RadhaGovinda:
You said, "What was I thinking?"
In cult groups critical thinking is often shut down by coercive persuasion and thought reform.
See [
www.culteducation.com]
Also see [
www.culteducation.com]
As you say, "But Siddha did have a certain power..."
This would be the basis of that "power."
The key factors that distinguish coercive persuasion from other training and socialization schemes are:
1. The reliance on intense interpersonal and psychological attack to destabilize an individual's sense of self to promote compliance
2. The use of an organized peer group
3. Applying interpersonal pressure to promote conformity
4. The manipulation of the totality of the person's social environment to stabilize behavior once modified
The basis or foundation for this is control of the environment, or what Lifton calls "milieu control."
Milieu Control
The most basic feature of the thought reform environment, the psychological current upon which all else depends, is the control of human communication. Through this milieu control the totalist environment seeks to establish domain over not only the individual's communication with the outside (all that he sees and hears, reads or writes, experiences, and expresses), but also - in its penetration of his inner life - over what we may speak of as his communication with himself. It creates an atmosphere uncomfortably reminiscent of George Orwell's 1984.
Such milieu control never succeeds in becoming absolute, and its own human apparatus can - when permeated by outside information - become subject to discordant "noise" beyond that of any mechanical apparatus. To totalist administrators, however, such occurrences are no more than evidences of "incorrect" use of the apparatus. For they look upon milieu control as a just and necessary policy, one which need not be kept secret: thought reform participants may be in doubt as to who is telling what to whom, but the fact that extensive information about everyone is being conveyed to the authorities is always known. At the center of this self-justification is their assumption of omniscience, their conviction that reality is their exclusive possession. Having experienced the impact of what they consider to be an ultimate truth (and having the need to dispel any possible inner doubts of their own), they consider it their duty to create an environment containing no more and no less than this "truth." In order to be the engineers of the human soul, they must first bring it under full observational control.
Psychologist Margaret Singer identifies other control techniques such as the use of hypnosis and trance.
See [
www.culteducation.com]
Meditation can also be used in a destructive manner.
See [
www.culteducation.com]
Reading and understanding how cult groups work often helps former cult members sort through their experience and better understand what happened.