In each ease, Sargant holds, the dramatic conversions that follow these experiences are the product of a physiological dysfunction of the brain which renders it receptive to new ideas and physically incapable of judging or evaluating the wisdom or correctness of those ideas. Sargant's argument is impressive but, as he acknowledges, by no means original. The first data on the subject was compiled early in this century by the Russian neurophysiologist I. P. Pavlov. Pavlov's studies of the effects of stress on the higher nervous systems of dogs provided Western science with an entire terminology of psychological malaise. He accurately mapped the successive stages of "protective inhibition" of brain function as a response to overwhelming stimulation, and he described the physiological and behavioral effects that resulted from it.
Following in the medical tradition of Sargant and Pavlov, those members of America's mental health profession who have begun to investigate the cult experience have confirmed the physiological effects of stresses such as reduced sleep and caloric intake on the nervous systems of cult members. Verifiable links have been discovered between the cult state of limited awareness and a decrease in peripheral vision. Connections have also been established between physical stress, poor diet, and fatigue and the disruptions of the endocrine system found among cult members that may cause women to stop menstruating and men to lose such secondary sex characteristics as facial hair and a deep voice. These insights have been helpful in treating the physical damage caused by extended periods of cult life, but they lead away from -- not toward -- a fuller understanding of the effects of cult techniques on the mind.
This medical approach also ignores situations in which intense spiritual experiences and sudden conversions are brought about in individual and group settings that present no physical stress or deprivation whatsoever. Our own research revealed numerous instances: Jean Turner's first encounter high, for example, and, most spectacularly, Sally Kempton's audience with the Swami. In these contexts, the only elements that can be identified as triggering the overwhelming individual reactions are a few well-placed words or, at most, some intangible quality in a rather exotic and alien environment.
The two most popular theories of brainwashing, Lifton's and Sargant's, offer no explanation for these experiences. In the literature of brainwashing, the only related insight can be found in a lesser-known study by a social psychologist named Edgar Schein. Schein, like Lifton, participated in the first army studies of brainwashing. In contrast to his medical colleagues, Schein's primary focus was on the psychological force inherent in the group processes used by the Chinese to change beliefs, attitudes, and opinions. He based his theory of "Coercive Persuasion" on models of small-group interaction developed by M.I.T. social psychologist Kurt Lewin (today referred to in human potential circles as "the father of the encounter group"). Schein's contribution, however, gets lost in the plethora of opposing references he brought together, and his overriding emphasis on the element of coercion renders his work particularly inapplicable to our investigation.
Studies of brainwashing, while historically significant, fall far short of explaining the phenomenon we call snapping. The Chinese program of Thought Reform was designed simply to change political belief and induce full cooperation among Chinese citizens and captive Westerners. What is happening in America today is very different. Instead of physical coercion and threats of death, the minds of American citizens are being swayed and altered by the promise of exciting new adventures in human awareness. While some of these dramatic experiences may be created by certain kinds of physiological stress and group pressure, no one has been able to explain the profound effects and personality shifts often produced by cults and mass therapies: the disorientation and delusion found among many est graduates we spoke to, the sensation of experiencing higher realms of consciousness widespread among Transcendental Meditators, the ongoing ecstasies common to offer mass-therapy participants and many Born Again Christians, and the bizarre trancelike states that characterize many cult members.
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The only other tool available to explain these individual responses in terms familiar to professionals and the general public is hypnosis, a widely used but little-understood technique for influencing the mind. Introducing the concept of hypnosis, however, only serves to compound the problem at hand, for the age-old art remains the black sheep of Western science. Although the techniques and effects of hypnosis have been widely demonstrated and reproduced, science has yet to explain the prodigious power of suggestion that enables a skilled hypnotist to put people in trance states where they may perform feats of superhuman strength, demonstrations of complete imperviousness to pain, and acts of memory and imagination that defy all waking capability.
Many have tried and failed to explain hypnosis in scientific terms. As early as 1755, the notorious F. A. Mesmer, the Viennese physician who pioneered the development of modern hypnosis, offered a theory of "animal magnetism" to explain the phenomenon, for which he was condemned as a fraud by the most revered minds of his day (among them, the American statesman and scientist Benjamin Franklin). In fact, the effects of hypnosis have nothing to do with man's animal or biological nature. It has been shown repeatedly that animal response to the techniques of hypnosis is almost exactly opposite to that of human beings in every instance. While fear and physical stress may produce a temporary state of catatonic immobility in dogs, sheep, and other animals, this effect has nothing to do with the modern practice of hypnosis, although many scientists, including Pavlov, have made the mistake of explaining hypnosis in terms of animal response.
In recent years, science has come to understand hypnosis a little better, and most of our previous beliefs about it have been directly overturned. The myth of the trance state has been shattered; the previously held notion that an individual must be put to sleep in order to be hypnotized has been categorically disproved. The old dangling watch fobs and swirling spirals of the mesmerist served merely to distract the subject's attention, rendering him more susceptible to suggestion and command. Gone, too, are the naïve convictions that hypnosis cannot be put to harmful use and that an individual will not perform an act under hypnosis that is contrary to his conscious nature. Traditionally, practitioners of hypnosis have exercised extreme caution and responsibility in the use of their mysterious skill, but many admit that, through lies and carefully contrived suggestions, a hypnotist could prompt his subject to commit any action, even a crime, in the firm belief that he was performing the act to accomplish some greater good.
In these latest findings about hypnosis and the power of suggestion there are important clues to the destructive effects of many cult and group techniques, but -- like "brainwashing," "ego-destruction," and "coercive persuasion" -- the term "hypnosis" tells nothing about the dramatic alterations of awareness and personality and the lasting disruptions of thought and feeling we learned about from participants in cults and mass therapies. The techniques employed by cult and group leaders bear no resemblance to the classical induction of hypnosis, nor are the effects confined to simple trance states or feats of memory and imagination. Their attack is comprehensive and profound, not simply altering belief and behavior, as in brainwashing, but producing lasting changes in the fundamental workings of the mind. And their tools are those of everyday communication, ordinary skills, and natural abilities that have been honed to the sharpness of precision instruments.
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Invariably, in America, an individual's involvement in a cult or mass therapy begins with voluntary participation. He or she reads a handbill, engages in a conversation, attends an introductory gathering or lecture, accepts an invitation to a group dinner or cult feast. Then comes the decision to take up further offers to attend a weekend seminar, workshop, or spiritual retreat. At any time during these early stages of recruitment -- and throughout participation in the cult or group -- the individual's actions and responses may be artfully controlled without the use of physiological stress or any physical means whatsoever. In lieu of co
ercion or hypnosis, cult and group leaders use an altogether different class of strategies: they may misrepresent their identities and intentions; they may lie about their own relationships to their organizations; they may display false affection for the potential member; they may radiate spiritual fulfillment and happiness to the point where it has a profound impact on the individual they are confronting; or they may provoke discussion and debate, creating what Sargant calls "emotionally charged mental conflicts needing urgent resolution."
However, none of these ploys depends upon any form of physiological dysfunction in the nervous system or the brain to be completely effective and produce their most dramatic effects. On the contrary, whatever the ploys, their effectiveness depends on the normal functioning of the human brain in its capacity for communication -- without that, they would not work at all. At every stage of involvement, from initial contact through conversion to the most profound states of humiliation and submission, every consequence of cult and group participation that has been explained as a product of physiological stress may also be produced with equal intensity and reliability by means of simple techniques of communication: age-old tools of rhetoric and persuasion, refined methods of propaganda and mass marketing, and as yet little-understood elements of group dynamics and nonverbal communication.
There is nothing casual or informal about the manner in which these sophisticated techniques are employed, nor is there anything mysterious about the way they achieve their predictable and profound effects. Like the distracting watch fob of the mesmerist, the well-known physical stresses used by cult and group leaders serve only to weaken an individual to suggestion and command. Subsequent thoughts, actions, expression, and even level of awareness, however, are controlled by identifiable products of human communication. They are controlled by the specific beliefs, opinions, suggestions, orders, and feelings the individual receives from cult recruiters, lecturers, and others in personal conversations and group rituals and amidst the atmosphere of warmth, love, and total acceptance that is common to each of these diverse groups.
This process of communication reaches far beyond the mere exchange of spoken and written messages between individuals; this complex and sophisticated process controls both our bodies and our minds. Communication, in fact, governs everything we experience as human beings. It is the basic organic process that regulates the functions of our nervous system. The principles of communication that underlie Marjoe's rhetoric, Moon's persuasion and propaganda, and est's group dynamics are one with the natural laws that direct and control the flow of sensation throughout the body and the brain. Through this common process, acts of speech, from sermons to hypnosis to casual conversation, and every other form of communication may affect biological functions at their most rudimentary levels, as well as human awareness in its highest states of consciousness and spirituality.
With the widespread exploitation in our society of sophisticated communication techniques in religious rituals, group practices, and mass-marketing strategies, a new perspective is clearly in order, one rooted in the process of communication which has come to play such a tangible role in our daily lives. Since Pavlov's time, research in animal behavior has made significant contributions to our understanding of elementary human processes and responses, but today this body of knowledge alone no longer provides the necessary base for broader legal, psychological, or social interpretation. Inevitably, theories based on the study of lower organisms are doomed to fail as explanations for events and activities that are uniquely human. Very often they obscure our understanding of individual and social phenomena that have no counterparts in other species. Snapping is such a phenomenon, and in order to understand it, we must first recognize that human beings do not grow and develop in an unvarying world of animal behavior; they do so in a dynamic world of experience that shapes their awareness, their personalities, and their lives.
To reach the core of America's current epidemic of sudden personality change, we must go beyond brainwashing, beyond physiology and psychology, to the process of communication by which human beings exchange thought, feeling, and experience itself with one another. Communication processes account for Jean Turner's first "encounter high" as well as the roller-coaster ride of ecstasy, fantasy, and horrifying delusion she experienced after est. They offer a way to examine the entire course of Lawrence and Cathy Gordon's participation in the Unification Church, from Cathy's feelings of strangeness when she met her first Moonie to Lawrence's vision of death while out fund raising. Moreover, communication provides a way to understand Marjoe's seasoned ability to sway an audience to the point of emotional collapse, as well as an explanation for why Sally Kempton snapped in response to a few empty words from Muktananda. It also confirms why hundreds of cult members have regained their ability to think for themselves after answering Ted Patrick's pointed questions.
In recent years the term "communication" has been used to signify an expanding universe of activities, encompassing such varied disciplines as broadcast journalism and library science. Our aim, however, is not to explore communication in this catch-all sense. Throughout this book we use the term to refer to an identifiable set of human processes which may be clearly understood in the light of recent breakthroughs in physics, mathematics, and biology. With the aid of these basic sciences, we can now forge a new perspective on the phenomenon of snapping. We can build a bridge from our culture's unconscious robot models of personality and behavior to a new view of human beings based on human awareness and experience. The foundation of this bridge is located in the technical sciences of communication -- cybernetics and information theory -- and the first step in building it requires that we update our understanding of how communication processes affect the human brain and nervous system, the basic biological machinery from which our individual personalities emerge.
PART TWO
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A New Perspective
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10 Information
Information is information, not matter or energy.
-- Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics
Ironically, cybernetics and information theory, the new communication sciences which have given rise to America's space-age hardware and modern technology, offer us a natural point of departure from the robot model of psychology. It is this world of sophisticated machines, not the world of animals, that has been constructed in the image of man. From its raw materials, its basic principles and processes, we can begin to refine our understanding of snapping.
In every form of the phenomenon we can identify a common element, whether it be the most intense physical experience or the most evanescent spiritual moment, the most profound thought, the deepest emotion, or the most mundane phrase or fleeting image that sets off some massive, life-changing individual response. It is something called information. Information is what human beings are made of, not simply information in the everyday sense of the word -- news, facts, data, telephone numbers -- but information in its scientific sense, the substance that flows through the human brain and nervous system. Information, not matter or energy, is the stuff of human consciousness. It is the soul of communication and the key to the phenomenon of snapping. Before we can fit together the different pieces of the puzzle, it is necessary to explore the manner in which the brain receives and processes information. Only within the last few years have scientists even begun to comprehend this amazing process, and, as it turns out, it is not at all as they once suspected.
The concept of information grew out of the science, of cybernetics, one of the new aids to understanding which have been developed in recent years. Cybernetics does not simply represent an advancement in older sciences. It is a whole new field of inquiry, born in America during World War II when teams of leading scientists from a wide range of disciplines were brought together in an-out efforts to solve the concrete problems of modern warfare. Out of such practical engineering tasks as computing intricate enemy flight trajectories and designing tracking mecha
nisms for antiaircraft artillery emerged the first principles for the scientific study of communication.
Cybernetics, succinctly defined as the study of "communication and control in the animal and the machine," developed quickly into a broad science of automatic control systems: mechanical, electronic, and biological structures that regulate their own internal processes and correct their own errors in operation. The word cybernetics -- coined by Norbert Wiener, the brilliant mathematician from M.I.T. and the acknowledged father of the science -- comes from the Greek word for steersman and commemorates the earliest known cybernetic device: the automatic steering mechanisms used on ships which monitored the disturbances of wind and waves and adjusted the rudder accordingly to keep the ship on a steady course. In Wiener's terms, the vital element of "feedback" which guided the ship's tiller, like the beam of radar which fed instructions to the automatic antiaircraft guns he helped develop, supplied a "measure of organization" to the system that he identified as "information." Following the war, Americans began to receive the first fruits of these once top-secret labors, as a new generation of automatic, self-regulating hardware and appliances came to the marketplace to ease all sorts of daily chores. Early arrivals included fully automatic washing machines, self-triggering toasters, and electronic supermarket doors, each employing simple feedback devices that responded to some tiny measure of information.
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