In one of our most revealing interviews, a former Krishna devotee discussed the seductive nature of an ancient Hindu ritual,the cult draws upon in its regular devotion. For this individual, the experience took place on his first visit to a Krishna temple.
"They have a ceremony called 'artika,'" he told us, "where they offer a candle to their deities. They jump up and down and they dance and sing. I think it was probably the most far-out feeling I'd ever had in my whole life. It was the first time I'd heard anybody chant like that -- very loud, the 'Hare Krishna' mantra. Then they opened the doors and there were these deities, six of them. The wooden ones on the right didn't attract much attention, and three yellow ones on the left didn't either. But there was one deity in the middle which was supposed to be Krishna that I recognized from the books and literature I had been reading. It really came out at me. The statue was stark white and very colorfully attired. He was sort of in an s-shape, standing very casually playing the flute. That was when I had this incredibly bizarre experience. All at once, while we were dancing and chanting, there was something like a flash of light, except that it didn't really happen. It wasn't on a rational level at all. The deity seemed to move. I was dancing around and getting along in my chanting, and I focused my attention on this deity and it seemed to fill my mind completely. I stared at it for a minute, and it seemed to bore right through me. Physically, I felt separated from my body -- it was really strange. I felt like I was completely there and my body had been washed away. There was just sort of a link-up between me and the statue, as if everything else had vanished."
For this devotee, the snapping moment came up fast and hit hard. Its impact was overwhelming.
"The whole thing lasted maybe three seconds," he said. "I really have no idea because I lost all track of time. It was a new experience and I didn't know what to do with it. I didn't know if I wanted it or not. I was trying to resolve it, trying to analyze it and figure out why it happened, what it was." Finally, he drew the same conclusion as those around him.
"The whole thing was very intense," he said, "and I interpreted it as a powerful spiritual experience. That seemed like such a big thing; it was the main reason I joined the temple."
Another Krishna devotee we interviewed revealed the difference between a simple peak experience and the powerful 'artika' ritual used by the Hare Krishna to bring about conversion. She described her ecstatic snapping moment in a similar ceremony at another Krishna temple halfway across the country.
"I was with these devotees who were all the way they get in the 'artika,'" she said, "and I got all caught up in it just like everyone else. I was closing my eyes hard, trying to get that bliss and make it come; and it did, more or less. I felt like I saw a white light. I felt like I was going to explode. I guess you can relate it to a sexual thing, like a climax or something. Your mind has to be in a certain state of willingness to achieve it, then the chanting and the music and the incense and all those things just help to bring it on."
Looking back, this young woman told us how the entire 'artika' setting -- the bright-colored statues, the incense, and the chanting -- put her mind in the proper state of readiness for her intense snapping experience. She reflected on the way the cult leaders orchestrated and exploited the group frenzy.
"Right at the peak," she said, "the person who was leading the ceremony blew the conch shell; then everyone fell to the floor and started reciting their little prayers. Afterwards, everyone was really high. Some people were in a trance state. Others became very quiet. Then we all sat down and received a lecture. When we were totally drained, they poured in all the indoctrination."
The comprehensive sensory assault that culminates in a moment of snapping Filled with ecstasy and bliss is only one cult method used to bring about sudden conversions and transformations of personality. Other cults use less obvious methods to create a completely different type of information environment, yet their impact may be equally bewildering and profound. A former member of the Divine Light Mission explained to us how that Hindu cult combines fatigue, darkness, and ancient scripture in its solemn ritual of initiation.
"The initiation was held at three in the morning and none of us had had very much sleep going into it," he recalled. "The room was pitch black as the 'mahatma' read from the scriptures of the Divine Light, emphasizing that the light referred to was not allegorical but real light and that all religions have been based on the same mystical experience. He told us to concentrate on a point in our foreheads where our third eye was located, and he would come and channel the divine energy into us. He came swishing through the darkness. I felt his fingers on my eyes, and I saw a light that seemed to stab down from the outer darkness. It came from somewhere behind me and created a figure eight of pure, white light. It lasted for a brief period of time and I was blown away by it."
Afterward, this new disciple of the Perfect Master experienced some disorientation. Even as it was occurring, he sensed that something ominous had happened to his mind.
"After the initiation I went through a period of five or six hours in which I felt I was not really controlling what I was doing or saying," he remembered. "I felt like I was being spiritually controlled, like a marionette of some sort. It was very strange."
One of the most puzzling aspects oF the snapping moment is that, very often, it is not some overwhelming experience that sets it of but some tiny thing, a seeming irrelevancy that sparks a chain reaction of thought and feeling. A number of est graduates and encounter group veterans told us about some long-forgotten and inconsequential event that came stampeding to the forefront of their awareness at the prompting of their group leader. Many others pinpointed the start of their snapping experience as the moment they focused on a tension headache that developed in the course of their weekend ordeal. Still others, like Sally Kempton, told of a passing phrase or idea that set off a depth charge of emotional response.
There seems to be no limit to the number of settings in which the snapping moment may occur, From religious rituals to encounter groups, from public, stressful ordeals to private, stressless moments of relaxation and repose. We spoke with a suburban housewife in her mid-thirties, who described the disorientation she experienced in the privacy of her isolated New England home the First time she tried a meditation technique she read about in a book. Here, as in. other cases cited, that curious white light switched on at the precise instant of snapping.
"This particular technique recommended that you go into a closet," she said. "I put a chair in there and I sat up straight, trying not to think about anything. The idea was that if a thought came into your mind, you should just watch it, just see it come and let it go out without fighting it. Pretty soon, I found that time had disappeared. I came out of the closet and saw that two hours had passed, and it really blew my mind. I had a feeling that I was something other than my body, but other than my mind, too. I felt very light, and I remember after that being in the kitchen and reaching for some equipment and it seemed as if a big light suddenly flashed on in front of me."
This sense of timelessness is perhaps the most telling feature of the snapping moment, for to us the flash of images and rush of sensations that may take place seem clearly to describe a holographic process. Many of the people we talked to did their best to relate this burst of simultaneous experience which took place apart from their normal groundings in space and time. Yet in direct contrast, others told us of a snapping moment that was not instantaneous but drawn out. We heard from many individuals who, like Jean Turner after her second est weekend, came floating out of some cult or group on a magic carpet of bliss, only to experience a plunge into profound unhappiness and alienation after a period of several days, even months. Another ex-Krishna devotee described this delayed snapping response to us in vivid terms.
"When I left the temple that first night I went home and I was feeling really high," he told us. "I woke up Monday morning still feeling high. It was a little bit like a dope high or champagne. I was light-hea
ded, tipsy, but still in control of my faculties. I was really feeling good, and it lasted all morning, but about noon it just went boom! I just crashed. I was in school and I hit the pits. I'd never been so depressed in my life. Everything just went bang. I was disgusted. I couldn't do any work. I was completely out of it."
This young high school student's depression kept up all week. Throughout the period, he told us, he was confused and disoriented, once even losing control of his motorcycle on a ride down a familiar road. The following Sunday he went to the temple to attend the next Krishna feast.
"That whole evening is very, very blurred," he explained to us, straining to remember. "I had expressed my interest to somebody, and they immediately put me in a room with a couple of other devotees. They talked to me for about an hour, expounding about this and that, and I said that I really thought I should stay outside the temple, where I could make quite a bit of money. Then one of the leaders said, 'Don't worry about the money; somebody else can get the money. We want you inside the temple.' I went wild then, thinking, 'Wow, these people don't care about the money; they'd rather save my soul.' It was a subtle thing, though. I noticed they had convinced me, and I was really sort of surprised. I'd had no plans to stay. I'd even parked my car in a no-parking zone."
The delayed response of so many individuals is yet another dramatic indication of how some intense experience, emotion, or new idea may work its way into the organic whole of the mind. Across the spectrum of religious conversion, from the Christian Born Again moment to the Hindu rituals described in this chapter, snapping may be an instant and conscious change. Or, as in the Unification Church, an individual may be transformed over the course of an intense weekend, without ever experiencing that sudden break in the continuity of his awareness. Despite the differences, there are no contradictions among the various forms of snapping. Whether jolting and instantaneous or imperceptible and in slow motion, they may all be understood in our communication terms of information and experience, and each indicates a similar surrender of thought and will.
Until recently, there would have been no way to sift through the variety of personal accounts of snapping we have gathered together in this investigation. There was no formula available to explain how an infinitely complex convergence of physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences may build up, cresting in a comprehensive holographic crisis in the brain and resolving into what appears to be a whole new system of personality. In our attempt to grapple with this problem, however, a number of scientists pointed us in the direction of an exciting new method of interpretation. They suggested that it might help us picture the dynamics of these varied sudden leaps in human awareness and evaluate their significance in relation to one another.
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Within the past few years, a new mathematical perspective called catastrophe theory has been introduced and debated across a broad spectrum of scientific disciplines. Catastrophe theory is concerned with events that take place abruptly -- by fits, jumps, and starts, as one advocate expressed it. Throughout nature this type of occurrence is abundant. The physical world offers many examples of sudden or discontinuous transformations: earthquakes, cloudbursts, waves breaking on a beach. The movements of man take place with equal outbreak and surprise: stock market crashes, prison riots, and, of course, religious conversions. These events represent the abrupt resolution of conflict between steadily interacting and opposing forces. In seeking to understand the dynamics of this type of discontinuous change, René Thom, a French mathematician, developed the math and logic of catastrophe theory.
The precise "topological" mathematics of catastrophe theory would be nearly incomprehensible to the layman. Thom's basic model, however, may be described, and even pictured, with little difficulty. (See Figure 1, a highly simplified depiction of the folding wave-shaped form, showing the curving surface smoothly continuous at the far side and then appearing to break in a wavelike manner on the near side; the "catastrophe" or breaking point is where the path plummets downward over the crest.) The images of an earthquake or breaking wave are basic catastrophes of nature. They are products of dynamic forces -- migrating land masses, flowing water -- moving in direct opposition to each other. When the opposing forces of water meet and build up on a beach, for instance, with water both flowing toward the land and slipping back into the sea, they converge gradually, adding, subtracting, canceling each other out, until they cross a complex threshold of opposition and give way in the sudden, drastic breaking of a wave. On another scale, an earthquake too is the abrupt product of opposing forces, as the unseen pressure of moving and resisting land masses builds up to an obvious breaking point. That breaking point, the final push, is no stronger than the forces that have gone before, but the change in activity, the earthquake, is sudden and discontinuous, wildly out of proportion to the tiny event that set it off.
This sudden, drastic change is an event of nature called a "catastrophe." Another example would be the straw that broke the camel's back.
When it was first introduced, the idea of a theory of catastrophes caught the fancy of the media and the general public, many of whom hoped it would provide a method of predicting natural and economic disasters. As it turns out, however, Thom never intended catastrophe theory to be a tool of prediction, but rather a mathematical model and visual image that offers a way to understand the incalculable complexity of natural occurrences and living things -- exactly what we were looking for in our attempt to grasp the complexity of snapping.
As we began to explore catastrophe theory, several scientists cautioned us that it was a highly technical and controversial innovation. As we spoke with other scientists, however, and closely examined the underlying principles of Thom's work, we became more certain that catastrophe theory does indeed have its valid applications. One application in particular convinced us that catastrophe theory may be of genuine use in understanding the dynamics of snapping.
The most ambitious and promising applications of catastrophe theory to human affairs have been made by Professor E. Christopher Zeeman of the University of Warwick in England. In one model, Zeeman and British psychotherapist Dr. J. Hevesi offer a demonstration of catastrophe theory in action that is strikingly similar to the experience of snapping. Zeeman makes use of Thom's concept of catastrophe to study the affliction known as anorexia nervosa, or obsessive fasting, an emotional disorder found most frequently among adolescent girls who may be struggling to reconcile conflicting personal needs, family problems, and the normal social pressures of growing up. Anorexia usually begins as simple fasting, not extraordinary for a figure-conscious young woman. Unchecked, however, or taken to extremes, this harmless dieting strategy may cause a total degeneration of appetite, leading to states of profound emotional disturbance, starvation, and, on rare occasions, death. In its advanced stages, anorexia may also produce a violent counterreaction in which the individual will undergo periods of what Zeeman calls "obsessive gorging."
Zeeman likens the experience to one of Thom's elementary catastrophes, plotting the progressive stages of the disorder on Thom's basic three-dimensional model. On the folding, wave-shaped form depicted in Figure 1, the appetite may be systematically plotted as the product of opposing forces of hunger and restraint. As these forces draw the anorexic individual toward the crest of the catastrophe wave, the appetite may jump from more or less normal to, paradoxically, practically nonexistent; then some time later the individual may turn to compulsive gorging. Zeeman cites a sudden experience many sufferers of anorexia call "the knockout," when feelings of exhaustion, disgust, and humiliation sweep over them and cause them to crash abruptly from a mounting level of hunger to no appetite at all.
In treating this disease, Dr. Hevesi developed a form of trance therapy in which he offers his patients reassurance, reduces their anxiety, and gradually brings their appetites back to normal. In an article in Scientific American, Zeeman describes the observable moment of Dr. Hevesi's cure. It parallels the sudden snap of deprogramming (o
r in Figure 1, Sudden Moment of Recovery):
After about two weeks of therapy and in about the seventh session
of trance the patient's abnormal attitudes usually break down
catastrophically and the personality is fused into a complete whole
again. When the patient awakens from this trance, she may speak of it
as a "moment of rebirth."
Thom's catastrophe theory provides a near-perfect model of the entire anorexic experience: the abrupt change from dieting to fasting, the contradictory jump from fasting to gorging, and the miraculous two-step cure from anorexia through trance to "rebirth." It also supplies a graphic, three-dimensional image for the vivid terms in which victims of anorexia describe the experience of their illness, such as "knockout," "let-go," and "rebirth." The correspondence is startling between the catastrophic jumps that occur in anorexia netrosa and the abrupt changes in personality that take place in America's religious cults and mass therapies. The sudden changes in appearance and behavior and the instant transformation of lifelong patterns of thought, feeling, and relationship all suggest the catastrophic resolution of opposing physical, emotional, and intellectual forces. Moreover, the folding, wave-shaped catastrophe curve offers a three-dimensional image of the sudden, sweeping shift that characterizes the snapping moment when the flow of new information rises and crests to destroy and replace the old. In the face of the mounting catastrophe, these two natural and generally complementary processes of change and resistance are brought into direct opposition with one another. Obvious examples of this are an intense group encounter, a religious ritual, and a head-on personal confrontation. This battle of moving and resisting thoughts and feelings may end in a dramatic upheaval in the brain. In the snapping moment, we may presume, long-standing patterns of personality that have developed since childhood -- constituting one established, resisting whole -- may suddenly give way to an entirely new personality of sorts. This personality is made up of the mass of new information the individual has received in the comprehensive assault of alien and intense experiences impinging upon him with an immediate and overwhelming force. Old pathways in the brain may become disconnected and destroyed, or new pathways may be formed which suddenly override the old.
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