Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
I disagree. We were told to get out of our mind, period. No qualifiers. As with most of the Lee corpus, what may have originally related to scripture, however faintly, was dumbed down to the point of caricature, or worse. Shouting slogans became the way "out of our minds".
And we did a lot of jumping and shouting and arm-waving to manufacture an exalted state (at least, my group did. And I saw it in Anaheim too). So don't be so quick to try & distance yourself from pentecostalism. As Drake says, "That wasn't my experience."
And the videos I saw smuggled out of the PRC are even more damning when I consider what role that shouting slogans for hours had in producing ISIS-level craziness. Talk about an emotional frenzy. . . it was pretty clear on the video tape that they were suppressing the mind.
Again, go to the Acts 15 conference for comparison. Did the person who shouted slogans the loudest prevail? No, they had what most of us would call a discussion
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The key thing is not the outward manifestation per se but the cause of that - is it emotional or is it spiritual? Even Jesus jumped up and down with joy on occasion. And for prophets in the Old Testament it was customary to strip naked and their behavior was bizarre.
However in Pentecostalism it is noticeably caused by the drumming rhythms and beats (similar to African tribal frenzy) and the expectation for God to "work a miracle" and the Spirit to "come down". Somehow their experiences are correlated with the quality of the music and sound effects, that without them they would not be able to produce those experiences. In fact Pentecostals are unable to produce these experiences without some kind of worship music playing in the background. This shows that they seek to touch their emotions to gain the Spirit. It's all about creating the "atmosphere". In the local churches the piano players can be more of a distraction to the atmosphere than anything else - there is really little comparison. "Stop playing honky tonk when I'm trying to touch the Spirit".
In contrast a spiritual person can access the Spirit of God through prayer or God's Word, and experience positive emotions, any time, regardless of outward circumstances. This can result in ecstatic behavior but like the Old Testament prophets comes through activity of the Spirit alone and not external stimuli.
To be clear, I don't believe there's a problem with using emotions to touch the Spirit, but the number of Kundalini videos on youtube makes me think it is dangerous if taken too far.