Snapping
Page 31
In addition, to counter what appears to be a massive, richly funded tide of exploitation of experience in our culture, we believe there is an urgent need for an equally ambitious campaign of public information and action. Further scientific research should be conducted aimed at providing the American people with detailed criteria that would go beyond the scope of what we have been able to present here for distinguishing between a valid religion and a cult and between a sound mental health therapy and a potentially dangerous form of physical and emotional abuse. Such efforts would also help clear up the confusion over deprogramming and provide guidelines for legal and medical intervention.
Undoubtedly, any action on these sensitive issues of religion and mental health is bound to cause legal battles, but the overriding imperative may be simply stated: somehow, through public guidelines, court precedent, or specific legislation, we as a nation should declare explicitly that no individual or organization may, by means of physical stress or any subtle or covert technique, impair, make captive, or destroy an individual's freedom of thought.
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However somber our message has been throughout this book, our investigation of snapping has not led us to draw entirely negative conclusions. There are also hopeful signs and extraordinary promises, for if there is one thing snapping reveals, it is that our human information-processing capacities, our individual abilities to think and feel, remain almost infinitely flexible throughout our lives. Although our culture now possesses the know-how and the tools to destroy human awareness, that knowledge may also be used to enable people to shape their own personalities, to cultivate their individual powers of thought and feeling, and to enhance, rather than impair, their abilities to perceive and respond to the world around them.
Individual growth and fulfillment need not be bound by traumas from the past. Our adult lives are not necessarily determined by how we were weaned or toilet-trained; no one has to suffer unrelievedly from the shocks of childhood and adolescence. As the mass therapies demonstrate, however recklessly, Americans now have a battery of techniques at their disposal with which to annihilate long-standing hurtful emotions and self-defeating patterns of thought. At the same time, there is no reason for an individual's humanity to be swallowed up by the process of change. A person's personality need not become a passive product of whatever environment he finds himself thrust into. His life is not required to fly off on a new tangent with every "rite of passage" or intense experience he undergoes. Once each of us grasps the larger significance of our natural capacity for change, we can protect ourselves from manipulation and control our own personal development, and even beyond this -- we can step into the process of our human evolution and direct the manner in which our extraordinary individual capacities of mind unfold.
Throughout the seventies some of these truly positive trends in personal growth have been overlooked or ignored. While the cults and mass therapies have been capturing the attention of the media, some of the founding figures of the human potential movement have remained faithful to its ideals and principles, nurturing the fundamental values of human development, shunning the fireworks of so many of their colleagues and disciples in favor of more thoughtful, thorough explorations of man's capacities. Amid the free-for-all, these elders of the movement, Carl Rogers, Jack Gibb, and others, pulled back from controversy, going about their own research in firm but quiet ways.
Toward the end of our stay in southern California, we stopped in to see Carl Rogers in his office in La Jolla. Rogers is perhaps the most revered survivor of the heyday of the human potential movement. Founder of the person-centered approach to psychotherapy which bears his name, and impressed by the demonstrated power of group dynamics, Rogers in the sixties had proclaimed the encounter group "the most significant social invention of the century." Now, a decade later, Rogerian therapy still holds fast to the goals of humanistic psychology.
When we called Rogers and expressed our interest in his view of the recent turns the human potential movement has taken, he granted us a few hours of his time just days after he had returned from a series of seminars in Brazil. At seventy-five, Rogers still displayed the grace of the humanist and father figure that he is. We found him tanned and healthy; thoughtful, relaxed, and pleased to share his views. As we laid out the general plan of our investigation, Rogers responded to our ideas, from the outset placing himself in firm opposition to mass therapies such as est which function on, as he put it, "intrusive" principles.
"I've never been through est," Rogers told us, "and I don't think I want to. Their goals are not too bad, actually, but their means are horrendously authoritarian. I feel that they have lost completely the distinction between means and ends.
"I've read a great deal of transcribed material of Werner Erhard's. There's a lot of rather rambling talk about how great it is to discover that you make your own reality and that you're responsible for your own life -- some of which I agree with, some of which I don't -- but nowhere does he mention the process by which you're supposed to arrive at that goal. In my opinion, that process is all-important."
The fundamental principle of humanistic psychology is that the process of an individual's experience is more important than any end-product of behavior. In contrast to est's intrusive style, Rogers described his method as "facilitative." Instead of aggressively confronting their participants, Rogers's group leaders consciously place the power and control of the group experience in the hands of each participant.
Rogers agreed with us that an authoritarian, intrusive group can produce dramatic changes in personality and that a religioua revival can bring about miracles of renewal and rebirth. But from his point of view, Rogers asserted, there is much more to personal growth than can be achieved by simply overwhelming the individual.
"It comes down to a question of your basic philosophy and intention," he said. "I think people like Werner Erhard and Billy Graham -- and I'm not trying to equate the two -- both know how to use mass effects to bring about very potent personal experiences. But these are not self-induced, they're mass-induced. Those kinds of conversions don't last very long unless you keep the person in the group that brought it about."
While he had been traveling around the world, however, Rogers admitted he had not been paying a great deal of attention to the ways in which the principles of humanistic psychology have been exploited in other brands of therapy and in the cults.
"I guess I hadn't realized myself how much the issue has become blurred in people's minds," he said frankly. "There has been an awful lumping together of anything that is a group. I think that it is a terrible thing to unnecessarily exert power over another person. The more you move toward power over others, the more potential for damage there is, and the more danger there is, as in the cults, that people may get caught in something they can't get out of. I think the goal in the cults and groups is to attribute personality change to something outside the individual. It's always, 'Look what happened to me!' -- whether it's because of Christ or Werner Erhard. The other kind of personality change, the kind I am concerned with, is a process from within. I did it. Others facilitated it, but I'm the one who did it. I'm the one who's in charge of it, and I'm the one who can determine whether it goes any further."
Rogers's insight that beneficial change rarely results from just a sudden moment of intense experience confirmed the message we had received from so many individuals who had learned that lesson the hard way.
The remainder of our conversation with Rogers was devoted to speculation along more hopeful and uplifting lines. We spoke of creativity, of trust, and of our culture's movement away from the "ultra-rational" toward inclusion of the emotional. To our surprise, Rogen's forward-looking approach to man's unfolding human potential incorporated an increasing interest in -- and regard for -- man's older intuitive powers. "We do have a kind of primitive wisdom that we've completely forgotten," Rogers told us, adding, "We need to get in touch with it again."
"If I were a young psychologist
today and I knew what I know now," he said, "I'd probably start looking into the psychic realm. I've never had any psychic experiences myself, but I feel there's enough evidence these things can happen that it bears looking into. In the future, I think the nonrational aspects of a person will come to be more honored and will prove to be more useful than we have any idea at the present time."
As it turns out, many young psychologists, and some older ones as well, have already set out in that direction. In contrast to the popular movement's misguided turn toward "intrusive" therapies, leading figures in humanistic psychology, along with concerned scientists from a number of other disciplines, have begun delving into the intriguing world of psychic activity. In our research, we spoke with many professional men and women currently exploring one or another branch of this new arena. We interviewed prominent psychologists who were attempting to solve the mystery of "holistic healing," a secular version of the Evangelical "laying on of hands" which has demonstrated how belief alone may produce very real and lasting cures for physical ailments. We contacted physicists, biologists, and former surgeons who had begun to investigate other psychic phenomena such as clairvoyance, telepathy, and telekinesis, using strict scientific controls in an effort to satisfy the rigorous standards of their peers.
Among laymen as well, interest in psychic phenomena appears to be at an all-time high. Throughout our travels, even in casual conversations unrelated to our investigation of snapping, we heard people of all ages and walks of life recount their personal stories of "out-of-body" excursions, telepathic incidents, premonitions that later came true, and brink-of-death experiences -- not all of which could be dismissed as simple hallucinations.
Despite our concern over the dangers and delusions of the cults, our extensive knowledge of the techniques that may be used to create vivid impressions of psychic events, and our inherent skepticism with regard to so many wild stories we were told, we endeavored to listen with open minds to each tale of extrasensory and psychic phenomena. From our perspective, none of the experiences described was necessarily of supernatural origin. So many of the experiences people now refer to as mystical or psychic are completely natural: they can be explained in communication terms, at least in theoretical, if not yet fully verified, accordance with our emerging understanding of the brain's holographic information-processing capacities and man's extraordinary intuitive and nonverbal communication abilities.
Researchers who for years have been questing after exotic "psi energies" and "parapsychological dimensions" only now appear to be on the verge of drawing similar conclusions. Science, however, our ultimate standard of verification in the West, still awaits a comprehensive theoretical framework and experimental method that will enable people to accept the psychic feats that each individual may be capable of performing. And slowly that framework appears to be taking shape. The new interdisciplinary sciences promise in time to explain the hidden powers of the human mind, not by means of psychology, psychiatry, or traditional physical medicine, not even in accordance with our usual notions of matter and energy, but in terms of information, a newly recognized entity in itself. Before long, we may come to fully understand information and harness it with the aid of the new scientific languages of quantum physics, neuroscience, cybernetics, and information theory.
Yet in a very real sense, it could be said that man's psychic powers are already being tapped and exercised every day by participants in religious cults and mass therapies through their extraordinary rituals and practices and their recruitment and solicitation activities. Up close, however, the uncanny powers of healing, mind control, and "on-the-spot hypnosis" used by people in these groups may be identified as nothing more than finely tuned versions of man's ordinary communication powers, "psychic" capacities which many have already come to understand in the unembellished terms of suggestion and belief, of nonverbal communication, and of the dynamic bonds of relationship between individuals that give rise to all kinds of remarkable occurrences. These natural capacities for communication are the most powerful tools an individual possesses, yet most people remain ignorant of these sophisticated powers of mind, unaware that they already use them all the time in their day-to-day lives, affecting other people as others affect them. As we come to better understand the natural power of our human communication abilities, it is very likely that the psychic skills formerly viewed as parlor tricks and miracles will become readily available to us all. Throughout history, these powers have been held for man -- as if in safe-keeping -- by religion. Now we can begin to bring these treasures out of hiding and place them where they belong: in the space between human beings.
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Before bringing this book to a conclusion, we drew back from our work just far enough to view our own perspective in perspective, and think about the note on which we wanted to end this inquiry. After everything -- the cults, the mass therapies, information disease, and the challenges of everyday life -- we thought about the larger meaning of snapping in America as our culture heads into the nineteen eighties, and we came full circle to address the first question we posed at the beginning of this book: Has mankind crossed the threshold of a great new era of human fulfillment?
Yes, it's true, we agreed: in America today, mankind does stand poised at the threshold of a new age. But in our view we haven't entered that era yet; and we may never see it, because our culture seems to be embarking on a destructive new course of manipulation and escapism, of human abdication. Snapping, as we have come to understand it, may be summed up in a very simple definition: it is a phenomenon that occurs when an individual stops thinking and feeling for himself, when he breaks the bonds of awareness and social relationship that tie his personality to the outside world and literally loses his mind to some form of external or automatic control. In that sense, the moment of snapping, when the mind shuts off, remains a moment of human decision. It takes place as some invisible switch is thrown in the infinitely flexible human brain, whether voluntarily and in good faith or unwittingly and in a state of confusion, as individuality is surrendered to some religion, psychology, or other recipe for living that requires no real conscience and no consciousness, no effort or attention on the individual's part.
It seems clear to us that, confronted by the demands of a complex, ever-changing, and often overwhelming mass society, an individual cannot elect mindless happiness over everything and everyone else in his or her life. That kind of happiness is information disease, for, severed from humanity, it cannot be understood or shared. Contrary to popular opinion, our exploration has confirmed for us that there really is nothing human inside human beings. It's all biology -- chemistry and machinery. Our humanity lies in the space between. That is why we have chosen to look at snapping from the point of view of communication, for it is this social process of communication that dictates what each individual's awareness and personality will be. This process also teaches us that an individual's sense of self can be no greater than the quality of that individual's interactions and relationships with other people. For it is only in relation to other people that the human mind finds a pathway to itself. Even the loner or recluse who believes he is self-sufficient in his private thoughts or the world of nature has been raised by someone, given a language, and taught to think and feel.
Snapping, in all its blind detachment from the world, its disconnection and self-delusion, is a product of a futile attempt on the part of millions of Americans to escape the responsibilities of being human in this difficult, threatening age. In that sense, it is an act of betrayal both of one's individuality and of one's society, for our human nature binds each individual to every other. So long as we ignore this undeniable imperative of human communication, we will remain slaves to our genes, our machines, our environment, and to those who seek to exploit our culture's rapidly expanding technology of experience.
If, on the other hand, we choose to cultivate our natural capacities of thought and feeling, respecting the fundamental values that did, in fact, emerge f
rom the consciousness explosion of the sixties, and if we come to understand how our individual personalities are bound one to another, we may actually discover that new era of fulfillment, that great new age of enlightenment. Then together each of us will be able to step across that threshold without snapping.
Postscript: Jonestown
The Face of the Eighties
Only seven months have passed since the first publication of Snapping. In that time, the phenomenon of "the cults" -- considered by many to be a fad of little or no social consequence has exploded before the public eye with a violence and horror that has shocked the nation and the world. In the closing months of 1978, a quick succession of events transformed the curious phenomenon into what more than one respected journalist called "the story of the decade." Having observed, researched, and struggled with the complexities of this story throughout the seventies, we have long been convinced of its significance, but the events of recent months have provided us with new pieces of the puzzle, sharp fragments of what we perceive to be a picture not just of the immediate past but of the near future as well.