It took this former Divine Light Missionary months to rebuild his capacities of thought.
"After I finally broke the reflex of meditating, I found I was going through another stage where my thoughts were like a very weak telephone signal," he said. "Normally, when you're thinking, you're with your thoughts; they're right where you're talking from. In this case, however, my thoughts were like way off over there, way out yonder, very faint. I really had to pay attention to them to hear them at all."
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The Eastern religious cults are not the only ones that employ techniques to put the mind on hold. The international Christian cult called the Way uses the Pentecostal practice of speaking in tongues. A young woman who spent several years in the Way explained the cult's highly developed method of teaching its members this technique of spiritual "possession."
"The first class is twelve sessions long," she said. "It's a whole buildup to get you to the point where you believe you'll be speaking in tongues. You go to their fellowships and they call on people who have already had the classes to speak in tongues and then interpret and prophesy. It's like kindergarten. When you hear it enough, you finally learn how to do it. When I finally started to do it, there were no ecstatic moments. I had been told for twelve sessions what it was, so it was no bolt of lightning. I could control it. I could start it and stop it. It's kind of funny, now that I think back on it."
Her instruction in tongues appeared to be a more methodical version of the learning process Marjoe described to us. However, once she mastered the basic sounds and patterns of speech that made up, in this instance, something resembling a Middle Eastern nonsense language, the leaders of the Way issued a familiar command to this young woman and other followers.
"We were told to do it 'much,'" she recalled. " 'Speak in tongues much,' was the phrase, and that meant as much as you could, whenever you weren't talking or reading the Bible. It wasn't out loud, it was in the mind. It was no more than a silent chant, like the Krishna mantras, only we were just babbling in tongues. Toward the end of my involvement with the Way, I was doing it all the time without being aware of it. I would forget every once in a while, but as soon as I caught myself not doing it, I would make myself do it. It's weird; it's something that gets out of control. The only real thinking you do in the group is about God and the things you are taught, but all your thinking automatically goes together with speaking in tongues."
After her deprogramming, this former member still experienced difficulty with the tongues habit.
"When I got out of the group it was still going on in my mind. I couldn't go to sleep without saying it. When I tried to stop myself from speaking in tongues and couldn't, I knew I was in trouble. Finally, I developed my own way of breaking it. When I listened to someone talk, I formed their words in my mind. I'd concentrate on every word that came out. I'd make mental images and spell their words out to keep from straying. It took me a good six months before it was completely gone."
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The Unification Church has also developed its own form of meditation. It is called "centering," a process that corresponds closely to Robertson's category of Christian meditation.
A former Moonie described for us how centering focuses on the specific teachings of the church to the exclusion of all other thoughts and feelings.
"Centering is centering yourself on Moon's definition of God as the church gives it to you," he said. "You're instructed to concentrate on the thinkings of the church at all times and take the upper hand in any threatening situation. You are to assume dominion over the people you're around, because you're the enlightened one."
Instead of jamming the mind by endlessly repeating mantras and chants or focusing on their breathing or heartbeat, Moonies control their thought processes at a higher level of mental activity. Every person who is not a fellow cult member, and every social, religious, and political institution that lies outside the cult's domain, is portrayed as a representative of Satan's world. Moonies focus on this belief, along with other church doctrines, to the exclusion of all other thought. In this way, centering may achieve two purposes at one time: it may neatly prevent the individual from thinking independently, and it may add a larger element of intellectual and social control to an already airtight web of domination.
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Like most cults, Erhard Seminars Training attacks the process of thinking head on. Over the course of the sixty-hour training, est leaders focus on thinking as the cause of their trainees' problems. Est's lectures and processes provide trainees with alternatives to thinking as it is customarily defined, using basic techniques that still the activity of the mind. Throughout the training, est keeps up its own form of indoctrination, urging individuals to refrain from the activity that is causing all their problems and, instead, to simply "experience" life itself.
We spoke with a recent est graduate about this curious distinction between "experience" and thinking.
"Thinking is the enemy," he said flatly. "Thinking is absolutely the enemy to me because it is a barrier to experience. Thoughts are not based on truth; they're based on tapes, things from the past. People are such machines, they let their thoughts run their lives rather than their experiences."
As this man, a professional in his late thirties, explained it to us, est appears to view the process of thinking essentially as tape recording. It declares the mind a storage vault of troublesome tapes that clog the essence of pure experience. Erhard's pop philosophy works like a charm for individuals fleeing their pasts, as it does for those whose route to pleasure is simply ignoring the things that trouble them. Ironically, the est process of "encountering" seems to do exactly the opposite, bringing the trainee's entire past to the fore until his or her "tapes" become strained to the point of snapping.
With est's philosophy of pure experience, we come full circle in our interpretation of information disease, through the techniques of chanting and meditation, religion, and therapy back to the starting point of experience itself. Est trainees seek a state of raw, unmediated experience which they consider the healthiest level of human existence. By most standards, est is not a cult, but it offers the best example of the pervasiveness of America's runaway technology of experience. Est brings the process of not thinking to its logical conclusion. By slickly packaging concepts and techniques that have been roaming loose in our culture since the sixties, it offers its participants a fully rationalized, legitimized self-defense for shutting off the mind.
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What are the long-term effects of this widespread process of shutting off the mind? The best information available to us is found in the Krishna cult.
Late in our research, we interviewed a former Krishna 'brahmin,' a temple executive. As we talked, he gave us his view of how, in the early seventies, the once penitent International Society for Krishna Consciousness turned into a full-time book-distribution operation. Extravagant hardbound copies of the Bhagavad Gita, he said, complete with beautiful full-color engravings, were handed out to devotees of Krishna for public sale, and experienced salesmen traveled to Krishna temples around the country instructing devotees in the techniques of salesmanship. According to him, in their unthinking state, the devotees remained perfectly willing to solicit up to twenty hours a day; but there were some who, over time, were no longer able to do so.
As our contact described it:
"There were two vegetables at our temple, people who were really bad off from chanting. We'd have to spend about two hours a day chanting our rounds to Krishna, but they would take four or five hours to get through them. There's not a whole lot of work to do around the temple, so we would just let them chant all day. Eventually these people deteriorated to the point where they couldn't get their chanting done. They would become slower, and we couldn't get them to work or do anything. They were basket cases."
According to him, over time, extended chanting may lead to complete dissolution of the mind.
"The vegetables are amazing," he said. "Once t
hey get to a certain stage they can become very destructive. The guy who brought me into the cult was a college graduate in philosophy, and he used to teach classes every day. He went nuts, started saying weird things, and began screaming at the women all the time. The last I heard of him, he'd gone to the Krishna commune in Africa."
In the course of his official duties, this former brahmin spent several months at a Krishna communal farm in West Virginia. A meeting place for Krishna leaders, from his description, it appears that it may also house members who are among the cult's worst casualties.
"There are people cracking all the time," he said. "Either they become vegetables or crack violently."
After more than a decade, the Krishna cult no longer attracts much attention in America. The public and the media have become inured to the Krishnas' strange appearance and practices, preferring to focus on the newer and more sophisticated cults. Nevertheless, according to reports from around the United States today, Krishna members continue to crack. Amidst the current epidemic of snapping, they are perhaps an intimation of what lies ahead.
"There were a couple of nuts in our temple," recalled another ex-Krishna we interviewed. "We had a crazy girl there who would go nuts occasionally and start throwing knives at people. Some people would have attacks and become very violent. Others would suddenly just turn on you and scream and yell. After a while you just accept it. You accept insanity as a matter of course."
14 Snapping in Everyday Life
Consciousness is a social product
-- B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity
And what about the rest of us -- those of us who have not even remotely considered participating in a religious cult or mass therapy and, in all likelihood, never will? Why should we be concerned about snapping?
The answer is, because it's all around us. The threat of snapping extends far beyond America's religious cults and mass therapies, beyond their dramatic rituals and intense experiences to the overwhelming pressures of everyday life. These forces, too, may cause profound although often less immediately observable changes in awareness, as well as sudden drastic alterations of personality. Just as moving land masses may shift gradually and imperceptibly and then give way in a massive earthquake, so, too, the sheer mass and movement of experience -- of information -- that has engulfed our culture in recent years may bring about changes in individual personalities, making us less aware, more vulnerable to manipulation, and, ultimately, less than fully capable of thinking and acting as human beings. Already, the forces are at work on each of us in our daily lives, and they are mounting.
A great deal has already been written about how the accelerating rate of drastic change and the spread of mass production, mass marketing, and mass culture have altered our environment, our lifestyles, and our personal relationships, and how the overwhelming amounts of information each individual is called upon to process every day push his body to the limits of endurance and adaptability. Physicians have identified the various health hazards that may result from this kind of extraordinary stress: headaches, ulcers, heart disease, and possibly, as recent research suggests, many forms of cancer as well. Psychologists and sociologists have analyzed the effects of increasing personal and social pressures in terms of work, marriage, family life, and an individual's sense of identity in "post-technological," "neo-tribal" America. Culture watchers such as Alvin Toffler have even foretold the approaching menace of "future shock" and other ills caused by unrelenting change and stimulation. Throughout this decade, Americans have been warned about all these threats to their health, happiness, and prosperity. They have been offered countless recipes for living, strategies for coping, and exercises for relaxation. Ironically, this abundance of warnings and threats alike have become simply more of the same -- a further onslaught of information, more experience for the brain to metabolize. On top of everything else, this stepped-up assault on our modern minds may lead to still another form of snapping, one that is much less tangible yet clearly observable in America today. It is a form we call snapping in everyday life.
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Everyone, without exception, is susceptible to snapping. The pace and stress of life in the seventies is enough to do the job. The physical stress which has been singled out as the potent tool of "brainwashing" in cults is so much a part of our daily lives that its impact on each individual's ability to think and feel may be easily overlooked. What with job, family, travel, and entertainment, most of us can go for days, even weeks, and save scarcely a moment for reflection. Yet, an individual who simply consumes each experience in this way, like junk food or candy, may over time become inattentive, passive, and totally open to the barrage of intellectual and emotional propaganda that comes at him daily. This propaganda urges him to surrender to the seductive enticements of our consumer society, to the manipulation of his opinions and beliefs, and to the overpowering weight of new and traditional images, roles, and rewards which, in the seventies, make promises of fulfillment that our society cannot keep.
This flood of information and experience makes up the constant, comprehensive assault on human awareness that confronts most Americans each day. Yet, the more experience an individual consumes the more information he tries to process -- the more confused he may be, causing his mind to become disjointed, scattered, unguarded, and vulnerable to suggestion. Many cults make use of this principle when they concoct exotic ritual environments combining strange music, lights, incense, and foreign languages that may confuse and control the potential convert's awareness. This same principle of distraction, however, can be identified in countless everyday forms: in television commercials that use beautiful models and actresses to confuse the viewer's desires, as well as extravagant supermarket displays that bombard the senses with dozens of competing brands of the same product. These effects are deliberately subtle, yet they represent a few little ways in which our individual awareness is divided and conquered every day, dazed just long enough to slip some message or suggestion past our normally more attentive decision-making processes.
In every area of our daily lives, other distractions can make us even more vulnerable. Perhaps the most common threat occurs when the driver of a car becomes lost in conversation or reverie and can drive for city blocks or country miles completely oblivious to the road ahead. This familiar form of "highway hypnosis," like the sudden attacks of vertigo that are not uncommon to long-distance drivers, may in fact be responsible for thousands of accidents each year. This modern peril, like the other examples cited, is not caused by the sheer quantity of massive "information overload" but by the brain's constant need for variety, for change and stimulation -- but only within manageable limits. In contrast to these threats of boredom and repetition, information too varied, too new and foreign, experience for which the brain has no previously established or related patterns, may also take an individual completely by surprise. Shocking news -- the death of a loved one or some accident or tragedy, for instance -- may evoke many of the symptoms of the snapping moment, and a further quite harmless but unusual experience in that context can be seriously disorienting. A man who has just learned that he has lost his job, for example, then comes home to find his living room flooded with water, might have a massive snapping experience if, say, a lost partygoer appeared at his door in a gorilla costume. In a more serious example, one truly baffling element introduced into an otherwise ordinary environment, a vacationers' chartered airliner being hijacked by a group of armed terrorists, for instance, might leave many passengers stunned, groping for a response -- and also extremely suggestible, and open to mass hysteria and individual withdrawal.
Today such threats of increased vulnerability to suggestion are ever-present. Yet mere stress, shock, and surprise do not tell the complete story of snapping in everyday life. Here, as in many cults and groups, the attitudes of the sixties and their development in the seventies play leading roles in the drama. Everyone is now capable of imagining a richer personal life. People have been given new models of
awareness, wholeness, fulfillment, completion, and the realization of their human potential. They have been exhorted to discover their capacity for joy, to have fun, to indulge in play, to nurture their innate spontaneity and creativity. Many have learned how to express private feelings and share their most intimate fears. The consciousness explosion, which is already past history, has left its mark on every aspect of our society. Even if some people were not directly touched by that cultural upheaval, even if they managed to isolate themselves from the civil rights movement, rock music, long hair, psychedelic drugs, antiwar demonstrations, and women's liberation, these changes have affected them through the mass media, the arts, fashion, and America's shifting political climate. To a great extent, the sixties' famous "generation gap" has been bridged. Yet in the seventies a new rift, a kind of "sensibility gap" that cuts across all age groups and social classes, is also being spanned, as each day more Americans become aware of new possibilities for experience. Even for the most tradition-bound individuals and communities, the search for happiness and fulfillment within the traditions of work, marriage, and family that comprise the base of American life is no longer enough. Today, people want to feel their satisfaction. They want to consciously experience their happiness. To compound the challenge, most Americans still strive to incorporate their growing awareness into the fabric of their daily lives, to cultivate a new state of consciousness without destroying everything that has gone before.
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