us.”^[7] It certainly does not follow from self-examination that we contain the universe within ourselves. On the contrary, it takes little reflection to recognize this idea as a delusion.

Nevertheless, the holographic theory has been embraced even by such top scientists as Brian Josephson, Nobel laureate in physics. On that basis, Josephson expects to explore the entire universe from the innermost depths of the atom to the farthest reaches of the cosmos by looking within himself through yoga. He has held this belief for many years now, but we still await the evidence.

What About “Ye Are Gods”?

What then did Jesus mean when He quoted Psalm 82:6, where God says, “I have said, Ye are gods”? Because He was testing the Pharisees’ comprehension of Scripture, Jesus didn’t quote the next verse: “But ye shall die like men.” It sounds as though being a god and death are related. Clearly, in reminding them that God had said they already were gods, Jesus was not calling men to become gods. We must go all the way back to Genesis 3:22 to find when and where God called men gods. There God says, “Behold, the man is become as one of us.”

It was Satan, not God, who had promised godhood to Eve—and not that she would be God, but “as [the] gods” (Genesis 3:5). Ah, there was the catch! There is only one true God. The gods are all false. They are the pretenders after godhood, the followers of Satan, who have believed his promise of godhood. These demonic beings are worshiped through idolatry. Speaking of “that which is offered in sacrifice to idols,” Paul writes that “the Gen­tiles… sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:19,20).

Every problem in the world today can be traced to Eden, when mankind became a race of godhood-seekers. Today we have nearly 6 billion such seekers on earth, all in conflict with one another, all seeking for the power to enforce their will upon others. Unless we abdicate the throne of our “godhood” and are reconciled to God through the sacrifice of Christ on the cross, we remain under God’s judgment for joining Satan’s rebellion. God warns: “But the Lord [Jahweh] is the true God…. The gods that have not made the heavens and the earth, even they shall perish from the earth, and from under these heavens” (Jer. 10:10-11).

God puts His finger on the root of every earthly problem: rebellious man, pretending to be a god, and claiming he can create with his mind. And He exposes the lie very simply: Obviously we have not created the heavens and the earth, but He has. The one true God declares unequivocally that all who claim to be gods but have not created the heavens and the earth shall perish! Yet Paul Crouch declares: “If we are not ‘little Gods,’ we will apolo­gize to you in front of ten thousand time ten thousand before the Crystal Sea!”^[8]

Notes

1. ↑ “The Viewpoint in the Science of Mind Concerning Traditional Beliefs” (Science of Mind Publica­tions); Ernest Holmes, The Science of Mind (Textbook), p. 20; cited in Science of Mind, Septem­ber 1983, p. 47.
2. ↑ Science of Mind, March 1978, “Victim or Master,” pp. 3-4.
3. ↑ Jane Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality (Prentice Hall, 1974), p. 509.
4. ↑ Jon Klimo, Channeling: Investigations on Receiving Information from Paranormal Sources (Jer­emy P. Tarcher, Inc., 1987), p. 43.
5. ↑ David Yonggi Cho, The Fourth Dimension (Bridge-Logos International, 1979), p. 43
6. ↑ Ibid., pp. 39-44, 64, etc.
7. ↑ Chopra’s Infinite, November 1996, p. 5.
8. ↑ Praise the Lord Newsletter, March 1993, p. 1.