By Steven Bancarz| As some readers may know, I used to be a New Age blogger with a website called “Spirit Science and Metaphysics.” Â This site was up and running for about 2 years, collecting over 100 million website views during that time. I was also a lead author on the Spirit Science website for a while. This website covered a wide range of New Age that I genuinely believed to be correct at the time.
I didn’t always believe this kind of material. Â I was actually born and raised in a Christian house, and was home-schooled under a Christian curriculum. Â I started to doubt the Christian worldview when I started to come across material and ideas that didn’t seem to fit with what I had been raised with.
The subject that started me down this path of independent research was ufology, alien abductions, and ancient astronaut theory.  This to me made me question the exclusivity of Christ and Biblical creation account all in one fell swoop, and so I began to go against the grain of what I had been taught and embrace other types of information.
Pyramid technology, pantheism, the Unified Field of consciousness, the pineal gland, astral projection, ancient astronaut theory, etc.  I would research this stuff endlessly and formulate my research to make it as well-organized and self-evident as possible.  I was fully convinced of these things and believed I had the philosophy and science to back it up.  I felt like was beginning to see the whole picture for the first time in my life.
I backed up my research with primary studies, peer-reviewed alternative journal articles, and proper referencing to attempt to justify a New Age worldview that contained some of the following beliefs:
That we are all God, everything in the universe is made up of God. Â That the soul lives on in a neutral spirit world before reincarnating and that psychic ability and phenomenon was safe and real. Â That past lives could give us insight into our personality, character, and life situation, etc. Â That Jesus was an ascended master of some kind who taught a universal path of enlightenment.
Christianity seemed naive
Did Christians really believe that, given all the world religions, only faith in Jesus as the Saviour for sins could bring us into relationship with God? Â How could they deny the divinity of life, of self, and the seemingly obvious fact that God is in all things? Â I was a pantheist at the time. Â Actually, more of a hard panentheist.
I thought of God as a universal being that was the destination of all different kinds of spiritual/religious roads, and that Jesus revealed a universal path to a higher state of consciousness unified with God.
But the person of Jesus wouldn’t leave me alone. Â I couldn’t explain him away sufficiently enough.
There was something about Jesus I couldn’t put my finger on that kept knocking at the back door of my conscience. Â I had to always try to explain Jesus away, account for what he said, and construct a worldview that accommodated him and his ministry in some way. Â He was just too powerful, too influential, and too special to simply write off as a mystic of some kind.
I wrote him off as a mystic, but I wasn’t fully satisfied with this explanation. Â There was something more going on here. Â And for some reason, I never wanted to fully read the Gospels to learn more about what he actually said.
Christianity seemed false to me, but Jesus was clearly a special historical figure who has left a powerful trail of evidence for his spiritual authority. Â It wasn’t just me who tried to explain him away, almost all New Age teaches MUST be able to provide some kind of an explanation of Jesus if they are going to be taken seriously.
My life as a New Age blogger
Eventually I created a Facebook page, and then a website. Â Starting in January of 2014, I launched “spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com”. Â My hobbies and practices turned into a career opportunity, so much so that I dropped out of my third year in University to pursue this work.
I was a full-time New Age blogger making a living off of teaching false doctrine.
In fact, my site was the largest New Age site in the world for a while. Â My site was predominantly New Thought, parapsychology, and alternative science, and it blew up very quickly. This was largely due to the fact that I had a lot of social media connections to other pages such as The Mind Unleashed, Spirit Science, and Collective Evolution who would deal share deals with me on their pages.
I was making well into 5 figures a month on this blog.  This is what 200k website views a day on an ad-optimized site will get you apparently.  As a 21 year old at the time, I was excited of course.  Cocky, arrogant, everything you would expect and more. I was driven, convinced that what I was teaching was true, motivated on my path, successful in my field.  I was literally the LEAST likely person to find Jesus.
I was more well-researched than any Christian I had talked to, I had a promising career ahead of me that was showing no signs of slowing down, and I had a new website/project I was about to launch that I was sure would have become a staple in the community.
The thing is, I believed my success was being caused by the universe agreeing with what I was doing.  This is taught in the New Age movement, that the “universe” is a guide and a care-giver.  I used to pray and thank the universe for giving me a chance to help enlighten people and wake them up into higher consciousness.
But during this time I was also extremely wicked. Â Full of greed, selfishness, and hardness. I was a compulsive liar, a cheater. Â But I was also greedy, egoic, vain, selfish, narcissistic to extents you wouldn’t believe. Â To extents I don’t feel comfortable sharing here, and may never feel comfortable fully sharing. Â Criminal. Â Darkened. Â Empty.
I was a lust addict and a slave to my own mind. Psychological programs were running in me that I felt I was a servant to. Â I didn’t feel I had any other choice because these programs were all that I knew. And this was all while working as a New Age blogger. Â I was a broken person hiding in secret sin who believed he had an airtight worldview.
I was 100% convinced of reincarnation and I even had several out of body experiences confirming to me that what I was researching was effective and bring my closer to uncovering the truth about the nature of reality.
But I felt terribly unfulfilled, to say the least. Â Something was off, messed up, and seriously missing from my life. Â My “spiritual journey” wasn’t bearing good fruit in my life. Â I was wicked, and I couldn’t get the person of Jesus out of my mind. Â All the NDE testimonies involving him, the conversion stories, the evidence that he held authority during spiritual attacks, the evidence for the resurrection.
When I gave my life to Jesus
My sin started finding me out and catching up with me. Â Plain and simple. Â I was being exposed in my relationships, my field of work, and everything was hitting me in the face all at once. I couldn’t fix myself. I didn’t even know the extent to which I was broken, but looking back it was greater than I realized at the time.
I was too depraved, too psychologically enslaved, too beat up from my past and too infected by my sin. Â This is when I decided to stop suppressing my spiritual intuitions about Jesus and decide to give him a chance and seek him out. Â So what did I do? Â Not much.
I said a prayer (with my Christian parents), I went to a church service that night, and went back to writing New Age-esque articles and living in sin. Â I had some slightly new orientations towards sin and spiritual things, but nothing changed in my life. Â I wanted to give Jesus more of a chance than I had, since blocking him out clearly did me no good.
This time I was open and not closed. Â I wasn’t going to try to make excuses for my apostasy, or explain away Jesus as something that he never claimed to be. Â I was going to be open to Jesus however he is and whoever he is. Â To the Jesus who revealed himself in the New Testament.
It wasn’t until a few weeks after when I had to come to terms with the people I had hurt that I made that decision that I fell on my face before Him just weeping to Him, hoping He would hear me and forgive me. My life was pretty much in ruins, along with my psychology and emotions.
I was telling him I was sorry, I give in, I need him, I need a sign from him, and that I am done being the lord of my own life all at the same time. Â It was the first time I ever really repented and pushed into him. Â I was just done and wanted Him.
And when I did this, the spiritual atmosphere started to change. Â Not a minor change, not a change of emotion, but a change in the spirit around me. Things were not the same around me in the spirit. Â His presence started to fill the atmosphere and the horizon and the air became thick and heavy with his glory. Â It was a personal, divine, authoritative presence all around me. Â I could not stand up. I tried and I couldn’t. Â I knew it was Jesus, but didn’t know he could be known this way.
The Jesus of scripture. The Jesus who I suppressed in unrighteousness. Â And I was interacting with His Spirit, and it was absolutely undeniable.
My spirit and mind was coming into alignment with the reality of who He is and let me just say this.  When we come into his presence, all doubts fade away.  It’s done.  Whatever you think you knew goes out the window.  You know the truth and it’s right in front of you.
You know He is Lord of everything, especially you. Â You know everything in creation is under His feet. Â You know He is sovereign.
You know he loves you and has deep concern for you. Â But for me what stuck out was how I knew exactly where I stood in relation to Jesus, and where Jesus stood in relation to the world.
He was King, I was a sinner.  The universe was subject to Him. I knew that it was this way.  I was overwhelmed with this feeling that He was God over me and everything around me.  Jesus is Lord.  It is just that simple.  Jesus is Lord.
He stood over everything in creation and everything in creation seemed to pay him honour in that moment. Â The wind through the leaves and the sounds of the crickets seemed to point to him and glorify him, which really did a number on me because I was able to see how ever nature seemed to respond to his presence.
This is why I say I encountered Him, because I did. Â It may sound strange, weird, or unbelievable, but this is the best way I can describe what happened. Â I was confronted with the Lord, as hundreds of millions had been before me. Â He revealed Himself to me, and he has lived inside my spirit ever since and has not left me since that day.
What happened after this?
Light bulbs were going off like crazy as the Holy Spirit started to show me the truth about the New Age topics I was involved with. Â Realizing the carefully crafted approach of occultism under the guise of a universal love, seeing the same patterns and traditions repeating themselves in every culture EXCEPT the people of scripture. Â Seeing that inter-dimensional aliens denied Jesus not because they wanted me to evolve but because they wanted me to die in my sins.
Seeing how everything in the New Age oriented away from Jesus and towards false theology on purpose. Â Not subtly, but explicitly denying Jesus and brushing him off on purpose. Â The list is endless.
I quit my job as a New Age blogger the next day. Â Sold my house and car. Â Moved back in with my parents. Â Started going to an amazing local church. Â Got baptized. Â And started getting to know Him as I started facing my wounds from my past for, really, the first time ever.
It was also put on my heart by the Lord to create this website to bring together things I learned from my past to help make the Christian faith as rational and intelligible as possible to the unbeliever. To provide reasons for faith and resources for those who are genuinely and sincerely seeking for truth.
In case you haven’t seen it before, here is my testimony summarizing my journey through the New Age movement to Jesus Christ (filmed over a year ago):
Jesus is real. Â He loves you, died for your sins, is Lord over all creation, and wants to spend eternity with you. Â We were born for relationship with God, and we have relationship with Him through Jesus Christ.
Any objection you can think of will be addressed here thoroughly and clearly because you deserve to know the truth.  In fact that’s why Jesus said he came, to testify to the truth.  He claimed to be the embodiment and standard of truth.
What blew me away was the fact that we can know Jesus is real personally because His Spirit enters into ours when we believe on Him and are saved. Â We receive an indwelling of the Holy Spirit who affirms and confirms to us the person of Jesus. Â A personal presence where there was once nothing in us. Â It’s more spiritual than anything I had every practiced or been involved with in my entire life.
I’m not hallucinating, the disciples weren’t hallucinating, Paul wasn’t hallucinating. Â Hundreds of millions throughout history weren’t hallucinating. Â The tomb was found empty, the disciples saw the risen Jesus, Jesus has been moving in the world ever since and has proven Himself to be exactly who He claimed to be.
The intellectual objections to Jesus have all been satisfied. Â Really, they have. The real question is, when are you going to come to the cross and accept the free gift of salvation?
