Yoga, Tai Chi and Reiki: A Guide for Christians

In December 2012 rolled from the presses in Australia a sensational book, YOGA, TAI CHI, REIKI. Its subtitle? A GUIDE FOR ALL CHRISTIANS. Its message? Like other Western countries, Australia in very short time had taken to its ample, uncritical bosom a trio of Eastern physical activities. In origin one was Indian/Hindu, the second was Chinese/Tao and the third was Japanese/Buddhist. All that most Australians taking up yoga, tai chi or reiki wanted as results of their classes were relaxation, better health and/or benevolent ability to hand-heal themselves or others. *** Author Max Sculley is a non-clerical Roman Catholic de la Salle teaching brother based in northeastern Brisbane, Queensland, Australia but drawing many real-life experiences and opinions from southern Sydney and New South Wales. He warns that yoga, tai chi and reiki are spiritually dangerous. When learned as their founders intended they be learned, the three Oriental disciplines develop in practitioners altered states of consciousness, dimmed logical thinking, weakened will power and growing passivity, all of which combine to create in the advanced learners pretnernatural strengths and skills, to allow uncanny explorations of past and future, astral travel and virtually invite evil spirits to take over minds and bodies. *** Brother Max Sculley notes common characteristics of the three Asian disciplines. (1) All emphasize slow, deep breathing with a view to bodily relaxation and greater control of body by mind. (2) All three push for emptying the mind of extraneous, distracting thoughts and images. (3) Each is rooted in a religion or philosophy (or both) different from and in some ways hostile to traditional Biblical Christianity. (4) Each discipline trains learners to search for and find ultimate reality within the practitioner. Spend enough time doing tai chi and related chi kung (qigong) and you will likely become more physically powerful than most people dream possible and you will, by your own unaided efforts, find the Divine within you. (5) The Divine force within you is also in and behind the universe -- call it chi or something else -- it is eternal and above all IMPERSONAL. That is the most fundamental difference from Christian teaching of a triune PERSONAL God incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth. *** Perhaps 20 to 25% of the text of YOGA, TAI-CHI, REIKI goes to concrete case studies from life designed to show that these Asian practices are not merely dangerous if pressed to extremes but intrinsically, INEXTRICABLY wrapped in anti-Christian philosophies or theologies, are "occult" and that they open practitioners to "mental illness, demonic influence, spirit possession and occult bondage" (Preface, p 9). *** Brother Sculley retells in five pages the story of Italian-Chinese onetime world kung fu champion now English Christian evangelist Tony Anthony as told in Anthony's 2004 autobiography TAMING THE TIGER. During years of training beginning at age four with his mother's Chinese father, Tony was immersed in Shaolin Temple-derived martial arts and related practices. He believed that he was learning to unleash "seemingly supernatural power within yourself" (Ch. 6, p. 83). He learned that the chi of chi kung and tai chi was "the god within, the root of my power" (p. 84). He learned to sense the movements of an opponent in the dark, to distribute chi throughout his body to wherever needed. At age 17 he survived (many do not) the "test of the tunnel" and walked on bare feet along the edge of a razor sharp eight-meter long blade. He became bloodthirsty and violent and ended up in Cyprus's Nicosia prison where a Christian evangelist convinced him that "Kung fu might CLAIM to be A way; but he (Jesus) is THE way. Just accept it Tony" (85). And on and on Max Sculley piles up case studies, including some of demonic possession. *** YOGA, TAI-CHI, REIKI is notably alarmist. But the text is well illustrated, the case studies documented and the theses are rooted in Old Testament and New Testament warnings to be on guard against evil spirits and not arrogantly to presume by unaided human exertion to reach levels of unity with a (false, impersonal) god that are the free gift of the one true God. -OOO-