These links circulated between TM Centers:
Mahesh Yogi to be cremated in Allahabad Feb 11
(Insiders say his body will be lowered into the Ganges, not cremated)
This was broadcast on Stern's Daily show on his Sirius satellite radio show
Tribute from Chopra
The Des Moines Register
Has the world gone mad? (duh) Where is the critical analysis of this man's life, activities, the multi-billion dollar global org?
Listen to Howard Stern. Did MVED pay him? Stern sounds like Travolta praising Scientology. Am shaking my head in bemusement.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Thursday, February 07, 2008
An Ex-TMer Remembers the Maharishi
A former Transcendental Meditation teacher I've known over the Net for some years wrote me this morning. Very moving.
by William W. Eberwein
I spent 13 years with Maharishi. Several friends wrote to tell me of his passing. I wrote a few words in reflection.
MMY died today. He had been predicting it for a few weeks. Missed a few "drop the body" dates, and finally succumbed to whatever ailed him. He was 91.
A huge part of my life. I feel about him the way Dean Martin did about Jerry Lewis. Best thing that ever happened to me was meeting him. The second best thing was leaving him. I met him in 1971, was "initiated" personally by him into the teaching profession in 1972, taught around 500 people "the technique" and established several centers, and was program manager at the 'TM TV station' in Los Angeles, spent several 6-months retreats with him, and left the movement (as we called it) in 1985.
He was an enigma. Claiming to be a world teacher, his real aim was to re-elevate Indian culture and influence. He often spoke in harsh terms about the Chinese, and was dismissive of any claims from other traditions until they had been veda-ized. Even science, which he used to underpin his meditative practice, was seen as the sterile though poetic expression of the Life Force -"The Science Of Creative Intelligence." In the last 15-20 years, all of the programs were explicitly "Indian" - from foods and dress codes, to program names. Schools have been set up in India to train young boys into the priesthood. They must be genetic Indians to have the pure sage-capacity, it seems.
He never taught morals or ethics, and often gleefully counseled us to break laws if it served the purposes of world enlightenment. It was thought that meditation would naturally cause one to live in harmony with nature - and that proper civil laws were derived from nature. Therefore, any requirements or ethics were a "waste of time." When enlightenment dawned, you would naturally be a good citizen.
"Lie to them!" he told us when he made us teachers of TM. "An elephant has two sets of teeth: one to show and one to chew with!" So we lied about the matras - the names of Shiva - and how we selected them - simply by age - and the goals of meditation, thinking we were serving a higher truth. An odd man.
"Move the money from SIMS to IMS (two training organizations set up in the early 1970's) until the audit is complete, then move it back." When we told him that this was illegal, he snapped, "It's my money!"
"Go past the passport gate and then hand your passports through the fence to those still here," he told us, when many of us had exhausted our six month visas in Switzerland . Those who were leaving would pretend to be those who were staying. This was pre-9/11 and very easily accomplished.
"Start being late and losing their videotapes," he told us at KSCI - the TM TV station - when we wanted valuable air-time back from the Koreans, to whom we had sold it months earlier. We now wanted the prime hours for our own broadcasts, but had signed contracts. "Make them responsible for breaking the contract. They're only Koreans."
He was very conservative in the 1970's, telling us to cut our hair, allow ourselves to be drafted, and "listen to your parents." As time went on he drifted to the left, mostly due to health-food concerns that irradiation and genetically modified food was vibrationally damaging to the soul, and the accompanying conspiratorial charges that big government and big corporations were intending to enslave people by weakening them with altered foods. Queue the Twilight Zone music.
Most of his big initiatives were accompanied by wild esoteric prophesies. If we don't get 1000 people to move to Iowa, nuclear war will start. A demon is just outside the solar system, and is about to move the world into "Kali Yuga" (the dark ages) unless we have a facility built in India . He would simultaneously inspire the faithful with declarations that "The Age of Enlightenment has dawned!" or is in "Full Sunshine!" which we could see if we could only open our eyes. Visiting the various Maharishi websites reveal that there is a currency and a King of the Enlightened world, to which other meditators must bow and pay homage. One staggers under the audacity of the enterprise.
I should write about the good times I had - which would be like the starry-eyed idealists who became Marxists until they started seeing the bodies pile up. Yes, yes, lots of days sipping coffee until dawn in a bohemian apartment, reading utopian poetry, and chasing coeds with Daddy issues. Waking up at dawn to paint signs and march against "the machine," throwing rocks, the tang of tear gas, and the wild glee of having the press bringing pressure to have charges dropped.
So there were days with the other flower children, feeling we were saving the world. Sipping herb teas and reading Upanishads until dawn, but the same coeds. Giving lectures on meditation, and chanting in an exotic foreign language, chided by the world in their “ignorance” of the beauty of our message. We felt anointed.
In the end, like the radicals who grew up and rejected Marxism and revolution – I wish I would have joined the Army, gotten married much younger, and taught more kids how to throw a curve ball. Spent those wild years in domesticity and talking to my father.Listening to him. And wish I would have read the book of John, and followed the carpenter from Galilee much earlier.
This isn’t regrets. Just a statement of acknowledgment of where the truth lives.
William W. Eberwein
Drugs, Fraud and the Murky Past of the Beatles Guru
DRUGS, FRAUD AND THE MURKY PAST OF THE BEATLES GURU
by Simon Edge
1312 words
7 February 2008
The Daily Express
(c) 2008 Express Newspapers
The Maharishi, who died this week, believed wealth was corrupting but it didn't stop him amassing an incredible fortune from meditation or exploiting the fame of his celebrity disciples
HE LIKED to tell people: "I am a monk, I have no pockets." That may technically have been true - his trademark white robe never looked as if it had a hidey-hole for a wallet - but the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was not as uninterested in wealth as he claimed.
When he died this week at the approximate age of 91, the so-called "giggling guru" had plenty to laugh about in financial terms. His own spokesman admitted recently that his personal assets were worth between £300million and £600million.
The long-haired, bearded Maharishi (a Hindi word meaning "great seer"), who shot to world fame in 1967 when the Beatles went to hear him speak about the technique he called transcendental meditation, had built up a vast global corporation. Based in a former Franciscan monastery on the Dutch/German border, his business empire included the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, a bewildering variety of online "vedic" and open universities, a Maharishi Institute of Management in India, a 24-hour global satellite television channel and a network of New Age health centres and companies selling massage oils, books, CDs, courses and spiritual consultations.
He memorably added to the gaiety of politics when he set up the Natural Law Party of Great Britain. It fielded an astonishing 310 candidates at the 1992 general election, who preached the benefits of yogic flying - a technique they declined to demonstrate for voters, instead making do with a cross-legged, frog-like hopping.
The party reached its polling high when it attracted 400,000 votes across the EU in the European elections of 1999, as well as the symbolic boost of coming second to Labour, well ahead of the Conservatives, in a local council ward in Lancashire. He also set up a 1billion fund in the US which he said would enable 40,000 flying "vedic pandits" to create world peace.
THE Maharishi was disheartened to discover that Americans were not very interested in his ideals. As he told the interviewer Larry King: "I lack only 1billion to make the world a better world... But I realised later that I was talking to this capitalist country. Unless they get something privately themselves, they'll not indulge into it." Whether you see him as a well-meaning crackpot or a self-serving fraud, it's hard to believe that such a figure could hold the world in thrall in the Sixties and Seventies.
After travelling on the "mystical express" with him from Paddington Station to Bangor in North Wales, the Beatles spent a month the following year at his ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.
George Harrison remained an admirer and a funder, as did singer Donovan and filmmaker David Lynch, relationships that he was brilliant at exploiting. In 1975, Time magazine put him on its cover, surrounded by psychedelic flowers, under the slogan: "Meditation: The Answer To All Your Problems?" Paul Mason, author of the biography The Maharishi, says the essence of his original teaching was not so daft. "He cobbled it from traditional sources and his own inspiration and basically it
worked.
"I learned the technique in 1970. People in that era were looking for expanded happiness and they were doing it with all kinds of drugs. He was saying you could get high without drugs. It was a very attractive proposition." But the other side of that legacy, he says, is the bizarre, quasi-religious organisation the Maharishi built up - and the way he financed it. Initially he taught his meditation technique - which involves two 20minute sessions a day, focusing on one word or
mantra - for free. But when he arrived in the US in the Sixties he started charging a fee. "He quickly changed from a wandering monk who didn't charge anything to a salesman charging a week's wages, " says Mason.
The steep fees were not the only complaint about the man who was born Mahesh Srivastava - although Mason says he later changed his name to Mahesh Prasad Varma, after an uncle he went to live with - around January, 1917. When the Fab Four stayed at his ashram overlooking the Ganges, they wrote songs including Revolution, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Blackbird.
But they left after a row with the guru over his treatment of 19-year-old Hollywood actress Mia Farrow, who was also staying there.
She accused the Maharishi - a professed celibate - of making a pass at her and fled to America. When the Beatles heard about it they departed in solidarity; John Lennon was so disgusted he wrote Sexy Sadie, a bitter satire on the guru (although Harrison later apologised to the Maharishi).
His disciples have always dismissed the story. Two years ago New Age writer Deepak Chopra said there was an entirely different reason for the pop stars' departure: "What isn't generally known is that the Maharishi had got fed up with the Beatles taking drugs. They were smoking ganja and taking LSD. He hadn't come across anything like that before." Farrow herself angrily hit back, telling an interviewer: "Chopra should talk about what he knows. I was there. There were no drugs at the ashram; those guys were not kicked out. Ringo left because of the flies, I left for my own reasons and the other guys left because they just got bored. George stuck it pretty close to the end, along with [my sister] Prudence." Whatever happened that year, Mason says the allegations of sexual misconduct have never rung true. Unlike the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, he says the Maharishi did not seem motivated by base desires.
"People rightly or wrongly have the idea that he was a sexy old man but few if any of his close followers would concur with that.
He really wasn't a sexual guy. He wasn't motivated by money for its own sake either.
"The great lure for him was exposure.
He liked having people sitting round listening to him and saying, 'Oh great master'. He wanted to be a messiah." The rot really set in, Mason says, when the guru started developing new messages. "Once you learned meditation you didn't need the Maharishi any more, so he resorted to making people come back for new products. Yogic flying was part of that but it was also a sign of dementia. They were promising that people would fly and nobody was flying. It was a farce."
YESTERDAY the website of the Maharishi Open University proclaimed: "Heaven is applauding and welcoming His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi." His followers on earth include graduates of his networks of universities who invoke quantum physics to justify their belief that 40,000 people can harness energy from the collective human conscience to levitate and thereby bring world peace.
Mason predicts that this group will fall apart sooner rather later.
"His contribution was that he woke people up to the idea of finding inner happiness and strength but the price we pay for his contribution is the weird cult business enterprise he has forced upon us, which will likely last but a few years after his passing." Aside from that dubious legacy, the Maharishi made one final claim to fame. In a rare interview two years ago, he was asked if he regretted his involvement with a group that brought him to world prominence.
He retorted angrily: "I did not become great by association of the Beatles. Forget about it!" The world famous foursome, it transpired, should be grateful to him.
"If at all, the Beatles became substantial due to my contact, " he concluded.
Terms of use (c) 2008 Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive LLC
(trading as Factiva). All rights reserved
Paul Mason - author 'The Maharishi: the Biography of the Man who Gave
Transcendental Meditation to the World - Evolution Books, UK
by Simon Edge
1312 words
7 February 2008
The Daily Express
(c) 2008 Express Newspapers
The Maharishi, who died this week, believed wealth was corrupting but it didn't stop him amassing an incredible fortune from meditation or exploiting the fame of his celebrity disciples
HE LIKED to tell people: "I am a monk, I have no pockets." That may technically have been true - his trademark white robe never looked as if it had a hidey-hole for a wallet - but the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi was not as uninterested in wealth as he claimed.
When he died this week at the approximate age of 91, the so-called "giggling guru" had plenty to laugh about in financial terms. His own spokesman admitted recently that his personal assets were worth between £300million and £600million.
The long-haired, bearded Maharishi (a Hindi word meaning "great seer"), who shot to world fame in 1967 when the Beatles went to hear him speak about the technique he called transcendental meditation, had built up a vast global corporation. Based in a former Franciscan monastery on the Dutch/German border, his business empire included the Maharishi University of Management in Fairfield, Iowa, a bewildering variety of online "vedic" and open universities, a Maharishi Institute of Management in India, a 24-hour global satellite television channel and a network of New Age health centres and companies selling massage oils, books, CDs, courses and spiritual consultations.
He memorably added to the gaiety of politics when he set up the Natural Law Party of Great Britain. It fielded an astonishing 310 candidates at the 1992 general election, who preached the benefits of yogic flying - a technique they declined to demonstrate for voters, instead making do with a cross-legged, frog-like hopping.
The party reached its polling high when it attracted 400,000 votes across the EU in the European elections of 1999, as well as the symbolic boost of coming second to Labour, well ahead of the Conservatives, in a local council ward in Lancashire. He also set up a 1billion fund in the US which he said would enable 40,000 flying "vedic pandits" to create world peace.
THE Maharishi was disheartened to discover that Americans were not very interested in his ideals. As he told the interviewer Larry King: "I lack only 1billion to make the world a better world... But I realised later that I was talking to this capitalist country. Unless they get something privately themselves, they'll not indulge into it." Whether you see him as a well-meaning crackpot or a self-serving fraud, it's hard to believe that such a figure could hold the world in thrall in the Sixties and Seventies.
After travelling on the "mystical express" with him from Paddington Station to Bangor in North Wales, the Beatles spent a month the following year at his ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas.
George Harrison remained an admirer and a funder, as did singer Donovan and filmmaker David Lynch, relationships that he was brilliant at exploiting. In 1975, Time magazine put him on its cover, surrounded by psychedelic flowers, under the slogan: "Meditation: The Answer To All Your Problems?" Paul Mason, author of the biography The Maharishi, says the essence of his original teaching was not so daft. "He cobbled it from traditional sources and his own inspiration and basically it
worked.
"I learned the technique in 1970. People in that era were looking for expanded happiness and they were doing it with all kinds of drugs. He was saying you could get high without drugs. It was a very attractive proposition." But the other side of that legacy, he says, is the bizarre, quasi-religious organisation the Maharishi built up - and the way he financed it. Initially he taught his meditation technique - which involves two 20minute sessions a day, focusing on one word or
mantra - for free. But when he arrived in the US in the Sixties he started charging a fee. "He quickly changed from a wandering monk who didn't charge anything to a salesman charging a week's wages, " says Mason.
The steep fees were not the only complaint about the man who was born Mahesh Srivastava - although Mason says he later changed his name to Mahesh Prasad Varma, after an uncle he went to live with - around January, 1917. When the Fab Four stayed at his ashram overlooking the Ganges, they wrote songs including Revolution, While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Blackbird.
But they left after a row with the guru over his treatment of 19-year-old Hollywood actress Mia Farrow, who was also staying there.
She accused the Maharishi - a professed celibate - of making a pass at her and fled to America. When the Beatles heard about it they departed in solidarity; John Lennon was so disgusted he wrote Sexy Sadie, a bitter satire on the guru (although Harrison later apologised to the Maharishi).
His disciples have always dismissed the story. Two years ago New Age writer Deepak Chopra said there was an entirely different reason for the pop stars' departure: "What isn't generally known is that the Maharishi had got fed up with the Beatles taking drugs. They were smoking ganja and taking LSD. He hadn't come across anything like that before." Farrow herself angrily hit back, telling an interviewer: "Chopra should talk about what he knows. I was there. There were no drugs at the ashram; those guys were not kicked out. Ringo left because of the flies, I left for my own reasons and the other guys left because they just got bored. George stuck it pretty close to the end, along with [my sister] Prudence." Whatever happened that year, Mason says the allegations of sexual misconduct have never rung true. Unlike the cult leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, he says the Maharishi did not seem motivated by base desires.
"People rightly or wrongly have the idea that he was a sexy old man but few if any of his close followers would concur with that.
He really wasn't a sexual guy. He wasn't motivated by money for its own sake either.
"The great lure for him was exposure.
He liked having people sitting round listening to him and saying, 'Oh great master'. He wanted to be a messiah." The rot really set in, Mason says, when the guru started developing new messages. "Once you learned meditation you didn't need the Maharishi any more, so he resorted to making people come back for new products. Yogic flying was part of that but it was also a sign of dementia. They were promising that people would fly and nobody was flying. It was a farce."
YESTERDAY the website of the Maharishi Open University proclaimed: "Heaven is applauding and welcoming His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi." His followers on earth include graduates of his networks of universities who invoke quantum physics to justify their belief that 40,000 people can harness energy from the collective human conscience to levitate and thereby bring world peace.
Mason predicts that this group will fall apart sooner rather later.
"His contribution was that he woke people up to the idea of finding inner happiness and strength but the price we pay for his contribution is the weird cult business enterprise he has forced upon us, which will likely last but a few years after his passing." Aside from that dubious legacy, the Maharishi made one final claim to fame. In a rare interview two years ago, he was asked if he regretted his involvement with a group that brought him to world prominence.
He retorted angrily: "I did not become great by association of the Beatles. Forget about it!" The world famous foursome, it transpired, should be grateful to him.
"If at all, the Beatles became substantial due to my contact, " he concluded.
Terms of use (c) 2008 Dow Jones Reuters Business Interactive LLC
(trading as Factiva). All rights reserved
Paul Mason - author 'The Maharishi: the Biography of the Man who Gave
Transcendental Meditation to the World - Evolution Books, UK
David Lynch on MMY "dropping the body"
David Lynch's Guru and his Art
interview by Claire Hoffman (MSAE alum)
interview by Claire Hoffman (MSAE alum)
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
Special Broadcast on Maharishi Channel
A special message by His Majesty Maharaja Nader Raam announcing the departure of our most eternally beloved His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi to heaven.
This special broadcast including the message, Guru Puja and chanting will continue repeatedly until further notice at http://www.maharishichannel.org on Channel 3.
His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi always saying "Jai Guru Dev", "Vijayante Taram".
Jai Guru Dev
This special broadcast including the message, Guru Puja and chanting will continue repeatedly until further notice at http://www.maharishichannel.org on Channel 3.
His Holiness Maharishi Mahesh Yogi always saying "Jai Guru Dev", "Vijayante Taram".
Jai Guru Dev
New York Times obituary of MMY
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Spiritual Leader, Dies
February 6, 2008
(A LOT was edited from the original version, for obvious reason. -g)
February 6, 2008
(A LOT was edited from the original version, for obvious reason. -g)
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
Rumor: Maharishi Mahesh Yogi Dies
I have received a number of email reporting the death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, founder of the Transcendental Meditation Org, a few hours ago at Vlodrop. Some posters on FairfieldLife are also reporting this.
We will post a confirmation once we have one. This is a sad day for many in our community. Please be kind to one another.
J.
KnappFamilyCounseling.com
We will post a confirmation once we have one. This is a sad day for many in our community. Please be kind to one another.
J.
KnappFamilyCounseling.com
Monday, February 04, 2008
Beam Me Up, Shruti
The Economic Times
NASA to Beam a Beatles Number
4 Feb, 2008, 0359 hrs IST,
For Alien Ears
Today is the 40th anniversary of the day the Beatles recorded their psychedelic song “Across the Universe” in
And this year the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) is observing the 50th anniversary of its foundation. To commemorate all three anniversaries, NASA has decided to beam across the universe today the Beatles’ song recorded 40 years ago.
The music will be digitalised and beamed through NASA’s deep-space communications network on a 431-light-year journey to the North Star, Polaris, where it is scheduled to arrive in 2439. The song has an Indian connection since it was created at the time the Beatles were learning Transcendental Meditation from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Which explains the salutation Jai Guru Dev,
That was also the time the Beatles were experimenting with psychedelic drugs like LSD. Which could explain the lyrics “Words are flowing like endless rain into a paper cup.../Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes.../Limitless undying Love which shines around me like a million suns/It calls me on and on across the universe...”
Lennon said he wrote the first line one night in 1967 in response to his wife “going on and on about something. I kept hearing these words over and over, went downstairs and it turned into some sort of cosmic song.”
Forty years later, Beatles’ DVD producer Martin Lewis suggested that NASA beam the song since its lyrics breathed friendship and harmony. With ISRO scheduled to launch its first unmanned lunar orbiter this year, maybe Chandrayaan-1 could also serenade the moon by beaming the music of Bismillah Khan playing Raga Durga on the shehnai. “Even if the world ends, the music will still survive,” Khan would say.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
Betrayal Trauma: A New Model for Transcendental Meditation Abuse?
I have been reflecting lately on both the extreme denial that active cult members exhibit and the extreme reaction former members experience after leaving their cult. Margaret Singer, PhD, believed former cult member's reactions were largely grief based. More recently, Colleen Russell, LMFT has developed phases of loss and grief that cult members experience.
I think these models capture only part of the truth, because like most current academic models of cult involvement, they are based on the thought reform or "brainwashing" model. While I can readily see the characteristics of thought reform present in most cults, I've come to believe it doesn't capture the intensity of cult experience fully. Robert J. Lifton developed the model after his work with American veterans "brainwashed" in North Korea. But unlike brainwashed soldiers who knew who their enemy was and fought being brainwashed, we as cult members eagerly sought the "knowledge" or "truth" our cults dished out. We invited them into our minds, made them comfortable, and begged for more. The co-option of our rational thought processes was therefore all the more swift and complete than brainwashed soldiers.
Lately I have been exploring the concept of "betrayal trauma," a concept introduced by Jennifer J. Freyd, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, in 1991. Psychological trauma is severe and enduring damage to the mind and brain that occurs due to a traumatic event, traditionally defined as an experienced or witnessed threat to life or sexual integrity. Most of us have heard of trauma in relation to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, experienced by war veterans or rape victims. Since the '90s, the definition of trauma has been expanded to include betrayal trauma. Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or institutions we depend on for survival, such as parents or churches, violate us in some way. Examples of betrayal trauma are childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.
It was Carl Jung who long ago postulated the concept of God as a personified parent-figure. It's my hypothesis that the guru, cult leader, or cult organization functions as a parent-figure for deeply involved members. If this is true, when we come to suspect that the guru has betrayed us — whether rightly or wrongly — we may come to experience betrayal trauma as if abused by a parent. The primary initial effect of this betrayal may be denial — in which we are faced with facts too painful to accept, so we reject them violently, insisting they are false even despite overwhelming evidence. When cult members do come to accept they have been betrayed, the results may be overwhelming grief and rage — and dissociative phenomena such as amnesia, "spacing out," depersonalization, and pseudo-personality (similar to multiple personality).
I suspect that both the denial of those who remain cult members and those who come to believe they were betrayed by the guru are examples of betrayal trauma — even though they may occur well outside of childhood. Particularly suggestive are the symptoms of dissociation that both sufferers of betrayal trauma and cult veterans experience.
In my experience, many, if not most, psychotherapists not experienced with cults don't get cult abuse trauma and brush it aside. My clients may have felt judged, ridiculed, or ignored by the conventional therapists they approached for help in the past.
Psychotherapists at first resisted the PTSD concept because their training led them to believe primary trauma could only come from childhood. This is one reason that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder took some while to be accepted by the mental health community — adults were not supposed to experience trauma. Eventually they came around to the idea that a "life-threatening" or sexual attack could cause lasting trauma — lasting for decades — much like childhood trauma. (Note that many survivors of cults did in fact endure physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that causes PTSD.) But mental health professionals have remained conservative about accepting cult abuse trauma. I think this is a mistake. Many of my clients report that their cult years were much more formative than the family or religion they were brought up in.
The treatment for dissociative disorders is well-established. There is hope — and success — when you work with a counselor experienced with cult abuse trauma.
John M. Knapp, LMSW
KnappFamilyCounseling.com
I think these models capture only part of the truth, because like most current academic models of cult involvement, they are based on the thought reform or "brainwashing" model. While I can readily see the characteristics of thought reform present in most cults, I've come to believe it doesn't capture the intensity of cult experience fully. Robert J. Lifton developed the model after his work with American veterans "brainwashed" in North Korea. But unlike brainwashed soldiers who knew who their enemy was and fought being brainwashed, we as cult members eagerly sought the "knowledge" or "truth" our cults dished out. We invited them into our minds, made them comfortable, and begged for more. The co-option of our rational thought processes was therefore all the more swift and complete than brainwashed soldiers.
Lately I have been exploring the concept of "betrayal trauma," a concept introduced by Jennifer J. Freyd, professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, in 1991. Psychological trauma is severe and enduring damage to the mind and brain that occurs due to a traumatic event, traditionally defined as an experienced or witnessed threat to life or sexual integrity. Most of us have heard of trauma in relation to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, experienced by war veterans or rape victims. Since the '90s, the definition of trauma has been expanded to include betrayal trauma. Betrayal trauma occurs when the people or institutions we depend on for survival, such as parents or churches, violate us in some way. Examples of betrayal trauma are childhood physical, emotional, or sexual abuse.
It was Carl Jung who long ago postulated the concept of God as a personified parent-figure. It's my hypothesis that the guru, cult leader, or cult organization functions as a parent-figure for deeply involved members. If this is true, when we come to suspect that the guru has betrayed us — whether rightly or wrongly — we may come to experience betrayal trauma as if abused by a parent. The primary initial effect of this betrayal may be denial — in which we are faced with facts too painful to accept, so we reject them violently, insisting they are false even despite overwhelming evidence. When cult members do come to accept they have been betrayed, the results may be overwhelming grief and rage — and dissociative phenomena such as amnesia, "spacing out," depersonalization, and pseudo-personality (similar to multiple personality).
Betrayal trauma theory posits that there is a social utility in remaining unaware of abuse when the perpetrator is a caregiver (Freyd, 1994, 1996). The theory draws on studies of social contracts ... to explain why and how humans are excellent at detecting betrayals; however, Freyd argues that under some circumstances detecting betrayals may be counter-productive to survival. Specifically, in cases where a victim is dependent on a caregiver, survival may require that she/he remain unaware of the betrayal. In the case of childhood sexual abuse, a child who is aware that her/his parent is being abusive may withdraw from the relationship (e.g., emotionally or in terms of proximity). For a child who depends on a caregiver for basic survival, withdrawing may actually be at odds with ultimate survival goals, particularly when the caregiver responds to withdrawal by further reducing caregiving or increasing violence. In such cases, the child's survival would be better ensured by being blind to the betrayal and isolating the knowledge of the event, thus remaining engaged with the caregiver.
Freyd, J. J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
I suspect that both the denial of those who remain cult members and those who come to believe they were betrayed by the guru are examples of betrayal trauma — even though they may occur well outside of childhood. Particularly suggestive are the symptoms of dissociation that both sufferers of betrayal trauma and cult veterans experience.
In my experience, many, if not most, psychotherapists not experienced with cults don't get cult abuse trauma and brush it aside. My clients may have felt judged, ridiculed, or ignored by the conventional therapists they approached for help in the past.
Psychotherapists at first resisted the PTSD concept because their training led them to believe primary trauma could only come from childhood. This is one reason that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder took some while to be accepted by the mental health community — adults were not supposed to experience trauma. Eventually they came around to the idea that a "life-threatening" or sexual attack could cause lasting trauma — lasting for decades — much like childhood trauma. (Note that many survivors of cults did in fact endure physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that causes PTSD.) But mental health professionals have remained conservative about accepting cult abuse trauma. I think this is a mistake. Many of my clients report that their cult years were much more formative than the family or religion they were brought up in.
The treatment for dissociative disorders is well-established. There is hope — and success — when you work with a counselor experienced with cult abuse trauma.
John M. Knapp, LMSW
KnappFamilyCounseling.com
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